smile had ersatz teeth

msnovember:

Love Lockdown by Kanye West

Oh man, I know everyone is Kanye-d out, but I just have a couple of (non joke) things to say. First off, twitterers, I’m not calling anyone out, but why can almost NO ONE spell Kanye? It’s spelled pretty much EXACTLY how it sounds. NY, NY, NY, not YN. Since it’s Twitter, I can only assume there’s some kind of iPhone auto-correct making it Kayne.

But anyway, interestingly enough, the two people who I’m most interested in right now in pop music were the two crazy stories of the VMAs. I didn’t see any of it, but I do want to say that I love them both. I like that they’re both a little nuts and make people uncomfortable. And I think part of that reason is they’re both a little gender-fucked and don’t fit into the same molds as most other pop stars. To which I say, thank god. Yeah, it’s pop music, but I’m not one of those people that will discount the entire genre as artless and soulless. In fact, I think those two are examples of people who really do care a lot about the art in their music. And not just the music, but the show and the personality and the whole package. Lady Gaga’s been around for a long time, writing for other people and deemed too weird to go out on her own. They were both dropped from labels for being less than marketable. And I see some justice in them being two of the biggest stars in the world right now. I like that they don’t fit and they’re still making money hand over fist.

Obviously the problem with Kanye is that he says things without thinking about them first. It’s a problem  a lot of us have. Jesse Thorn wrote a really interesting piece about Kanye and his tendency to shoot for the hip that I REALLY loved:

I don’t want to defend what Kanye did. It was a real dick move. And it was made worse by the fact that Taylor Swift is a very legit artist and a very young woman. And she’s dead right that she was striking a remarkable blow for country music, which clearly means nothing to Kanye West. Awful, I agree.

That said, there’s something in the tone of the anti-Kanye sentiment that always strikes me as wrong-headed.

Kanye West really is a groundbreaking artist, and he has had as hard a road to the top of the music industry as anyone in hip-hop. This is a guy who literally spent ten years trying to get signed as a rapper — in an industry where you’re pretty much done if you haven’t been signed by 21. He learned how to make beats, and became one of the top five producers in hip-hop, producing monstrous hits for Jay-Z and others, and he still couldn’t get a record deal. Even Jay-Z admits that when he and Dame Dash signed Kanye to Roc-a-Fella, it was because they knew that he would take his beats elsewhere if they didn’t. It was like that time the Rangers let Jose Canseco pitch.

Only when Jose Canseco pitched, he hurt his arm and looked like an asshole. When Kanye rapped, he changed the industry.

Kanye was an artist on Roc-A-Fella, a label that had its finger on the pulse of hip-hop music, and was signing (great) MCs like Freeway and Beanie Siegel and Camron and even M.O.P. who were grittier than gritty. Meanwhile, Kanye is wearing Polo and a backpack and writing lyrics that sound more like De La Soul than Kool G Rap. The odds were not on Kanye’s side.

In fact, even after Roc-A-Fella signed Kanye as an MC, they figured they could let his career die on the vine from benign neglect. Kanye talked Talib Kweli into giving him an opening spot on Kweli’s tour, and then West put out a mixtape on his own dime. Then Kanye got in a car accident and nearly died. When he was in recovery, he recorded a song about the accident while his jaw was wired shut. The Roc didn’t want to give him any support, so he made his own video, with his own money, for a song that he didn’t have the money to clear the sample for, and that song became a hit.

Since his first album blew up (on merit), Kanye has been absolutely dogged in his pursuit of the next artistic plateau. Some of his efforts have been more successful than others (I wasn’t that into “808s and Heartbreak”), but he’s never rested on his laurels. And he’s also always regarded video as not just a compliment to his work, but an essential part of it. He’s hired people with singular visions like Michel Gondry and Zach Galifianakis to make videos with and for him, and he’s himself conceived of some of the most artistically ambitious videos ever made by a hip-hop artist. Before Kanye, this was essentially not done by a mainstream rapper.

Throughout all of this, West has occasionally had a bizarre and unpalatable outburst like this. But what’s fascinating to me about his outbursts is that they’re always about merit. Wrong or right, he seems to care so passionately about popular art that he can’t help but speak out. There were times when it was about him thinking he should have won, but there was also this time — when he thought Beyonce deserved credit. Or the time Kanye won and promptly handed his award to one of the few hip-hop artists who’ve matched his creativity and fearlessness, Outkast. Not as a tribute, but because he thought they had earned it more than him.

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I think these outbursts are manifestations of the same pig-headed passion that drove Kanye to insist he could rap for all those years. The same passion that made him abandon the soul samples after they made him the hottest producer in hip-hop. The same passion that led him to let Zach Galifianakis and Will Oldham dress up in weird farmer outfits and make him a video on a farm.

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But I think Kanye’s flaw isn’t his enormous ego. He’s never been afraid to give credit to others, and he’s never claimed, for example, to be the greatest MC (he’s not), despite a hip-hop culture that encourages such claims (and a broader culture that takes them too literally).

I think this is the problem: Kanye doesn’t understand that despite the fact that he is still the same guy, the same passionate, music-loving, speak-until-someone-listens scrapper, the change in the context in which he lives has changed who he is in a very real way. He’s confusing signifier and signified. He’s not the nerd anymore, he’s the bully. When he stands up for what he believes in, he’s not sticking it to the man, he’s stepping on the little guy.

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I hope Kanye can grow as a man, and think about who he is now, and what he means now. For himself, and for all the people who he inspired to be themselves and create art that expresses their experience rather than to play a role someone else wrote for them.

And I hope he never stops caring. Because his art is too important.

Also: that Beyonce video was amazing.

I know that was a huge quote, but there’s more than should be read so check it out if you get a chance. It just really rang true with me and I thought it was really well said. Or maybe more succinctly put by the amazing Carrie Brownstein in her take on the event

I’m fine with Kanye West being some sort of loose cannon, but I really wish he had better aim.

I find it even more interesting how freaked out people get by Lady Gaga. No one knows what to make of her, but if she sang rock music, it wouldn’t be nearly so outrageous. Well, it would still be outrageous, but no one would be so indignant that she’s so…weird. I like that she’ll show up to the fucking MTV awards, MTV who basically is just a show case for garbage like The Hills now, and the epitome of everything cookie cutter and materialistic, and look like some kind of menstrual mummy. I think it’s even more interesting how she’s run with what may or may not be a rumor about being intersex. In light of the appalling way Caster Semenya has been treated for not fitting into a strict gender binary (she’s on suicide watch now, by the way), I like that she didn’t roll over and act like someone calling her intersex is the end of the world or a horrible insult. She embraced it.

So just as all this is gearing up this week, they announced a tour and I wet myself a little. Because say what you want about their music, and I am going on record to say I am FOR it (although 808s isn’t my absolute favorite), that show will be one fuck of a spectacle. It would be worth the ticket price to see a real balls to the wall gutsy pop show. And hopefully see some jaws drop.

But now it looks like it’s cancelled or postponed because Kanye was serious about saying he wants to take some time off to get his head back together. So that sucks.

Here’s the deal though: Love Lockdown in a BAD ASS jam, and that Beyonce video WAS one of the best of the year.