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Kanye West & Kid Cudi
Kanye, having lost the responsibility for his words in an infantile manner, recorded, together with Kid Kadi, an album about how catharsis and liberation make us return to childhood. Having ceased to defend their freedom in the world around them, they recorded seven gospel ballads about the struggle for internal freedom, the struggle against personal demons.
At the end of April, when Kanye was tweeting and making public round-the-clock, I wrote a short note that he was a “free” person in a certain sense, mainly because he was not responsible for his words. By chance it somehow happened that for his two plates (“Ye” and “Kids See Ghosts”), released this month, the topic of freedom turned out to be central. Continue reading
Review: Drake – Scorpion
As sometimes happens, Drake’s symbolic infallibility cracked, and the fruit was an album that drastically lowers the listener from heaven to earth – nothing is more everyday and sobering than the stuffy, insincere dude who tries to put himself in a favorable light.
If I were offered to describe Drake’s “Scorpion” in one epithet, I would say that the disc is unfair, and at once in every sense of the word. This is probably the worst thing that can be said about the Drake album due to the niche it occupies in contemporary pop culture. There are three reasons for this:
1. What Drake sings about Continue reading
“Long.Live.A $ AP” after 5 years
Long.Live.A $ AP, released exactly five years ago, is an extremely rare example of how a young promising artist managed to sit on two chairs at once. Usually, guys like Rakim are faced with the following problem – the greedy fat A & R of a large label hangs over them, and he already has a clear album structure in his head that should target everyone – boys, girls, backpackers, dandies and ghetto blacks. For each segment of the audience on the album should have its own song, for the most solvent – a single for TV, radio and clubs, the intro should be ambitious, and the outro should be soulful. Naturally, with such initial conditions, the album cannot turn out to be solid and authentic in sound, and in the zero years this formula (by which 90% of the records were released) destroyed a large number of interesting artists who had to play by the rules of their owners. Continue reading
