'Ye 2

I had a bunch of things I wanted to say about Kanye West's Graduation, but my mind is running a thousand different directions.

Let's start by saying that Kanye is probably the most interesting mainstream pop artists working today (hence the fact that I will actually buy his records), because his dirty laundry is laid out for everybody to see in a way that isn't really true for any other pop star, now or possibly ever. There's no subtext with Kanye. You don't read his lyrics and wonder if the song is about Jay-Z, because he says right in the song that it's about Jay-Z. Furthermore, his thoughts about these things are interesting and (usually) articulate. His lyrics are about internal conflicts, not ones that involve guns and machismo (to fall back on a rap cliche). He's hugely confident but still hugely insecure, he's proud that he's made a name for himself but feels guilty for those left behind, he loves and admires Jay-Z but can't figure out why Jay is a jerk to him sometimes, etc., etc., and it's all there on the records. The backstage tamper tantrums and general bitchiness only add to the depth. I find him fascinating.

So onto the music: I was going nuts over the (apparent) samples a few days ago, and that's what I'm coming back to. Kanye West is a good artist use to analyze sampling in rap music, because his samples are often of pretty high profile artists, and he makes pretty extensive usage of them in his music. It's interesting to me because it's sort of a foreign concept to me, being a white, rock-oriented dude.

Take "Champion," for instance, which takes the most obscure, two second clip from a small breakdown in Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne," and turns it into the backbone of an entire song. I guess when you've trained yourself to listen to music like that, it comes pretty naturally, but it would never have even occurred to me to do something like that for a song.

Ditto for "Good Life," which takes a chunk of Michael Jackson's awesome Trhiller cut "P.Y.T.," slows it down to about half of its original speed, and lets us laugh at that hilarious vocoder part over and over. The one in the original song, not T-Pain's digitally auto-tuned Cher-like love-bot crooning.

"Stronger," meanwhile, takes pretty much just a vocoder part from Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and works an entirely new song around it, the second (and second-best) time this song has gotten that treatment from a prominent hip-hop producer (the Neptunes' remix was pretty awesome). Daft Punk's original has yet to be topped, but that'd be pretty damn tough.

The Can sample, meanwhile, is pretty dreary. "Sing Swan Song" isn't so much sampled as loosely covered by Kanye and Mos Def, turning it into a tedious song about the struggle inherent in nailing a drunk and hot girl without her running up your tab, talking too much about her boyfriend, vomiting in your car, falling asleep, and presenting various other obstacles in the way of drunk, semi-date-rape, adulterous sex. How charming. It's actually called "Drunk and Hot Girls," by the way. I'll take whatever nonsense Damo Suzuki was singing about.

Anyway, Graduation is pretty good. His great grooves and lush productions are a given, and there's enough interesting lyrics to keep me coming back. I have no comments about his rapping skills, which are apparently subpar, because I don't know enough about that to comment. It actually is a rap album with no stupid skits (yaaaaaaaay, no Bernie Mac), relatively few guest vocalists (oh, that reminds me, somebody punch Chris Martin in the stomach, dude's getting annoying), and a strong consistency, which is pretty rare, at least for most rap albums I've heard, but again, I'm not the authority.

So yeah, pretty good.