Watching music writers trying to come to grips with Kanye West’s newbie has been a straight blast. The album brings out the worst in everybody who goes near it and here is why: it is shallow but it sounds deep.
This leaves rock critics trying to figure out if, indeed, there is something here they are missing. There isn’t so they make stuff up. Here is Jonah Weiner in Slate: “The song is also the centerpiece of a lyrical motif that spans the album (and reaches back to the 2006 song “Flashing Lights” built around the word lights. For West, lights signal alternately alluring and malevolent forces, the beacon and the rocky shores rolled into one.” Er, if Weiner is right, which I doubt, so what?
I once read a review of “Wuthering Heights” where the critic made the case that every time Heathcliff appeared in a scene the weather, the very atmosphere, would become erratic. Again, so what? So something: Bronte, subconsciously of course since the word didn’t exist, saw her antihero as a manifestation of the Id. What the fuck does West use lights for? I dunno. Jonah doesn’t know. You don’t know.
Let’s make it real easy: Kanye is a grieving Peter Pan with an Oedipus complex who can’t shut up. Luckily, he can ke-ching it into ace pop songs.
That’s it.
Wanna go looking for Fear Of A Black Planet? What’s Going On? OK Computer? Maybe you’ll find a variation on a different masterful but shallow album, Here, My Dear.
But it sounds so good and it feels so important. It feels so major. How can it not be important. Because Kanye’s a dick and his impressions are solipsistic. Taylor Swift is exactly the same. The two biggest albums of the Christmas season were made by assholes.
And the rock critics are just the biggest buncha planks, falling over themselves to write about what isn’t there. These guys are my peers? These idiots?