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Jayson Greene: The Coldest Story Ever Told: The Influence of Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak (Pitchfork)
Jayson Greene: The Coldest Story Ever Told: The Influence of Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak (Pitchfork)
“I’m trying to put on those Phil Collins melodies,” West told Miss Info, naming the most elusive and least-explored influence on 808s. He was talking about Collins’ synth-like, proto-Auto-Tuned voice, but there’s also a sonic kinship between the hard, sharp, and dry drums that Collins popularized on his earliest solo records and the uncanny explosions in dead space that make up 808s’ beats. Collins first came upon this “gated reverb” drum sound while working on Peter Gabriel’s 1980 track “Intruder”, when the song’s engineer, Hugh Padgham, used a microphone normally used for in-studio communication—something closer to an intercom—and then trapped and snuffed out any overtones with a signal processor called a noise gate. It made the drum hits both vivid and lifeless, loud sounds that confused our sense of how loud sounds travel. The technique was famously employed on Collins’ signature hit “In the Air Tonight”, which Kanye has covered live.
·pitchfork.com·
Jayson Greene: The Coldest Story Ever Told: The Influence of Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak (Pitchfork)
Alex Pappademas: Ninja: A Short History of a Less Troublesome Word (Grantland)
Alex Pappademas: Ninja: A Short History of a Less Troublesome Word (Grantland)
On Katy Perry covering ‘N***** in Paris’. The dumb, tee-hee transgression of saying the edited-for-television version sort of obscures what’s interesting and daring about this performance, which is that under the guise of tribute/ironic cover tune (it feels about half-and-half) it’s a girl refusing to let this song’s imaginary world of swinging-dick privilege be off-limits to her. But that’s all that’s happening here; she puts the word on like a piece of borrowed jewelry and parades in front of the mirror.
·grantland.com·
Alex Pappademas: Ninja: A Short History of a Less Troublesome Word (Grantland)
Vulture: Nitsuh: Watch the Throne: Uneasy Heads Wear Gaudy Crowns
Vulture: Nitsuh: Watch the Throne: Uneasy Heads Wear Gaudy Crowns
“It’s a portrait of two black men thinking through the idea of success in America; what happens when your view of yourself as a suppressed, striving underdog has to give way to the admission that you’ve succeeded about as much as it’s worth bothering with; and how much your victory can really relate to (or feel like it’s on behalf of) your onetime peers who haven’t got a shred of what you’ve won. It’s not a topic that deserves to be scrubbed up, either; there are things about Kanye’s tiresome self-involvement and moody debauchery — the way he sounds like some sullen hip-hop emperor, stalking around the crumbling gilded palace of his own psyche, muttering angrily and getting aggressive with the help — that belong in any such portrait.”
·nymag.com·
Vulture: Nitsuh: Watch the Throne: Uneasy Heads Wear Gaudy Crowns
NYTimes.com: Kanye West, Still Unfiltered, on Eve of Fifth Album
NYTimes.com: Kanye West, Still Unfiltered, on Eve of Fifth Album
Yeah, this is that nagging thing about MBDTF. “On Monday Mr. West, who is 33, will release his fifth album, ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’, and it’s terrific — of course it’s terrific — a startlingly maximalist take on East Coast rap traditionalism. And yet that doesn’t matter nearly as much as it should, at least partly because of Mr. West’s insistence on his own greatness. By not allowing for responses to his work other than awe, the value of the work itself is diminished; it becomes an object of admiration, not of study. Instead the focus is on the whole of Mr. West’s persona and character, which is more fractured, and subject to a far wider range of responses. The result is that Mr. West becomes a polarizing public figure who happens to be the most artful pop musician of the day, not the other way around.”
·nytimes.com·
NYTimes.com: Kanye West, Still Unfiltered, on Eve of Fifth Album