Kanye, "the Black Bowie"

So it is revealed that KW originally wanted to give his 2018 album Ye the title  Hitler.  Which inevitably brings to mind David Bowie's "I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I'd be an excellent dictator" comment from 1976.  Apparently in a 2015 business meeting Kanye also described Hitler as a "marketing genius", which mirrors Bowie's impressed comments about Goebbel's skills in the advertising / propaganda realm and Hitler's as master showman who "staged a country". 

Here below is a review of Pablo where I do the West / Bowie comparison.

But first, crikey, look here's a piece from 2011 on Kanye comparing himself to Hitler! Apparently at the Big Chill Festival, he said this to the audience: "I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I’m ... insane, like I’m Hitler. One day the light will shine through, and one day people will understand everything I ever did." The LA Times journo consults a psychologist and psychiatrist, who posit plausibly that "For Kanye West to compare himself to Hitler in that way, it suggests a certain level of narcissism. To empathize with someone responsible for the deaths of millions of people, it can indicate a lack of sensitivity to how other people are going to feel about your comments. And, again, it can be a sign of narcissism.’ and ‘Kanye West’s referencing of Hitler is about narcissism and identifying with people in positions of power." 

Not that you need professionals to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder - you just have to listen to the records. 

KANYE WEST

The Life of Pablo

The Wire, April 2016

by Simon Reynolds

A journalist recently asked me whether I agreed with his thesis that the Rock Star is a dying breed – literally dying off, with high-profile 2016 extinctions like Bowie and Lemmy. My thought was that if you understand rock narrowly as electric-guitar music, then yes, resources are depleting rapidly; it’s a minority-interest sound now, incapable of supporting mythic-scale personalities. 

But think of “rock star” in a less tethered-to-genre way and it’s surely obvious that the archetype is alive and kicking elsewhere. Above all, rap is where you’ll find that public theatre of ego-drama, unbridled excess, and artistic over-reach, the car-crash personalities and epic sagas of anti-heroism.  If Future is our era’s Iggy – vocal tone of pained ecstasy, lust-for-life turned toxic - then Kanye West amply fills the Bowie role. There’s the same torturously conflicted relationship with fame, the same restless chasing of the cutting edge balanced by a compulsion to command the centre stage of pop culture.  

Like Bowie, West is a mediatician as much as a musician.  So while the audio content of his seventh album intersects with the soundworlds of TriAngle or LuckyMe, it doesn’t make sense to approach The Life of Pablo in the way that 98% of the releases covered in this magazine get treated – as a primarily audio experience. Pablo resists being disentangled from the vortex of discourse - gossip, leaks, forensic analysis, public melt-downs - that imbricates its every texture and lyric.  Tempting as it is to hack exasperatedly away at the thicket of context and subtext – from the month-long cavalcade of “spaz in the news Kanye” (to quote a lyric from the album) to the way that virtually every sound and line seems hyperlinked – in order to get through to the Work itself, the truth is that the surrounding swirl is the Work, or at least an outer but un-detachable layer to it.

The fact that there’s no solid-form incarnation of Pablo, that the album can only be heard as a stream from the hi-fidelity streaming service Tidal, practically incites you to listen connectively, with other windows open on your browser: checking reviews, consulting rap-nerd annotation sites, monitoring Twitter and Facebook reactions. This is Pablo’s, and Kanye’s, proper domain: the hubbub of the internet.

Pablo is an Event, then. But it’s also an assemblage of moments, aesthetic decisions, accumulated over three years of studio work (with a few elements dating even further back, to the 2010 sessions for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: the album before the previous album).  How could a coherent vibe possibly emerge from such a piecemeal process? The simple answer is that it hasn’t.  It’s not just that this album as a  (not-)whole feels loosely collated and arbitrarily sequenced. Many individual tracks seem like they could easily dis-assemble into constituent parts – there’s a segmental feel to the way that guest raps, vocal cameos, samples, intros and codas slot into their provisionally allotted place. You sense a governing logic of additive and subtractive unrest that has yet to subside. West tweaked tracks up to the last minute and indeed beyond the last minute. It’s conceivable that there will never be a definitive shape to The Life of Pablo.

The album’s mode of construction invites deconstruction: breakdowns of the credits, inventories of samples, a fever of instant-response exegesis.   This is how we tend to envisage creativity operating these days: as recreativity, the marshalling of influences,  allusions, evocations, self-reflexive references. Kanye is an exemplar of the modern ideal of the curator as creator. He rose to fame through deft use of samples, often amounting simply to re-presenting the music of others with his lyrics over the top and a turbo-boosted beat underneath. That technique felt inspired and glorious on the Chaka Khan-lifting “Through the Wire”, his debut solo smash in 2004; it felt empty and crass with the Curtis Mayfield-molesting “Touch the Sky” and Daft Punk-depleting “Stronger.”  Pablo is littered with startling sample-choices, but who even knows if Kanye, a man over-extended on multiple fronts, actually found them all? Perhaps he’s now obliged to delegate tasks like this to his diffuse squad of producers, what’s been described as the Kanye Think Tank.

Just as Pablo dismantles the conventional understanding of the Album as a finished work, authorship becomes moot here as well.  “Famous” is typical, crediting no less than sixteen writers (although some of these are the composers of the samples) and eight producers. It’s a drastically racheted-up version of the way Bowie made records, except that each of his albums drew on a finite team of players and a single producer or co-producer. Here, each individual song deploys a different line-up.

As you’d expect, then, Pablo is bitty. It’s an album of good bits and shit bits, all jumbled together. Nearly every song contains at least one great sound or rhythm idea. In “Famous,” it’s a sequence of what sounds like electro-Bollywood, but is actually Eighties dancehall queen Sister Nancy. In “Feedback”, it’s a gnarly loop distantly related to an Iranian disco song by Googoosh. In “FML”, it’s Section 25’s “Hit” drastically reprocessed into a psychedelic dirge of fluorescent bass and gargoyle vox.  Other delights come from guest collaborators or producers, like the too-brief interlude of Laurie Anderson-like cyborg chorale from composer Caroline Shaw in “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2,” or the lachrymose texture-swirls and echo-misted beat of “Real Friends,” built by Frank Jukes and Boi-1da.     

But every good bit is marred by its proximity to a shit bit, and nine times out of ten, the latter involves a gross sentiment or a mewling, sloppy delivery emitted from the brain and mouth of West himself.  Perhaps the most grating adjacency of beauty and beastly is “30 Hours”, where the blurry-souled mumble of Arthur Russell from World of Echo is accompanied by the self-regard and spite of a Kanye punch-drunk in the media echo-chamber.  After a swipe at an ex’s supposedly fading looks and a  jab about a blow job being better than having no job, the song degenerates into barely written drivel barely synched to the beat – the seeming off-the-cuff realism underlined by the interruption of a cellphone call and Kanye’s mumbled “I’m just doing an album track right now.”  

Pablo grips your attention through an attraction-repulsion effect: the attraction largely pertaining to the sonics, the repulsion manifesting almost entirely in the lyrics. Despite the album’s disparate provenance and huge cast list, Kanye’s personality is overpoweringly present, oozing from every pore of the record. If there’s a thematic, it’s spiritual unrest and a longing for wholeness. Fractured and insatiable, Kanye confesses “I just wanna feel liberated” - freed from his own self, from the chains of appetite and vanity.   At his core is a hungry hole that can be filled not by trophies and transient thrills but by God’s love alone.

Kanye has touted Pablo as a gospel album (its original working title was So Help Me God) and as a musical form gospel pops up several times, mostly early on. Featuring a squeaky-voiced 4-year old preacher and swells of choir, opener “Ultralight Beam” pleads for serenity and sanctuary. “‘Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1,” the next track, uses samples from a 1976 gospel record by Pastor T.L. Barret and Youth for Christ from West’s hometown Chicago. “Low Lights” takes a long passage of female testifying about the Lord’s inspirational power from “So Alive”, a track by house producer Kings of Tomorrow. Not for the first time, I was struck by the childish conception of the Almighty that seems to figure in hip hop: no trace of the Old Testament God of Thou Shalt Not, or the New Testament God who warns that the rich will have a tough time getting into heaven. This is a forgiving and indulgent deity, who offers ego-reinforcement and motivational uplift, unsurprisingly close to the all-American God who figures in prosperity theology a/k/a the gospel of wealth. 

Entreaties to the Sky Daddy have featured in Kanye’s work from the start. “Jesus Walks”, on the debut The College Dropout, introduced his “at war with myself” shtick: torn in twain ‘tween venality and virtue, lowly libido and higher purpose. Except it didn’t seem like shtick then; it felt strikingly original. West continued to present himself as a divided soul – most movingly on Late Registration’s exquisite “Addicted” – and opened up the terrain occupied by the likes of Kendrick Lamar with songs like “Bitch, Don’t’ Kill My Vibe” (where Lamar identifies as a sinner while admitting “I’m probably gonna sin again”). A secular version of this woozy confusion came from Drake,who became a  superstar by reveling in the fruits of fame and fortune while simultaneously complaining about the hollow-inside tristesse that followed.

These self-medicating and self-loathing (never enough to change or stop, of course) MCs constitute a late phase of rap I think of as its decadence. Where hip hop once thrilled with the barbarian rapacity of its hunger for success, now the genre – all conquering, sated – succumbs to a sickly malaise of self-doubt and overshared “sensitivity”. An inner void has become virtually a status symbol, like being player-hated once was: the true mark of having triumphed now is to feel like the treasure is worthless.

Kanye pioneered this brand of anhedonic numbness, complaining about feeling unreal when he sees himself on TV in the “Pinocchio Story,” the mawkish finale to his emo-rap album 808s & Heartbreak.  As the listener ventures deeper into Pablo, the gospel concept dissolves both musically and thematically: the sonics are suggestive by turns of IDM, trap, and “21^st Century hipster”, and lyrically any striving for higher ground gives way to the profane fare of paranoia and self-pity.  “Famous” is supposedly Kanye  “breaking-up” with Fame, (a temptress personified here by Rihanna) but he still manages to squeeze in some instantly-infamous jibes at Taylor Swift along with a legion of haters “mad they still nameless.” “Feedback” confesses “I’ve been out of my mind a long time” only to brandish that fact as support to his claim to be a modern Picasso: “name one genius that ain’t crazy.” “Real Friends” recycles laments first aired on 808s about the impossibility of leading a normal life: back then it involved a relative’s wedding and having to leave before they cut the cake, here it’s about always being in a hurry and not knowing how old his friends’s children are. The only new element is the dissing of a cousin who stole West’s laptop.

That crime and the “dirty motherfucker” responsible crop up a second time on “No More Parties in LA”, one of Pablo’s most cohesive and enjoyably groovy tracks: a Dilla-like throwback to underground rap’s hyno-loop aesthetic, with Madlib producing and guest verses from Kendrick Lamar. One sample source is “Suzy Thundertussy”, Junie Morrison’s funk track about a super groupie.  The original song starts with the line “Los Angeles is a lonely sort of place”, but in “No More Parties”, the first two words - Morrison’s oozily enunciated “Los Angeles”  - is turned into a recurrent refrain that sounds like “lost in lust” or, even more mystically, “lost in lost”. Like Lamar’s own “Swimming Pools”, the song sounds dissolute, the parties blurring into each other in a memory-haze of Hollywood Hills decadence. More than anything, “No More Parties” reminds me of “Hotel California” and Don Henley solo songs like “The Last Worthless Evening”: rock stars having their coke and critiquing it.  

Since at least 808s & Heartbreak being a Kanye West fan has resembled a dysfunctional relationship where one partner keeps pushing the other away, constantly testing their limits. Where Drake exists “somewhere between psychotic and iconic,” the discomfort zone for Kanye is somewhere between mess and messianic, desperation and despotism. An asshole who knows he’s an asshole and tells you he’s an asshole - “a 38-year-old 8-year-old with rich nigga problems” is how he self-diagnoses on “No More Parties” - is still an asshole. Even if he keeps managing to find ever more audaciously upfront and often laugh-out-loud ways -- on this album, “I Love Kanye” -  of telling you that.  

Equal parts scattershot genius and splattershit grotesquerie, Life of Pablo is a reminder of rap’s enduring paradox:  here’s an entertainment form based on personalities that in real life you would avoid like the plague - monologists, braggarts, slimeball lechers, pullers of rank.  You wouldn’t want to be with these people; you wouldn’t want to be these people. To circle back to the start, that then raises the question:  why do we need rock stars? (The “we” is rhetorical: I know many, perhaps most readers of this magazine either never felt such a need or have long out-grown it). At one point, there was interest and even illumination to gleaned from watching their megalo-melodrama from afar. Their misadventures and vision-quests made exhibitionist art out of the paradoxes and impasses of “living without limits” (as West phrases it on the most haunting song here, “FML” - an acronym for Fuck My Life).  Stars showed how ascending to that scale of freedom could become its own trap.  But we’ve seen this story acted out too many times. Fame-as-pathology, fame-as-catastrophe – it’s a script now.

Pablo’s final song “Fade” pivots around some classic house music samples -- Hardrive’s “Deep Inside,” Mr Fingers’s “Mystery of Love”- along with two different versions of “(I Know) I’m Losing You”  by Rare Earth and Undisputed Truth.  Guest Ty Dolla $ign voices what sounds like Kanye’s personal plaint about needing attention to feel alive: “When no one ain’t around... Ain’t nobody watchin’... I just fade away”. When Barbara Tucker’s wondrous vocal lick from the Hardrive track – “deep deep down inside” – enters, it sounds blurrily processed, probably indecipherably so for listeners unfamiliar with the original garage anthem. I hear it as “deep deep down I’m stuck”. That’s Kanye West and that’s pop culture in 2016. 

AXL ROSE and KANYE WEST
Salon, Saturday, Nov 29, 2008 

by Simon Reynolds

The egos have landed. Earlier this week, Guns N’ Roses’ long-awaited “Chinese Democracy” and Kanye West’s “808s & Heartbreak” were released on consecutive days, setting up a titanic struggle for the Billboard No. 1 album spot. On first glance about as distant from each other as imaginable, Axl Rose and Kanye West have a surprising amount in common. They both see themselves as arch-individualists in a pop world of industry-reared sheep.

Just how mavericky are these guys? Axl Rose made his fans and record company wait nearly two decades for the follow-up to “Use Your Illusion I” and “II,” funneling millions of man-hours and dollars into a project that always had about a million-to-one chance of not failing to live up to expectations — the “Heaven’s Gate” of hard rock. Kanye West didn’t keep anybody hanging around (he likes being in the public eye and ear), but he has defied expectations with this, his fourth album in five years: He’s a rapper, but on “808s & Heartbreak,” he sings, and instead of his usual up-tempo, uplifting hip-hop, the album largely consists of morose ballads.

Both performers intend their albums to be received as masterworks of “capital A” Art. West has paved the way for “808s” with talk of his compulsion to make “pop art” and his desire to take hip-hop to the level of the Beatles, Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. At the American Music Awards, he proclaimed, “We’re going to push this music to the point where it was like in the ’60s, in the ’70s.” On the song “Welcome to Heartbreak,” he declares, “I can’t stop having these visions,” while his MySpace page features the pompous motto “Our work is never over.”

Guns N’ Roses, of course, always aimed to enter the pantheon of classic rock, signposting their ambition with ballsy, overblown covers of songs by Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols and Paul McCartney and attempting to top the success of “Appetite for Destruction” with the hubris and gigantism of “Use Your Illusion I” and “II.” “Chinese Democracy” and “808s & Heartbreak” are each full of rage and anguish, of the sort you’d half-think megastars would be able to pay somebody else to feel on their behalf: Axl strikes typically embattled, I-won’t-change-for-you (and certainly won’t speed up my work-rate) postures, while West’s torment emerges out of romantic pain and “It’s lonely at the top” self-pity.

Most intriguingly, the records have something else in common: a sound that draws your attention to the technological artifice of recording. The difference is that “Chinese Democracy” is the victim of its means of production, whereas “808s & Heartbreak” turns the digital denaturing of sound into a positive aesthetic. Rose strives for majesty and produces a monstrosity, while West turns damaged sound into beauty.

It would be lovely to think that the vigorously polished turd that is “Chinese Democracy” could serve as the tombstone for an entire era of mainstream rock marred by misguided production techniques pushed by the record industry and radio alike. “Chinese Democracy” takes the two hallmarks of recorded rock sound of the modern era — compression and an overreliance on the digital editing platform Pro Tools — and amps their signature defects to a hideous intensity.

Compression is not intrinsically evil. It can make records sound more exciting, and equivalents to the effect were used as far back as the ’60s. The process “simply reduces the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of a piece of music,” in the words of technical writer Paul White, creating the illusion that it’s louder. It makes songs jump out at the listener. Your most common encounter with excessive compression is probably TV commercials, which is why when the ad break comes on you’ll often find yourself reflexively lowering the volume. Over-compression in music squeezes the depth out of the sound: Noisy guitar rock in particular sounds muddy and yet flat, a plane of overbright blare that tires the ear. But “the loudness war” keeps escalating because labels need their bands’ releases to be “competitive” on the radio, where stations add further compression to compete with rival broadcasters. And there is a generational shift toward tolerating degraded sound, as more and more people listen to music primarily as MP3s, which are then heard via computer speakers and iPods.

Pro Tools, like compression, is not invariably abused, but it does encourage fruitless perfectionism, with the temptation to add and remove and tweak and restructure, which often results in a densely layered, supersaturated sound. One common Pro Tools function is “drum sound replacement”: If, say, the snare drum doesn’t punch through to your satisfaction, you can either create another one in laboratory conditions or take it from a CD of sampled drum sounds, easily replacing every snare hit in the drummer’s performance.

The result, audible on “Chinese Democracy,” is a bionic precision that forgoes any real looseness and swing (one of Guns N’ Roses’ virtues back when it was an actual band circa “Appetite for Destruction,” as opposed to Axl Rose plus a teeming ensemble of hired hands). Pro Tools makes it easy, once you’ve got a perfect take of a guitar part or backing vocal, to cut and paste that element repeatedly across the song, in the process creating a subtle monotony that may not rise to the forefront of the listener’s consciousness but is felt as a subliminal absence.

Pro Tools is just a  tool, of course, and the defects of “Chinese Democracy” ultimately come down to the humans using it, and the infinitesimal aesthetic choices they made during its unnaturally prolonged creation. Another problem is the excessive number of talents that have passed through the project: There were six guitarists, including Rose (but excluding guest players Brian May and David Navarro, both left on the cutting-room floor). “Chinese Democracy” has almost as many credits as a modern-day action movie, and there is something about its overall sound that reminds me of CGI. Like the fight scenes or exploding cities in CGI-addled movies — in which no stunt men were ever in jeopardy, no debris ever hurtled — the sound of “Chinese Democracy” is spectacular but numbing, a simulacrum of rock’s wildness and untamed energy.

Here and there, the methodology pays off. Some of the song intros are eerily ethereal in a way that suggests the more interesting record Rose might have made if he hadn’t been wedded to making a rock ‘n’ roll record. And on “Shackler’s Revenge,” space opens repeatedly for a thrilling piece of digitally sculpted techno-rock, a corkscrewing riff like rotating knives in a slaughterhouse. But the bulk of that song succumbs to overload, with squealing solos and Rose’s shrill vocals jostling to dominate the upper frequencies. “There Was a Time,” “Catcher in the Rye” and “Riad n’ the Bedouins” gesture at defiance and intensity, but the sound has no bite: It’s like being mauled to death by a toothless pitbull, a horribly drawn-out way for your ears to die. “Madagascar” features a sample from “Cool Hand Luke,” the prison boss drawling, “What we have here is failure to communicate,” a curious act of self-plagiarism, since the exact same sound bite was used on the song “Civil War” back in 1991. But the “failure to communicate” unwittingly encapsulates the album’s inability to connect. Nothing can cut through the smog of sound.

Guns N’ Roses was always a phallic band — Sunset Strip sex pistols from the name down to the “feel my serpentine” imagery of “Welcome to the Jungle.” Doors hagiographer Danny Sugerman even compared Rose to the young Jim “Death and my cock are the world” Morrison. There’s a gross tumescence to the sound of “Chinese Democracy” redolent of the 4-hour erections induced by Viagra: engorged but devoid of desire, a meaningless show of strength.

Not Viagra, but a Niagara of synthetic tears: That’s the sound of “808s & Heartbreak.” All of Kanye West’s swagger has been knocked out of him by the twin blows of his mother’s death and his breakup with fiancée Alexis Phifer. He has described the making of this record as “therapeutic for me…it’s better than suicide.” If most of the songs address his love woes with an unexpectedly abject vulnerability, there’s a different kind of self-exposure that many will find much harder to empathize with: the mewling of the self-absorbed superstar who’s found — surprise, surprise — that the glittering prizes of wealth and adulation he’s chased so hard make for a hollow-souled hell of a life.

“Welcome to Heartbreak,” the second song, is the lament of someone who conquered the world but lost his life. West half-wishes he could go back to being a regular nobody, like the friend who “shows me pictures of his kids/ and all I could show him was pictures of my cribs.” In another verse, he whines about being invited to a relative’s wedding “by the lake/ but I couldn’t figure out who I wanted to take/ Bad enough that I showed up late/ I had to leave ‘fore they even cut the cake.” Despite having too many girlfriends and too jam-packed a schedule, West’s drive for greatness — “gotta keep chasing these visions, gotta keep winning” — denies him a normal life. “Amazing,” similarly, combines fragility and doubt (“I’m exhausted, barely breathing”; “I’m a problem that’ll never be solved”) with delusions of omnipotence (“my reign is as far as your eyes can see; I’m the only thing I’m afraid of”). The navel-gazing nadir is reached in the final track, “Pinocchio Story.” West bleats about the emptiness of luxury goods and fan worship, about how “I turn on the TV and see me/ And feel nothing.” The chorus goes, “I just wanna be a real boy.”

“808s & Heartbreak” belongs to a mini-genre of “woke up this morning/ got me the superstar blues” albums, alongside Nirvana’s “In Utero” and Puff Daddy’s “Forever.” What redeems the record is its sound, whose intimate relationship with technology is emblazoned in the album’s title. The Roland 808 is hip-hop’s famous drum machine, a sound at once vintage and timeless, like the wah-wah guitar in rock. 808 bass lines (made by detuning the kick drum) are prominent in West’s album, not in their typical block-rocking mode but as a subdued pitter-patter, the pulse of a worried heart.

“Heartbreak” refers to the emotion (West has had a bad year, no doubt) and also to a sound he’s devised using studio technology, which is slathered over virtually every vocal on the album. “It’s Auto-Tune meets distortion, with a bit of delay on it,” he said in a recent interview. “And a whole bunch of fucked-up life. That’s what I call my ‘Heartbreak.’” Like Pro Tools, Auto-Tune is standard-issue technology in today’s recording studio, where it’s used to correct pitch errors, typically in vocal performances. There’s hardly a radio-targeted rock record that doesn’t feature Auto-Tune-enhanced singing: it’s particularly noticeable with emo groups, maybe because it’s disconcerting to hear that gloss of unreal perfection in the singer’s voice when the music gestures at punky rawness.

Auto-Tune can also be deliberately misused or overdone. Radiohead dabbled with the device during the experimental “Kid A/Amnesiac” sessions, discovering that if you spoke words rather than sang them, the confused machine would try to assign notes to your speech and produce an impressively avant-garde-sounding cluster of dissonant and random-seeming notes. More typically, it’s used to create a kind of cyber-melisma effect, a fluttery vocal sound simultaneously evocative of angelic purity and a lovelorn robot. The most famous early example was Cher’s “Believe” at the turn of the decade, but since then the effect has popped up regularly in R&B and dance hall records, sometimes as a momentary glisten of posthuman perfection irradiating a particular line, sometimes coating the entire vocal in the gimmicky tradition of the 1970s vocoder and talk-box. This year it resurged as a fad sound, with the R&B singer T-Pain building a career around its glutinous, glucose texture.

Jumping on a bandwagon that’s already been around the block several times doesn’t quite fit the profile of a self-styled innovator, but West has made Auto-Tune his own, both by adding extra effects like distortion that push the sound to the edge of pain and by making it the defining sound of his new album. “808s & Heartbreak” starts with five down-tempo songs in a row that could be chips off the same sonic block, starting with “Say You Will” and climaxing with his smash hit single “Love Lockdown,” whose dolorous melody is offset by an incongruously harsh clatter of drums. Because it’s not just the vocals that are interfered with: Almost the album’s entire sound palette is distorted. “Paranoid,” the first of the few fast songs on the album, sandwiches a pretty melody between a grating synth riff and gnarly drum beats; “Robocop” is woven virtually completely from abrasively lo-fi sounds; and bursts of pure noise pepper “Coldest Winter.”

Why is something that ought to hurt the ear so damn listenable? Partly it’s because the tunes are so spare in their construction. But it’s mostly because there’s a unity of form and content. These abrasive digital effects — noises that make the ear flinch, like the sudden surge of distortion on the vocal early on in “Love Lockdown” — are motivated by the desire to find new ways to communicate pain. West wants to make his music sound how he feels, which is raw, skinless, unprotected.

“808s & Heartbreak” might start to exhaust your patience toward the end, as unrelenting misery piles up with songs like “See You in My Nightmares” and “Coldest Winter.” But as a purely aural experience, it is never exhausting in the way that “Chinese Democracy” is. Rose wanted to create something of grandeur and beauty the way the classic rock gods did, but like the cosmetic surgery addict who doesn’t know when to stop having operations, he ended up with something botched and grotesque: a face that can’t transmit a recognizable emotion. Whereas West’s cold and dehumanized sounds, which could have served as a mask, instead allow us to see right through him.

FURTHER NOTES
 

There's six people credited for "additional Pro Tools" on Chinese Democracy (which suggests that there's at least one other figure responsible for primary Pro Tools work on the album...) Talk about too many cocks spoiling the broth!

Information from Andrew Parker just in, suggesting that compression is not actually a factor in the shitness of Chinese Democracy, but that overproduction / too many cocks / folks-a-fiddling with the recordings over far too protracted a time, was a factor in the shiteness: 

 

Dynamics and quality win the Loudness Wars

from Bob Ludwig:

On Sunday, November 23rd the new Guns ‘N Roses record Chinese Democracy was finally released after many years of waiting and many millions spent making it.  14 different recording studios are credited.  I was thrilled to have been chosen to master the album.

In October, when I first heard some of final mixes which were incredibly multi-layered and dense, I was surprised by two things:  The mixes were so finally honed that doing the smallest move sounded like I had done a lot and also that adding the typical amount of compression used in mastering these days took the life and musicality out of the recordings in a big way.

The trial disc I submitted to the producers had 3 versions: The one I personally liked had no compression that was used just for loudness, only compression that was needed for great sounding rock and roll.  Then, knowing how competitive everything is these days, I made two more masterings, one with more compression and another with yet more compression, but even the loudest one wasn’t remotely as loud as some recent CDs.  Hoping that at least one of these would satisfy Axl and Caram Costanzo, the co-producers of the record, I was floored when I heard they decided to go with my full dynamics version and the loudness-for-loudness-sake versions be damned.

I think the fan and press backlash against the recent heavily compressed recordings finally set the context for someone to take a stand and return to putting music and dynamics above sheer level.

The dynamics vs. volume trade-offs include the act of simply turning your playback volume clockwise a little.  True, when shopping the iTunes store your song may not blast out as loudly as other songs. When trying to impress the radio station PD it may be an issue if you don’t have the guaranteed attention this record deserves, however level on the radio broadcast is NOT an issue.  As I have been lecturing to people for years, the radio stations are all in competition with each other and they all have devices to make loud things soft and soft things loud and indeed, I heard a critic’s review of Chinese Democracy on NPR and the song examples they played screamed over my portable radio.  Even with the radio station compression you can still hear detail in the car… amazing!

I’m hoping that Chinese Democracy will mark the beginning of people returning to sane levels and musicality triumphing over distortion and grunge.  I have already seen a new awareness and appreciation for quality from some other producers, I pray it is the end of the level wars.

Also,

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/gnr_iovine_f-cked_up_chinese_democracy.html

"At first we were in there a lot. We were working on the writing aspect of it, but it just kept going on. We had Jimmy Iovine intervening in a not-so-productive way, and we had other guys coming and going with nutty ideas. My summation of the whole thing is that Interscope, when they took over Geffen, really led Axl to believe that Jimmy Iovine would be involved, and would help get this record done and make it happen. But basically what he did was let it completely fall apart. Then he had this great idea to bring in [producer] Roy Thomas Baker to make it sound better. All he did was re-record everything three or four different times, trying to make it sound like something it didn’t need to sound like, and spend $10 million in the process. My two cents on the whole thing is that I really think Jimmy Iovine f*cked the whole thing up."

"It was a bummer. Most of the songs that are on the record now were done 10 f*cking years ago. But all the talking heads in the mix were saying, ‘Make ’em sound better! Make ’em sound better!’ So we kept redoing this and that. And it ended up coming back down to the same f*cking songs that they were 10 years ago, except that now they were a super-dense mishmash of a bunch of instrumentation."

"That whole era pretty much sums up what happened to the record industry. Those kinds of people, making those kinds of decisions and not really helping the artist."

KANYE WEST
Late Registration (Roc-A-Fella)
Uncut, autumn 2005

by Simon Reynolds


Last year, Kanye West cut through rap’s standard-issue one-dimensional personae with some refreshing complexity. Neither “conscious” nor a bad-boy chasing bling and bitches, he was a little of both: a hungry soul (“Jesus Walks”) trapped in a body prey to venality (“All Falls Down”). Kanye can pull off the occasional highminded lyric without risking sanctimony, because he’s clearly the sort of preacher who gets caught with call-girls.

Late Registration’s core of mixed emotion clusters around four songs that deal with themes of worldly wealth versus gold-of-the-spirit. “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” starts where College Dropout finished (“Last Call”). It’s another paean to Roc-A-Fella, the label that signed West where other A&Rs scoffed at his deceptively sloppy flow. The giddy ascending chorus “forever ever ever EVER ever” pledges fealty to Jay-Z’s dynasty, which rescued him from the parlous times when “I couldn’t afford/A Ford Escort.” But when West chants “throw your diamonds in the air,” he’s not really showing off his new status symbols so much as his aesthetic riches, the genius-visionary’s “power to make a diamond with his bare hands.” The song lives up to this boast and then some. Nobody deploys vocal samples better than West, and here it’s Shirley Bassey’s “Diamonds Are Forever” that gets shook down for hidden hooks and latent meanings. The glittering production, laced with harpsichords and strings, matches the lines about “Vegas on acid/Seen through Yves St Laurent glasses”. But what about the title’s reference to “Sierra Leone”? That just got tacked on after the fact, to fit the video, an expose of child-slavery in African diamond mines, and has absolutely nowt to do with the lyrics!

It would have been cool if “Gold Digger” sampled “Goldfinger”. Instead, a Ray Charles loop powers this gritty groove, while (cute touch) Jamie Foxx kicks it off with a faux-blues whinge about a “triflin’ bitch” who sucks up his money and weed. West wryly observes “I ain’t saying she’s a gold digger/But she aint’ messin’ with no broke niggas!” “Addicted” offers a far fresher angle on exploitative heterosex. “Why everything that’s supposed to be bad/Make me feel so good?” ponders West, before launching into a rueful account of a mutually degrading affair that interwines sex and drugs. The admission “and I keep coming over” is shivered with a hiccup of pained ecstasy, hinting at the double meaning of “come”. The song’s exquisite arrangement lends poignancy to this tale of male weakness and shame: a glisten of Amnesiac guitar, filtered hi-hats, a sampled chanteuse crooning “you make me smile with my heart” (a line from “My Funny Valentine”). “Crack Music” disconcertingly equates the analgesic powers of drugs and music, with Kanye and The Game chanting the chorus--“That’s that crack music, nigga/That real black music, nigga”--over an impossibly crisp military beat. If Black Americans traffic in the best pain-killers around, the song implies, it’s because Black America has the most pain to kill.

It could be that Kanye West’s “honest confusion” anti-stance will become its own kind of shtick eventually. But judging by the mostly-brilliant Late Registration that won’t be happening for a while yet. He might even make it unscathed to the end of the quintology of conceptually-linked albums of which this album is merely instalment #2.

Ambition (GQ Style, 2009)

AMBITION 

GQ Style, winter 2009 

 by Simon Reynolds 

Just a few months before Michael Jackson died, I felt the urge to write about him for the first time ever. I was in a café and "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" came on and even though I must have heard it hundreds of times since first seeing the video on Top of the Pops in 1979, for some reason the song hit me like a lightning bolt. For all its falsetto-funk silkiness , the sheer aggression of the sound--the coiled rhythmic tension, the stiletto penetration of Jackson's voice--seemed to attack with the force of The Stooges or Sex Pistols . 

But what I really came away with was a vague idea, just a phrase really: "total music", the idea of a category of pop set apart from the merely excellent. Listening, rapt, I imagined the electricity of the Off the Wall sessions: Quincy Jones assembling the highest-calibre session players available, no expense spared, and pursuing perfection with an almost militaristic focusing of energy. The achievement: flawlessness so absolute that it didn't so much transcend commercialism as blast right through it, such that domination of the radio and the discotheques was merely a by-product, a secondary benefit, of the quest. "Total music" occurs through the synergy of talent, limitless funding, a really good idea… and something else: a superhuman drive, the "right stuff" that Tom Wolfe wrote about in connection with NASA's moon missions.

I imagine this intangible elan infused the making of Abba's music, or the classic recordings of the Beatles, Phil Spector, Brian Wilson. There's loads of music that I love and that probably means more to me than "total pop", records made by artists both more unassuming yet in some ways more narcissistically self-absorbed and idiosyncratic. But there's no denying the special charge that imbues music when it's made by people who know they're making history, who can be confident they're taking it out onto the largest stage available.

 In the Sixties there was a long moment where the best pop (in terms of constantly pushing forward and sheer musical quality) was also the best-selling: Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Byrds, Dylan, Beach Boys, Doors. (There's really only a few exceptions: Love, Velvet Underground). Aesthetic ambition and commercial ambition were indivisible. This folk-memory of this ideal persisted long after it ceased to apply, inspiring everyone from Bowie and Roxy to the major punk bands to the likes of U2, Bjork, Radiohead. 

But over the last couple of decades the two kinds of ambition have come to seem more and more tenuously connected, to the point where a phenomenon like the Beatles seems almost implausible, a fluke. 

 My dad had this maxim, something like: aim for the top, because if you fall short, you'll at least reach higher than if you'd aimed for the middle and fallen short of that. It's not completely true: o'er vaulting ambition can result in "EPIC FAIL", whereas a shrewd strategy of modest aspiration might lead to steady sustained successes. Still, remembering this motto led me to this thought: if you want to do great work in music or any art form, just as important as talent or imagination is the desire to be great. You might have the most refined melodic gift, the subtlest musical mind, but if you don't have that will-to-power, the balls and the gall… 

Certain bands only make sense at the top of the pop world: Springsteen and U2 were made to work in widescreen, to issue the most sweeping, speaking-for-Everyman statements. "Overbearing", "bombastic": the insults are merely the measure of their achievement, and nobody can take away those moments when they mattered (Born To Run, then again Born in the U.S.A., for Bruce; the majestic sequence from "Pride" to "Streets Have No Name", for Bono and Co). 

 Of course, there are artists who have the temperament of the world-historical genius but who don't actually have anything worth saying. Jim Steinman, the fevered brain behind Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", and Celine Dion's "It's All Coming Back To Me Now", exemplifies this syndrome. Steinman is far from deficient in the will-to-greatness: he's got an unbridled flair for the grandiose, plus the requisite perfectionist streak (he's been known to spend huge amounts of his own private money on projects when the original budget's run out). Unfortunately his ambition is not accompanied by the filter of taste, to put it mildly. 

 Talking of finances, the rise over the last decade or two of home studios and digital audio workstations, has meant that it's possible for artists to make massive-sounding and expensive-seeming albums for a fraction of what it once cost. It's much cheaper and easier to create the illusion of luxuriant orchestration or to pull off ear-boggling sonic trickery of the kind that would have taken days of intricate labour by George Martin and Abbey Road's white-coated technicians. Artistic ambition, in the old days, had to go hand in hand with commercial ambition, just to pay off the bills. Nowadays the two kinds of aspiration have become severed. The Colossal Sounding, Colossally Ambitious Album is today a sort of specialist subgenre of rock, purveyed by groups like Flaming Lips. 

And not just rock: take Erykah Badu, who renovates the tradition of politically engaged, autobiographically personal "progressive soul" masterpieces by the likes of Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, and Marvin Gaye. Her vastly ambitious New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) sold pretty well but it could never hope to achieve the mass cultural impact of Songs In the Key of Life or What's Goin' On. These are different times and Badu, like her buddies The Roots and Common, is catering for a niche market of historically-informed cognoscenti who still listen out for that kind of takes-the-measure-of-the-zeitgeist Epic.

 Although a singer, Badu regards herself part of hip hop. Surprisingly, given its sketchy record with the Album, rap has been one of the main places this decade where commercial ambition and artistic ambition have remained tightly entwined, with performers like Outkast, Jay-Z and Kanye West putting out sonically adventurous, alternately self-glorifying and socially-conscious albums that sold in huge numbers. It stands to reason that rap is richly endowed with "the will to be great" because the genre is all about self-aggrandisement. What LL Cool J called "talking on myself" still defines the art's core: MCs exalt their own ability to dominate and defeat the competition, finding the most vivid, witty, unique and creatively brutal ways of describing their prowess. 

 Rap expresses and exposes the ugly side of pop's ambition: its profoundly inegalitarian streak, a drive towards status, glory, preeminence. The aspiration to greatness often comes with a certain monstrousness of personality. Look at Morrissey. Pop stardom was always, he frankly admitted, a form of revenge exacted on the world for his outcast adolescence. But when society's "mis-shapes" (to use Jarvis Cocker's term) become stars, the result can be unsightly. The retaliatory narcissism of early Smiths lyrics ("the sun shines out of our behinds", "England owes me a living") is one thing when the singer is a skinny wisp only a few years out of obscurity. But from a fifty year old pop institution with the build of a bouncer, striding across arena stages and tossing the microphone cord with lordly disdain, it starts to look like any old showbiz prima donna. 

 Rap has its own Morrissey in Kanye West. I never used to understand hip hop fans complaining about his monster ego (this is rap, what did you expect guys?). But after the bloated self-pity of much of 808s & Heartbreak and his disruption of the MTV Video Awards, I'm starting to see their point. 

 The supreme case of the will-to-be-great turning rancid is Michael Jackson, of course. Around the point he started calling himself (and insisting on being called) the King of Pop, Jackson 's output shifted from "total pop" to "totalitarian kitsch": the nine gigantic statues of MJ as a Dictator built at his requirement by Sony and installed in European cities to promote 1995's HIStory: Past, Present & Future, Book 1, the fascistic promo film for that record with Jackson in full Khadaffi-style regalia amid hundreds of soldiers. Think too of the Versailles-like indulgence and corruption of Neverland, and that peculiar quasi-dynastic marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of the King. When pop stars try to externalize the grandeur inside their music, to make reality match up to its utopian absoluteness, the results can be grotesque, a tragic-comical catastrophe of nouveau-riche kitsch.