Kanye West
There's no beating down the beats on Late Registration.
By Tim Marchman
The really incredible thing about Kanye West is that he's every bit as good as he thinks he is. If you doubt it for a second, take a listen to his work on Common's Be, released earlier this year to near-universal acclaim. In terms of lyrics and flows, it was the same record Common has been putting out for years, featuring a conscious-poet shtick that attempts to pawn off coy passivity as intellectualism. No one noticed or cared, just because the beats on the record sounded so good. Making a Common record worth listening to was a remarkable bit of sleight-of-hand on West's part, every bit as impressive as the work Dr. Dre and RZA have done in making MCs literally no better than random guys on the corner sound like the heirs to Rakim's throne.
As an MC, West, like Dre, is worse than a random guy on the corner, and, again like Dre, he's been completely unable to resist the temptation to make himself sound like a million dollars by adding his catchy rhythms. This is understandable-given a choice between making two bums sound great, why not choose the one who happens to be you? Unfortunately, West, a monumental egoist even by hip-hop standards, lacks Dre's ruthless self-discipline, which has always kept him grounded in the strictly commercial and thus kept him from making anything nearly as incoherent and overblown as Late Registration, West's latest ode to his own ambition.
The list of guest artists on Kanye's CD tells the story; anyone who ropes in both Common and The Game to perform on one record obviously has some problems with focus. Common's track, "My Way Home," is horrible, with the would-be beatnik breathlessly dropping verses from what must be some sort of program designed to spit out conscious-poet lyrics ("They say home is where the hate is/My dome is where fate is," it begins, and it only gets worse from there) over a "soulful" loop of cymbals and stuttering organ. Compare that to The Game's shamelessly ridiculous "Crack Music" ("How we stop the black panthers?/Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer," begins the first verse, and it only gets better and more over-the-top from there), which is also just musically fantastic, with intricately syncopated drum programming incorporating rolls and crashes along with deeply weird choral singing and string arrangements soaring over the beat.
The rest of the record follows similar lines. When the West capable of proclaiming that "I may be going too fast in trying to open new dimensions in hip-hop" is self-consciously sampling snatches of the Rodgers and Hart song "My Funny Valentine," working Andre 3000 riffs into choruses and otherwise proclaiming himself an Artist, he falls off the rails. When he's rhyming about gold-digging bitches (or, even better, nothing in particular) in his exaggeratedly amateurish Midwestern drawl over flashy party beats, he sounds like someone quite capable of single-handedly reinventing hip-hop. West is a bright guy, and it's not a lack of talent that makes the life go out of his music whenever it bumps up against his more grandiose ambitions of making something akin to chamber rap. What, then, is the problem?
If I can venture a theory, it's why West and Common are pretty much Chicago's sole contributions to hip-hop. It's a beautiful city, a wonderful place to live-and in terms of cultural segregation it's as bad as any place north of the Mason-Dixon line. Hip-hop, meanwhile, is fueled by cultural miscegenation. At its best, it's the result of someone's conflict with something totally outside their normal sphere of awareness. Nas, the bookish son of a trumpeter, watches the thugs in his neighborhood from afar and issues rap reports on them as though he were them; De La Soul, scions of one of the more sterile and humorless belts of suburbia in the country, go for raw surrealism; both take their art form about as far as it can go.
Along these lines, it makes perfect sense that West would go flat when he's trying to be the Elvis Costello of hip-hop or going on about Sierra Leone like a Nation subscriber. His mother is the head of a college English department, and he grew up in the most profoundly middle class of the great American cities. Gold-digging hussies at the club and cocaine deals, which in Chicago are walled off from the respectable world, were not his world. In this light, it makes perfect sense that his imagination explodes when he fixes it on the great musical and verbal hip-hop cliches and shrivels when he fixes it on the ambient detritus of his childhood, just as Nas explodes when he fixes it on the thugs he never really knew as well as he'd have you think and dries up when he turns to the Afrocentrism that was just in the air in New York 30 years ago. No matter what anyone says, the one iron aesthetic law of hip-hop is to never write what you know.