There’s nothing better than a controversy to sell a new album right? Brandon Flowers will release his second solo album ‘The Desired Effect’ on May 19th, but he is in the news because of a bold comment he made about Kanye West. He was interviewed by Rolling Stone a few days ago and they asked him to comment on some unflattering remark he had already made in 2006 about the rapper… ‘Kanye West ‘makes me ill’…
‘Yeah, that one’s tough,’ replied Flowers. ‘Everyone’s afraid to say anything contrary to him being a genius. It’s crazy, man! And it’s frustrating. I’m not going to tear him down, but I will say I find that to be frustrating. [Laughs] That’s my stance on it. A lot of people might agree with me now. I may have been a little bit ahead of my time. But I think he wants to be good. I think he wants to be great, and that’s something that we all want to strive for. We’ve just got different roads of getting there, I guess.’
I would say it’s refreshing to see someone expressing his own idea, and he is right about the consensus around Mr. West! Look, it’s not possible to please everyone, although nobody is saying anything negative about him! I don’t buy a minute that everyone thinks he is this amazing genius, there must be some artists who find him not that great, right? And I am not even talking about his attitude. But for a minute, sell me Kanye West as a genius! A genius is someone who displays exceptional intellectual abilities, and if anyone can recognize Kayne’s talent, the word genius is so overused that it is painful to see. Let me know, is there any outstanding Kanye’s lyrics you could come up with to prove the genius part? His lyrics seem always contrived to make a good rhyme with a few pop culture references, funny or even clever? Yes, but genius, certainly not! Plus who knows if he really is the author of all his lyrics….
‘Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see,’ is a quote from Schopenhauer, and in the case of Kanye, well, way too many people pretend to see the target, for him to fall in the genius category. But repeat it enough yourself (and there is no one better than Kanye at self-promotion), put his face on Time magazine as the most important people on the planet, and people start to believe it.
So Brandon Flowers isn’t impressed by Kanye West and I agree with him? Yes, and it’s scary because I usually don’t share any of his judgments, like his endorsement for Mitt Romney (well he is a Mormon too) and his anger toward science and Richard Dawkins for being ‘after the Christian man’. Plus his music bores me to death, and it’s not his new song ‘I Can Change’ that will change my mind… talk about recycling some bad pop of the 80’s! Not genius either.