![]() ![]() To almost lose oneself can be a galvanising moment, putting a fire in your belly, making you realise how precious life is and inspiring you to stride forwards and make something of yourself. It’s a fascinating story, reflecting the cruel dichotomy of loss. The final album of the suite, Good Ass Job, was shelved following the death of West’s mother, Donda. However, this trilogy was initially planned as a tetralogy. He wanted to show the world what an all-rounder he really was, and so he produced three albums that fully embody the vanguard of 2000s popular music. Having nearly lost his life, West no longer wanted to lurk in the background, producing for other artists. The near-mythical story of his debut single, “Through the Wire”, is common knowledge at this point, providing the foundation for a cohesive suite of records about a man seizing his own destiny. It is notable, for instance, that Kanye’s first three albums were spawned by his involvement in a near-fatal car accident. Though he leaves no path untaken, each Kanye – “old Kanye” and new Kanye – can seemingly be traced back to a single moment. What has changed is the perspective from which Kanye is looking outwards to the future. ![]() That is no less true today than it was in the mid-2000s. It is Kanye roleplaying the many men the media sees him as, and it’s a fascinating schizophrenic opus as a result.Īnd yet, for all the emphasis placed on Kanye’s contemporary complexity and plurality, it is worth remembering how renowned he was as a new kind of hip-hop star with an incredibly singular vision. It is Kanye at his best and worst, his most wholesome and grotesque, his most erudite and adolescent. The Life of Pablo, on the whole, epitomises this same gesture. “I Love Kanye” was itself the subject of various tabloid articles, exaggerating its claims and missing the point, as if his declaration of self-love was at all unifying, rather than the song’s many Kanyes being distinct entities, as if “Kanye loves Kanye” is a postmodern recursion Kanye loves Kanye loves Kanye, just as a rose is a rose is a rose. Interpreted by many as a jab at his imitators, this line feels like a moment of reflection on the Kanye kaleidoscope, which sees itself become a fractal as the media interprets and spins every move made in a dozen different ways. “See I invented Kanye, there wasn’t any Kanyes”, he syncopates, “And now I look and look around and there’s so many Kanyes”. On “I Love Kanye”, he seems to acknowledge this. In truth, Kanye is an artist who has always worn multiple hats, and as his success has grown he has only adopted more of them. It makes the very idea of an “old Kanye” even more suspect, established in hindsight, as if this “old Kanye” was ever some sort of unified and internally consistent figure. This one man came to represent the excesses and challenges of an entire pop cultural movement (somewhat like Michael Jackson before him, one could argue). ![]() When Kanye ushered in a pop sound for the twenty-first century, music fans weren’t so much mourning the old Kanye as they were the stale ideals of a now-bygone era, which extended far beyond Kanye’s individual output alone.īut in fixating on Kanye as the Noughties superstar who lost his way, it became clear that West was never going to be in full control of his own narrative and reputation again. But as West progressed as an artist, taking more risks and making more grandiose statements both publicly and musically, many came to miss this generation-straddling artist the whole family could enjoy. Exceptionally crafted, they are, in hindsight, somewhat representative of a staid twenty-first century culture that hadn’t quite found its own identity. His first three albums – The College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation – were an incredible suite that demonstrated a singular vision unmatched by anyone else in hip-hop at that time, fusing a classic 90s sound with the latest pop innovations. The opening line, “I miss the old Kanye”, has followed him around for years. Though the tabloids responded to the track predictably, chalking it up as another example of his egotism, the track/skit asks a far more complex question than that. It’s Kanye saying the quiet part loud, poking fun not so much at himself as the tabloid circus around him. In some ways, it feels like the centrepiece of the album. On his 2016 album The Life of Pablo, Kanye West included an acapella track called “I Love Kanye”. ![]()
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