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The Tris McCall Report

Critics Poll 2004 -- The Singles

He prefers the term "African American Express": Kanye West gets ahead

Bol Guevara, field marshal of the Mindset Army, runs one of the all-time Haterade-drinking websites. Not content with bashing the hell out of rap albums (check out some of his remarkable reviews while you're there) he's constructed a parallel weblog devoted to a campaign to deny Kanye West the Grammy award for "Jesus Walks". If you're as pissed at A Guy Called West as Bol is -- not that this is possible -- there's a petition you can sign, too. It's anybody's guess where he intends to send it.

Despite the 381 signatures, even the inflammatory Bol must know that there's no scandal here. Indiana rapper Rhymefest wrote the first verse of "Jesus Walks" and got credited (and payed, presumably) for it; West is not a plagiarist, and Rhymefest isn't complaining. If West gets a Grammy, Rhymefest will probably get one, too. Technically speaking, it's true the first verse of "Jesus Walks" is one of the better rhymes on the album. But nobody is praising West for his technical excellence, because he hasn't got any -- he's not a particularly good emcee, and his lyrics are loose and seldom poetic. I locate the heart of "Jesus Walks" in verse two, anyway -- it's here where he lays out his argument about the blackout of Christian voices in contemporary media.

But the complaint against West -- one that is echoed on plenty of other websites, too -- isn't a legal one, or even an aesthetic one. It's a moral charge. Bol and the members of his Army think Kanye West is an asshole; a guy unworthy of carrying the mantle of rap culture. West, who has a reputation for being incredibly arrogant in interviews, regularly says things that imply that he's mastered hip-hop utterly, transcended it, achieved the status of an all-time performer. I don't have any problem with rappers using ghostwriters, but it's fair to ask why somebody so sure of his own classic status needs to purchase verses. Beyond that, the idea that hip-hop can or ought to be transcended is deeply bothersome to those of us who love hip-hop. I'm not a rapper, and I'm principally involved in an indie rock subculture. To somebody like Bol who lives and breathes hip-hop, Kanye West's attitude is bound to be infuriating.

West has some anger issues of his own that he's in the process of working out: some of it he's doing during interviews with sycophantic journalists, but most of it is digitally preserved for posterity on The College Dropout. Here, he savages educators, authorities, employers, mentors and role models in language that is uncommonly blunt and unromanticized by the standards of modern rap music. Nearly every song sets up a father figure, and nearly every song savages that figure mercilessly. West is driven to show the absent father as a failure and a perpetrator, a fraud, a wastrel. As he chases his spectres across vibrant landscapes of his own devising on the most legitimately emo album of 2004, he drops his reserve altogether -- he's so busy flinging everything he can against his straw men that he's got no time to bother assembling typical hip-hop stances and iconography.

This has won him applause from journalists who see him as a genuine original. He is one, but that's almost beside the point: what is most notable about West is not his iconoclasm but his venom. Like the young Elvis Costello, the artist he sometimes resembles, Kanye West is principally motivated by hostility and revenge. But unlike the author of This Year's Model, he's not trying to get back at women who spurned him -- no, he's looking for revenge on an entire social structure that told him he wasn't good enough, and, clearly, the absent father who threw him to the dogs. To see him in concert is to witness a man bent out of shape by the emotional energy of his own material: hunched over, eyes closed, clumsily rhyming his prosaic verses in a trancelike delivery far more reminiscent of, say, Bob Mould than Jay-Z. He's up there exorcising demons, in a head-bopping trance at the lip of the stage, all decorum pushed aside in the name of self-important autobiography.

I have written elsewhere that hip-hop is the soundtrack for black upward social mobility, and just as those who most embody the trend are the ones who draw the most ridicule from white defenders of the social order, those rappers who poke fun at the bling and the rims are frequently praised. Satire is my favorite representational mode, in case you haven't noticed by now, and I tend to respond very well to parodists. But the difference between the gentle overstatement of Mannie Fresh (or the Roots's "What They Do" video, also a site of excitement for rap haters) and Kanye West isn't just a matter of intensity. When Mannie Fresh eincourages you to get that money and laugh at yourself as you do, it's because he loves you, and he loves the game. When Kanye West encourages you to get that money and excoriate yourself as you do, it's because he hates you, and he hates the game -- but he recognizes that playing the game is the only way for him to get the self-justification he craves. I think West is a hell of a satirist, but the closer you look at The College Dropout, the more you recognize that there is no redemptive warmth whatsoever in his critique.

Kanye West takes pains on The College Dropout to present himself as a good rap citizen, supporting other Chicago emcees and artists. I don't exactly believe him either, but I will take his word for it for now, knowing pretty well from personal experience that anybody who gets in the way of a guy so driven to prove himself is in for some trouble. That includes Rhymefest, who may or may not have been taken for a ride. Mainstream journalists and Grammy voters certainly have been: they've presented West as the man who will save hip-hop (as if the most popular musical form in the world is in need of saving), and West has fed this notion whenever he can, knowing full well that he's infuriating people. Bol, he is playing you, just like he's playing everybody else. Pissing folks off is a huge part of West's agenda. Those of us who waited out Elvis Costello's protracted adolescence and gratuitous race-baiting were rewarded with a twenty-five album run of staggering quality. If we want West around to show us what he can do, we're just going to have to put up with his shit until he learns to focus his rage a little better.

Kanye West and the Critics Poll

We want him around. Critics Poll voters love Kanye West, and have been giving his songs big numbers for the past three years. Some of this voting has plainly been done by people who have no idea who West is, and who just like the sound of his production: I got a ballot from a person who voted for "Izzo" in 2001, and who is now listing West as the Artist he Doesn't Know, but Knows he Should. "Izzo" won the poll handily in '01 with 142 points; last year, Ludacris's "Stand Up" picked up another 57, and Alicia Keys's "You Don't Know My Name" got 44. Jay-Z's "Girls, Girls, Girls" was a major vote-getter in 2001 and 2002.

This year, Kanye West becomes the first artist to have produced two poll-winning singles: "Izzo" in '01, and "Slow Jamz" in '04. The infamous "Jesus Walks" also made the Top 20, and "Through The Wire" and "All Falls Down" just missed. Throw in the scattered votes "The New Workout Plan," John Legend's "Used To Love You, " and Keyshia Cole's "I Changed My Mind," and West totals 332 points for the year -- more than twice the number scored by Franz Ferdinand, our runner-up. West's final sum is still a bit shy of the record tally set by "Hey Ya" in 2003, but adding up all his points for the past three years establishes Kan the Louis Vuitton Don as the best-scoring producer in the history of our poll.

What makes Kanye West such a consistent and enduring Critics Poll performer? I hear you mentioning the omnipresence of his singles, but it's not that; consider that Usher, who had five number one Billboard hits in 2004, only scored 64 total points in the poll this year. (That's less that Eamon's total for "Fuck It" alone). As ubiquitous hip-hop producers go, he's by far the most conservative of the bunch: he doesn't push the sonic envelope like Timbaland, or experiment with radical, stripped-down styles like The Neptunes do. Even Jazze Pha and the increasingly formulaic Dr. Dre take more risks than West does. His signature gimmick -- the sped-up soul sample -- has been a staple of rap records for years.

Yet there's something undeniably hostile about West's reappropriations. He isn't content to let the sample become part of the scenery, or even to function as a gag: no, he wants it to sound ridiculous. He wants to distort the sentiment in those old soul songs; speed up the emotion until it curdles. On "Slow Jamz," he really gives the game away: here is a song about plying women with syrupy R&B ballads, rapped over an R&B ballad that has been sped up to the point of absurdity. Critics Poll voters assigned credit (or blame) correctly, voting for the West song that makes the cynicism of his project most explicit. See, we tend to be cynical, satirical bastards ourselves. Instinctively, we recognize West as one of our own. Kanye wins.

One last thought on Kanye West, and then I'm going to shut up about him, at least until tomorrow. Much of The College Dropout is explicitly addressed to the rapper's mother: Kan's Louis Vuitton Moms is the major supporting character in his autobiographical melodrama. He's backed this up in interviews, where he's been the anti-Eminem - he talks about his mom constantly, praising her in whatever major media outlet will let him blather on. "Family Business," the most moving song on a very moving album, is practically a tribute to the matrilineal family.

But what about West's pilloried father? Early articles about the producer-rapper always seemed to mention that West was the son of prominent (but always unnamed) professor. Lately, the pieces don't mention a father at all -- which is odd, given that so much of the album is dedicated to taking pops apart.

One theory I've heard (and maybe one you've heard, too): Cornel West is Kanye West's father. There's been an under-the-table agreement between the two not to mention the relation in the press. Hey, I strongly doubt it, too, but it would go a hell of a long way towards explaining all the hostility, and the conflation of the figure of the deadbeat dad with the uncaring professor on The College Dropout. There's that family resemblance, too: an incisive, prosaic viciousness, a will toward ideological destructiveness. Go on, spread the rumor, Bol; it's ten times juicier than that boring one about Rhymefest.

Tune in Wednesday morning for the miscellany. On Thursday, I post my own ballot.

 

View the Album Results.

Go ahead to your miscellany.

View my ballot for 2004.

View the Singles Results for 2003.

 

 

I want to talk to Tris McCall, but I'm scared, 'cuz we ain't e-mailed in so long.