One might be quick to misunderstand his theories on self-value (“As a creative your ideas are your strongest form of currency”) or purpose (“Some people have to work within the existing consciousness while some people can shift the consciousness”) as total bluster, but West’s tweets sync squarely with his career-long artistic project: to create a new template with the hope that one might access a vision of untapped possibilities. She was going to lead the audience somewhere untraveled.Įxpression is also a matter of sight-the desire for others to see as you see. From the moment she materialized on stage as Nefertiti, it was clear: this would be no uniform benediction. It wasn’t so much a vision of black genius being born as it was black genius, thoroughly defined, doing what it does-stir, exclaim, surprise, fulfill. Her headlining performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this past weekend (she’ll headline again on Saturday) was genius in real time. The equally masterful work of Beyoncé conjures a comparable insistence on the senses. What secures the album as a chronicle of force and feeling is its sustained elevation, its mastery of self. He looks for a way out of it he searches through verse. “All worries in a hurry, I wish I controlled things.” He wants to make sense of the fog around him. “I’ll prolly die tryna defuse two homies arguin’/ I’ll prolly die 'cause that’s what you do when you’re 17,” he raps. A track like “FEAR.” charts the rapper’s private frictions-he wants us to see what he sees the pull of death, the despair that feels a crater wide. Lamar’s is a divine vision, and much of the album is filled with a linguistic searching. They are criticisms that wonder, dangerously: Just how should black genius occupy our world?Īccording to Billboard, the vote among jurors was unanimous in the rapper’s favor-since the inaugural music prize in 1943, recipients had exclusively been classical or jazz musicians-with one committee member citing the album for its symmetry of “melody, harmony, counterpoint, texture.” The album’s strength, though, lies in its insistence on sight. Has Beyoncé eclipsed Michael Jackson as the greatest entertainer of all time? Was Kendrick Lamar actually worthy of such an award? Is Kanye going on another one of his insane rants? Such misguided inquiries are fortified with an identical structural curiosity. Its ubiquity, too, inflamed the kind of lazy criticism that seeks to invalidate the precision, thunder, and totality of artistic exceptionalism (this is especially true when cultivated outside the white mainstream). Rendered through these three artists, the sweat and gristle of black genius-which is to say, the bone-tough work of black genius-was nearly impossible to escape, online and off. Or perhaps it’s best we start with Kanye West, who reemerged this week on Twitter with a meditative shortform treatise on human existence and the nobility of creative production. Or we could just as easily begin with Kendrick Lamar the Compton, California artist became the first rapper to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his searing album DAMN. We could begin with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter-the singer, mother, and pop maximalist who understands that music can, and should, be a kind of cinema-and her historically transcendent Coachella performance. But given its current success, that process is starting to look more like a strategy that has paid off.If one were attempting to define black genius in its modern form, the week of April 16 provides no shortage of starting points. West is a noted perfectionist, so the seemingly haphazard process of releasing this album appeared out of character. Panda, a song by the little known Brooklyn rapper Desiinger, was sampled on the album, and it is now number nine on Spotify and number three on Apple Music. The success of West’s album has also lifted the ships of the artists featured on it. West put the word out that he wasn’t happy, and reportedly was rather grumpy at home, too.īut on Saint Pablo, a new song reportedly from West’s next album, due this summer, he seems to see the silver lining to all that piracy, rapping, “ I’ve been waking the spirits of millions more to come/A million illegally downloaded my truth over the drums.” Tidal reported West’s album had 250,000 streams in the first ten days, but the limited and glitchy release spurred widespread piracy-500,000 copies were illegally downloaded after the first day. After West’s Saturday Night Live performance in mid-February, the album appeared exclusively on Tidal, but users were having trouble listening to it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |