In the land of taking a selfie, honing a personal brand, and publicly melting down online, Kanye West is the undisputed king. In a cloud-based and on-demand culture – a place of increasing virtualization, loneliness, and hyper-connectivity – West straddles this critical moment as what David Samuels of The Atlantic calls the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music. Having risen from obscurity as a precocious producer through the ranks of Jay Zs Roc-A-Fella records, by the time he released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF) in late 2010, West had evolved into a master collagist, an alchemist capable of transfiguring semi-obscure soul samples and indelible beats into a brash and vulnerable new art form.Ī look at the arc of his career, from the heady chipmunk soul exuberance of The College Dropout (2004) to the operatic narcissism of MBDTF, tells us about the march of pop music into the digital age and, by extension, the contradictions that define our cultural epoch. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Kanye West created the most compelling body of pop music by an American artist during the period. Kanye Wests My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves
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