New directions..

My Kanye Conundrum
written by Doesn't Matt R

As Kanye’s singles start to leak out for his new album, I’m stuck with a dilemma. Do I want to hear him sing? In full disclosure, I’m a huge fan. After I listened to College Dropout for the 400th time, I swore that I’d get down with whatever Mr. West put out there. So far he has not disappointed me. It’s all been hot.

It took me a few listens to get down with Love Lockdown. I wasn’t feeling The Coldest Winter, but I feel like this was never guaranteed to be on the album. Artists make a lot of songs, and sometimes the ones that are sub-par and wouldn’t make the final cut can leak too. I’m really feeling Heartless, but he only really sings the chorus of that. The verses are more hip-hop than R&B. So it’s not even that I don’t like the new stuff he’s playing around with.

I guess my major questions would be: Is this what we need from Kanye right now? is this a vanity project, like Eddie Murphy or Bruce Willis doing an album because they got so big in one entertainment genre, they feel like they could cross over to another. Rappers start to act. See Will Smith, Ice Cube, Ludacris for major successes. Actors sing and can make it. John Belushi and J Lo. Singers act (Elvis), actors rap (Brian Austin Green…yuck), and sometimes singers do stand up comedy (John Mayer). So it’s not like jumping between genres is rare.


It’s proven that you don’t need a great voice to have a hit record. With Britney’s production team, you could probably make a hit record with the tracheotomy guy from the TRUTH about smoking commercials. As a matter of fact, I think that’s where T-Pain got his early influences. But Kanye is arguably the hottest all-around act in hip-hop (because his verses and beats are so high in demand). Weezy may be a hotter rapper at the moment, Polo da Don may be a hotter producer. But nobody does the full package, puts on a show, sells albums, and sells his image like Kanye. So yeah he’s maybe talented enough to pull of an R & B album.

Michael Jordan is probably one of the most talented all around athletes of all time. And maybe if every swing he took, every ball hit his way, every base he ran wasn’t being watched by every media outlet, he may have turned out to be an alright baseball player. But at that time, he was the BEST basketball player in the world (not counting that kid, in that park, who never got a break). Yes, I understand why Jordan had to do it. Yes, I understand why Kanye would want to try this. Yes, I’ll probably listen to it, and yes, it may be as hot as Kanye claims it to be. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be wishing for the rest of my life that this was Valedictorian coming out instead. So that’s just the truth of the matter.