Late Registration
Posted: August 30th, 2005 | Author: themarkpike | Filed under: Stuff |
In February of 2004, I was trying to convince a small committee at Duke University that this dude named Kanye West was going to be the next big thing and we’d be silly to pass up the opportunity to sign him for a $15k concert. “I just don’t know about this Nine West character” they’d say, “he doesn’t even have an album out yet.”
Well, his album dropped. “The College Dropout“. If it wasn’t for the velvet Norah Jones baby-boomboxers, he would’ve debuted with that number one spot. They still weren’t convinced. “We can’t have an artist perform who endorses dropping out of college”. Eventually, armed with Billboard charts and album reviews, we convinced them to cough up double that paper, or approximately the cost of a year’s tuition.
After the Last Day of Classes Festival show, I thanked Kanye and made small talk. He asked me, “Oh you’re graduating?” There was only one way to reply, “Nah. I decided I was finished.” He rolled his eyes, as well he should’ve. After all, I was the antithesis of his term paper. “The College Dropout”?
His sophomore effort, “Late Registration” dropped today. “It’s like Walt Whitman. ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes” West’s mama Donda said in a recent Time Magazine feature article (he’s the first rapper to ever appear on the cover, apparently). Donda West was a professor at Chicago State University, and she summed this album up perfectly, poetically.
Contradictions in Kanye’s dictions? Definitely. Co-producers? “Jon Brion is on the keys right now”. Yeah, that dude. Plucks the strings, brings heat in dramatic fashion. It’s like a soundtrack with the closed-captioning. Diamonds are forever? Shirley Bassey said so. Jay-Z said so, too. Kanye comes correct, remixes an apology, or is it? “Little is known of Sierra Leone and how it connects to the Diamonds we own.” He describes the contradictions, narrates the nuisances of being a self-conscious / socially-conscious successful rapper. “We can’t afford no gas”. “Remember when we used to eat our cereal with forks, cuz we wanted to save the milk?” “Yves Saint Laurent Glasses?” “Strippers named Porsche?” Kanye slaloms back and forth throughout the album, weaving between Broke Phi Broke, the fraternity of frugalness, while at the same time driving around in cars that have more TV screens than the Jungle Room, navigating the seas of success. Do I mix metaphors? Very well then, I mix metaphors.
“They ask me, why you called it Late Registration, Ye? Cause we takin’ these m*thaf@©!s back to school.”
He takes me back to school- the parties, parents, textbooks, teachers. The soaring symphony of confusion and contradictions. The tension and the pension. The resolution and the relationships between. Ye, I’m going back to school.
slightly cooler than gary payton at disneyland and/or harold from harold and kumar at the spearmint rhino.
I need to post that picture of Gary Payton at Disneyland, without a doubt. “Yo Glove. Show us some love!”
“Excuse me?” says Gary.
“Oh, umm. Will you take a picture with us?”
Mark,
I hate to rain on your Rapstar Parade, but I can’t help but notice that you are wearing a College Dropout shirt, thus making you “that guy.” Your sincerity is really sweet.
since i am now a sixth year senior (yuck!), i am going to come out with an album entitled “Never Leaving College.” i think it will hit home with a lot of people.
Have I mentioned that Kayne makes for a poor role model?
A poor role model? I don’t know if that’s fair.
True, the platform he used was perhaps inappropriate. The Red Cross has traditionally been an apolitical organization, and using their fundraiser as a medium for his message might have been counterproductive to the very statement he made.
But it seems as though people’s main point of contention with his comments, and the part that is being replayed over and over again in the media Kanye vilifies is “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Does saying that make him a bad role model? I don’t think so. Perhaps he over-simplified his observations and empirical data. I don’t think people would be so sensitive about his comments if he had said, “George Bush doesn’t care about poor people,” but this country’s history makes race an extremely sensitive subject.
It’s true that it has taken an unacceptable amount of time for federal assistance to make its way down to the affected areas. It’s true that a large portion of the human assistance is currently fighting a war very far away. It’s true that a large chunk of money that could have helped with engineering projects that could have enhanced the infrastructure in this area and prevented a disaster of this size, had been shipped overseas to a war that was begun with flawed intelligence. It’s true that Bush was on vacation and took an unacceptable amount of time to respond to this disaster. It’s true that he dropped everything he was doing and returned to Washington, DC to respond to the Terri Schiavo situation. It’s true that the amount of people that have been affected by this disaster come as a surprise to this administration, because the federal government has acted in a way that proves these people have been invisible to them for years.
And so, was it such a stretch for Kanye West to say the things he said? Somebody had to say it. Maybe not then and there…
Hmm…I went to that show. Good stuff.
But, for the sake of clarity, Kanye West was not the first rapper on the cover of Time.
Granted, this begets a conversation about the difference between rap and hip-hop, but I digress…