September is the Cruelest Month: The Event Horizons and Turning Points of Kanye West

It must feel weird being even a relatively old-school hip-hop head. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, you only knew Kanye West as a Roc-a-Fella producer with occasional placements on semi-underrated Jay-Z projects. The College Dropout leak and College Dropout album were game changers, but for critics, they often had more to do with narrative — i.e. making the leap from producer to rapper and bringing together backpacks and Bentleys. A decade later, it’s illegal in Dubai to stare directly into Yeezy’s Gucci shades. Oh yeah, and my mom knows what a “Yeezy” is. Things done changed.

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The One Thing I Learned From "Runaway"

When “Runaway”, and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy more generally, were getting heavy initial play in my life, I think it was pretty out of control. They say it’s easy to lose yourself, but I don’t think it is. You don’t lose things that you’re not looking for. If you don’t realize that you’ve really strayed then you’re not lost — you’re changing.

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My Variety Of Religious Experience

Music is not an intellectual exercise. Nothing — or hardly anything — is. Mathematical propositions are tautologies, a balancing act of equivalent notions by a sanguine equal sign. Language — despite its near-endless elasticity — is also a closed system, incapable of describing (here, again, notice the tautology) incapable of describing experiences outside its purview. Experience itself, phenomena, exist as aesthetic objects only insofar as there are people to notice them.

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My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Won The Loudness War

I will be perfectly honest with you. I do not believe in ‘listener fatigue’ or ‘ear fatigue’ or whatever it is: the phenomenon where music listeners have to take breaks or get tired from listening to ‘loud’ albums — with one exception. That exception shows me reasonably well that the phenomenon must exist. Like how when I was twenty-two, I didn’t believe in hangovers, it’s probably just a matter of time before I, too, get listener fatigue. But right now, I can, have, and do sit here and listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy all day long.

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The Case Against 808s And Heartbreak

I think a big part of my antipathy for 808s and Heartbreak is that it’s taken by many to be such a singular achievement within West’s canon. It is not. Some people like it for its emotional heft. That’s a fine reason to like something, but it’s not a great reason to think it’s a great work of art.

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The Case For Graduation

Graduation is the beginning of a climax that Kanye is still riding out. Virtually everything I like about Kanye’s work is present in Graduation, and there are a lot fewer of his really nasty parts.

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The Real Passion Of Kanye West

I’d thought of this album, idiomatically, as ‘the Jon Brion one’. But going back and reading some interviews and press, it’s more like ‘the origin story of modern day Kanye West one’. Let’s count down the ways.

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College Dropout On First Listen

College Dropout marked the beginning of a golden age of writing about music on the internet, and especially rap. At this point, the outsized musical personalities musico-cultural trends became almost more interesting to talk about than the music itself. It’s not like Kanye started that, but let’s say that it’s similar to how Harold Bloom argued that Shakespeare invented the modern human. I’d argue that Kanye West helped invent the modern music critic.

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An Excessive Attempt To Watch The Throne

Like, the album is about wealth. But it's also kind of not about wealth, you know? Seeing a pair of really rich dudes rapping about Margiela jackets and Murciélagos is not actually about wealth. It's about the crushing poverty that basically literally everybody else experiences.

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"I Crossed The Line"

As we see Kanye get caught up in the snares of race, class, and violence, it never seems artificial or like a set up. He just dives into his Olympic-size ego and comes up with another contradiction that normal people have learned to ignore or sublimate into one or another pernicious lifestyle choices. In this way, adding a disclaimer to "Monster" seems like a rare misstep.

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F.A.M.E. Monster

It seems possible that the days of the publicist are actually waning. When media outlets can't be trusted to toss softballs to their star subjects, celebrities are opting to take the shortest possible route to their fans.

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Kanye: All-Star Weekend MVP

On a weekend where both Justin Bieber and Kobe Bryant earned MVP honors, it should be a little shocking that anyone else would steal the show. It would take someone who’s not afraid to recruit the most popular musicians of the day to make help make his big artistic statement. Someone who’s happy to go toe-to-toe with the Black Mamba

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Kanye West's Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Year

Kanye West’s on-again/off-again search for redemption found its most stable iteration in the record, especially the latter half’s self-aware dive into the depths of West’s psyche. And for the first time since the mid-'90s golden age or Eminem’s halcyon early oughts, one rapper was able to unify rap discourse and focus the nation’s attention on himself. That’s one hell of a life.

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What Would You Wish For?

B.o.B’s “Airplanes” fits right into rap’s post-Kanye landscape. Its self-doubt and insecurity manifest themselves in brash bursts over a genre-confused, modern rock beat. But the song owes a lot of its power to a more ancient stretch of DNA, the notion that airplanes are an almost-magical mode of conveyance and escape.

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Is Kanye West Overshadowing His Art?

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was made by a combination evil villain-mad scientist on a tropical island. He imported henchmen and women as his whims moved him. They were ensconced in a mansion, replete with well-appointed staff and coterie at his beck and call. There were five-star dishes and different exotic fishes everywhere.

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Drake & Kanye: The Dream Team?

Drake’s been good for Young Money, but it bears looking into: Is Young Money good for Drake?

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Is "Runaway" The New "Thriller"?

With Runaway, it seems like Kanye has made another entry on his application for biggest pop star of his generation.

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Presumed Innocent

“I’mma let you finish” are four and a half words that continue to carry some cultural cachet despite their flimsy significance. They came up again at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, as if the awards show were a pop culture Indian burial ground.

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#ITSAPROCESS

Back when Kanye still gave interviews, he told a reporter that “Yeah, a whole part about being a human is to be a hypocrite."

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