Quote:
Originally posted by Great Username
Kanye = the world desperately looking for a musical genius figure to glorify, and lowering their standards and projecting utter ******** onto the album that isn't actually there in order to do so.
He was better when he didn't buy into the idea of himself being some sort of tortured genius. The College Dropout is so joyful compared to the laboured, bloated MBDTF.
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This almost seems like a case of Lady Gaga to me. People believe her early material was free of the pretension that people now see in all of her work, but to me, it feels like it was always present. It's the same for Kanye. He knew what he had an opportunity to do after The Blueprint, and I feel every bit of that budding self-glorification in The College Dropout where he casts himself as some weird mix between a repressed high school kid and full-on hip-hop playboy. I mean, here's an album where he sort of pretends he's fooling around and being immature, but he's injecting gospel and deep-religious introspection, touching on work ranging from 50 Cent to Tupac to Aretha Franklin, and packaging it all in a huge pop wrapper, complete with all manner of random pop culture references.
There's no doubt his music has become more dense or challenging, but that's because he's continuously opened up new sonic tools for himself over the years and integrated them into his music.