Ladies And Gentlemen, Allow Myself To Introduce… Myself

HIGH ANGLE - FULL SHOT - ASTORIA, QUEENS

    NARRATOR (Bernie Mac)
What in the fuck was that? I told you to get someone who 
knows something about Kanye West to write about Kanye West! 
You don’t know anything about rap music! You didn’t even
listen to Reasonable Doubt until like 2006. You’re a dilettante
with no sense of rap history. I don’t mean that in no nice
way.

Hi. I sit in a my office/kitchen in Queens in a folding chair from the discount store up the street and listen to music on big headphones. I’ve provided some photographic evidence. See? There’s a broom to my right, and a window behind me. This is my sole qualification for writing (what I hope will be) quite a bit about one of the world’s foremost entertainer cum artists.

I think right now I’ll probably talk about the first time I listened to Kanye West, and then talk a bit more about subsequent listening experiences, and then offer a theory of criticism.

Over the summer of 2004 I was in between junior and senior years of college. I was staying on a friend’s couch during this interstitial chapter of my life, and one afternoon we were just shooting the shit talking when I remember he played “All Falls Down” for me and said, sort of sheepishly, “This song’s actually good.”

The only rap music in my life until then consisted in listening to Wu-Tang’s Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and Nas’s *Illmatic. Like, solely. My freshman year at school, I wore a denim jacket I got at the Salvation Army. I’d sewed a The Strokes patch onto, and it was the ugliest jacket I think you could possible imagine, but I thought (and still do, actually) that liking cool things throws a halo around you that also makes you cool. (The actual application of this theory is almost tautological if you really think about it.) I was really into cool. I did not like The Soft Bulletin or In The Aeroplane Over The Sea for years after I heard them. I only conceded to them — and Wu-Tang’s and Nas’s debuts — because I guess I thought they were cool, and after enough exposure I via cool, I realized they were also good.

The early mid 2000s were an easy time to get what was cool. Napster and Audio Galaxy made downloading complete discographies extremely easy. (Not as easy as torrenting does today, but a lot easier than spending a hundred fifty bucks at the record store.) The idea behind downloading a discography, though, is basically antithetical to spotting new cool stuff, so if you were used to settling already mapped out musical territory (and essentially pretty derivative guitar-slacker-indie-rock territory at that), then listening to radio rap and pop difficult. Adding to my utter confusion was that, after indie rock, the music I most listened to was adult contemporary over something like fifteen years’ worth of car rides with my parents. Songs like “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” or even “Yeah!” sort of made no sense to me, like trying to read Russian in Cyrillic script. The overall situation very closely mirrors being in college: you learn the foundational knowledge accreted through history, and you generally avoid much contemporary content. Then I suppose it’s not ironic that an album called College Dropout would help break me out of this atavistic rut.

I must have burned my friend’s copy of College Dropout onto a CD-R because I have yet another strong memory of listening to Kanye: a few weeks later, still that summer, I was driving my 1990 Chevy Corsica in the parking lot of the local Super Wal*Mart. I was sitting in my car in a line of cars at a three-way stop, and I put “All Falls Down” on and it just clicked. It made so much sense to me, probably because it had a pretty catchy Lauren Hill guitar hook, a facile reason. I don’t remember anything else about the experience, other than 1) I did not notice the song’s awesome bass line (I remember my musical savant bassist roommate pontificating to me about the song’s bass line months later), and 2) once “All Falls Down” clicked, its predecessor, “We Don’t Care”, clicked even harder. It just made sense to me. What a sunny, weird song. Farty synthesizers, a happy-sounding chorus that was actually expressing something really tragic. The whole heft of the song didn’t really make a dent in me, but I knew I liked how it sounded, and I knew it didn’t sound like Nas’s (very good) refried jazz or Wu-Tang’s lo-fi samurai sounds. It was bright and shiny and of the moment.

After a seemingly interminable summer, I made it back to college. My Corsica actually broke down twenty miles away (cracked head gasket), but it already took me further than I’d have thought it could. 2004 to 2005 was the year I got rap and pop. Highlights included Britney Spears’s “Toxic”, Fabolous’s “Breathe”, all of the Black Album, Justin Timberlake, Usher, OutKast — everything. Before, I had hated pop music in a way that actually even eluded enunciation: I don’t think I ever deigned to make snide comments about the radio or MTV; I just didn’t mention it, didn’t listen to it. I went through all of college for the most part not knowing the difference between Jessica Biel and Jessica Alba or even watching more than one or two movies at the theater. I was going to be a philosopher. I still know a lot more about Hegel and Wittgenstein than I do about early- and mid-2000s popular culture. And now I probably won’t ever catch up.

The great thing about music, though, is that you can always catch up. Now they got the dropout keeping me in school.

Late Registration was, as far as I can recall, the second-to-last physical album I bought the day it came out. I lived in Albuquerque at the time, and I was well-primed for mainstream pop-rap. Driving around one day, I caught T.I.’s “What You Know” on the radio, and hearing it felt like witnessing the sort of magic trick the angels of revelation would play to amuse themselves in between damning and saving. I have literally no idea how I knew when Late Registration would be released or why I was so excited to buy it, but, well, I did. I was living with my girlfriend at her mom’s house, and I worked odd days at a thrift store. When I had the day off and they were out, I’d blast Late Registration and Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods. Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker worked its way in there, too. I think that’s all I listened to for a few months.

You can tell, maybe, that even though I was fashionably poptimistic, it was also sort of a front.

Wow, this story is probably kind of boring to the set of people that doesn’t include its protagonist. I’m sorry! I just wanted to set the scene, sort of: in college, graduate school, and beyond I basically was sort of into pop and rap, but at gunpoint, I’d pick Why? over Wu-Tang. I knew a lot more about Pavement than Parliament. And I’m not saying I’ve progressed that much, honestly.

If you’ve made it this far, then I’ll let you be privy to something of a secret: I probably didn’t listen to Graduation all the way through until the fall of 2010. I probably listened to all of 808s and Heartbreak at about the same point. I don’t know. Musically speaking, life sped up, and then it slowed down. Now I’m not saying I’m a Roger Federer of music listening, but I think at some point in 2010 I started listening to way more music and for longer periods. I listen to music basically all day now. I’ve had the good fortune to sit at a table in Astoria with big headphones on all day.

The first thing I wrote about music for which I received pay was an essay on Kanye West. I basically only wrote it because my editor was like, ‘Uh Kanye West is pretty popular right now. You should write about it.’ Note to future editors: just please tell me what to write about; it’s for the best. I’m reading the piece right now, and it’s terrible. But, it was an introduction — my introduction — to a new world. Again, this was the first thing I was paid to write, and I got the gig off the strength of some strongly worded indictments of Ben Roethlisburger and, like, magic or something. I don’t know. Looking at it, I was introduced to the idea of following musicians on Twitter (isn’t that uncool?), meta-music pieces (Jonah Weiner’s ‘interview’ of West on Slate), and even more meta-meta-music writing with Zach Baron’s response. Oh yeah, and I learned who Jonah Weiner and Zach Baron were. The thing about people — generalizing, of course — is that they don’t pay attention to byline unless they have some stake in bylines, as in, if they wish that piece had their byline on it. You don’t pay attention to that stuff as a mere music fan, I don’t think.

Which brings me to my main point. What are the qualifications of critics? Why should one person ‘get’ to write about something, and why should anyone listen? I don’t really know. After a year and a half of writing semi-professionally, I got to know a lot of names and styles, and all that made me make internal connections between stylistic tastes and proclivities of different writers and publications. I don’t know if paying close attention to who was writing what gave me any better idea about the music itself, though. There’s a variety of approaches to writing about music, and virtually none of them are predicated on growing up listening only to music from this beat, and then writing only about this beat. From what I can tell, virtually no reviewers (aside from classical reviewers) know anything about music theory. Everyone’s steeped in music, but it’s also just a portion of life. I think I listen to a lot of music, but I still read books, watch TV and movies, and have friends I talk to. There’s no such thing as a strictly New Criticism-style approach to music. You can’t evenly divide an artist’s biography by their critic’s and have no remainder. And I wouldn’t want to read such a criticism if you could. When I got out of literary criticism, I read a thing about studying, like, word usage frequency. I couldn’t imagine a more boring thing to study. I mean, you can get those data from Amazon, and they tell you nothing about anything.

This all is just to say that you should trust me. I don’t think I 100% got Kanye until around October 2010. I know that once I did get him, though, my life changed. (Thoughts on that experience forthcoming, of course.) I didn’t change anything else about my life, but somehow just listening to music changed the dimensions of my life. That’s what I’m trying to say. That someone with the ability to rub to words together and a passion for something deserves your time to tell you about that thing. I’m going to write a lot about Kanye West this week, and what I’m trying to say is that I’ve validated your possible time investment.

There’s always a you-shaped hole in the fabric of reality, granted, but I think there’s something that especially connects me to Kanye West’s music. (I’m sure a lot of people feel like that, too.) This is an interesting idea to me, since I know myself very well, I hope, so studying something that resonates with you is like getting to look at yourself from the inside out. A figure as large as Kanye gives you many such looks.

  1. jolenemaria reblogged this from bmichael and added:
    This is like….the best thing to happen to my week so far and...only Monday but STILL. YAY.
  2. bugalu reblogged this from oneweekoneband and added:
    I’m so glad Hendrik decided...Tumblr’s biggest artist crushes full reign.
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