If this is your first time hearing this … So with his seventh solo album, Swish, due February 11, we combed through each of West’s solo albums and one-off singles (plus his half of 2011’s Watch the Throne) to pinpoint every single reference he makes to pop-culture figures and properties, and catalogued them all here. Until now, those scattered references and shout-outs have never been collected in one place. Since he established a national profile as a solo artist, he’s been eager to shoehorn the contents of your grocery store impulse-buy tabloids into his music. His writing is distinct and often autobiographical, but one of its most enduring (and endearing) hallmarks is his obsession with pop culture. Where Kanye’s appropriation behind the boards is a long and complicated story, his work on the microphone is a little easier to trace. His albums have marked sea changes in the genre time and time again, but West makes little effort to obscure his influences.
DIAMOND REMIX KANYE REGISTRATION
His 2004 debut, The College Dropout, typified the soul-sampling style that made him famous 2005’s Late Registration incorporated broad, baroque orchestrations Graduation was the siren call for electronic hip-hop 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak moved entire genres into minor keys and made Drake’s career possible 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy urged rappers to reach for bizarre maximalist heights 2013’s Yeezus stripped the act back down. But there’s always value in tracing the source material.Īs a producer, he’s seen as a visionary. That can be a near-direct lift (Jay Z’s “Izzo” sees West add drums to a pitched-around version of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”) or more oblique–as in “Runaway,” where he takes the Backyard Heavies drum loop that Pete Rock famously sampled on “The Basement” and wrapped in salmon-colored silk and antipathy. His best work takes something recognizable and bends it into his orbit. Kanye’s career has always been about appropriation, and the moment when appropriation bleeds into synthesis. Two and a half years later, North West has a younger brother, her parents are married, and Yeezus remains perhaps the most divisive album of the decade. Finally he lets the songs - which take the industrial sides of Chicago drill and acid house and molds them into a midlife crisis - do the talking. I felt that I had a real talent in chopping and appropriating music.” He’s self-deprecating when he compares himself to Andy Warhol (“I’m a black guy, so I’m gonna name the most obvious artist in the world”), but he means it. “I found that when I would drop samples, my friends would react to it more. “I wanted to make something of impact,” he says of his earliest experiences in making music. So he sends out a few emails and makes it happen.īefore he hits play on the songs (he does so from his custom matte-black MacBook Pro, no MPC), he ambles through a disjointed, staccato monologue: Steve Jobs, the ugliness of the YouTube player, ad agencies, being a “very commercial celebrity boyfriend.” But mostly, he wants to talk about the act of appropriating. But, it’s Art Basel, and Kanye has been sufficiently moved to stage an impromptu listening session for his seventh solo album, the then-unreleased Yeezus. He’s in Switzerland, of all places - not where most expectant fathers are when their nine-months-pregnant fiancées are home in Los Angeles, at least one layover away. It’s early June 2013, and Kanye West is anxious. Photo-Illustration: Kelly Chiello and Images by Getty Images
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