Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbie
Now hang on...it may be debatable whether or not Kanye West is some kind of artistic "genius" or not.
But musician? A "damn good one"?
Hell no.
Please enlighten me on the musical instruments that Kanye has mastered. The guy can't even sing on pitch.
First thing we had to do in Music Theory class was work on perfect pitch. We had to be able to sight sing music in the correct key and pitch without so much as a starting note to let us know if we were singing the correct pitch.
I still have my old music theory books and the book entitled "Sight Singing And Ear Training".
Dude can't even sing on pitch. Much less be a master of any instrument.
Doesn't mean he's not a "genius".
I think Bob Dylan is a genius, and he can't sing on pitch either lol. (though in fairness...Bob Dylan can actually play guitar, piano, harmonica, drums and several other instruments)
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My point is...if Kanye is secretly a musician...he's kept it hidden real well.
I'd love to hear him jam with somebody who really IS a musician and a genius...how about Kanye VS Prince?
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You make a good point. As far as I'm aware, Kanye does not play any 'traditional' instruments but he's an excellent songwriter and producer and he's great about putting it all together to make music. So, maybe he's not a musician in a traditional sense, but he is considered to be a musician in a modern sense. That's a fact.
Whenever new forms of music achieve commercial success, there will always be detractors who say that the new music is not real music. It happened during the first Jazz Revolution when classical music fans who didn't consider it to be 'real music' and considered brass instruments to be beneath them. Rock had a lot of detractors when it became commercially viable. It happened when electric guitars started to become more popular than acoustic guitars. Dylan plugging in is a perfect example. He was heavily booed and some guy yelled "Judas!" because they felt that the electric guitar was not a real instrument and that the sound it produced was just noise. Some people don't consider synthesizer or keyboards to be real instruments.
As far as vocals, I think you're underrating Kanye. Public Enemy was recently inducted until the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Neither Chuck D nor Flavor Flav were trained vocalists. Far from it. Nor did they play instruments. Yet they are considered as musicians. Kanye's vocals are better than both,
Sorry, but I don't want to be one of those snobby classical music lovers who think that all popular music, from the Beatles to Miles Davis to Led Zeppelin to Prince, is not real music. To me, they sound like idiots. And believe me, they are still out there. I've witnessed it firsthand by talking to people after seeing various performances at the Lincoln Center and I argued on behalf of those artists much in the same way I'm arguing on behalf of Kanye in this stupid thread. It didn't go so well, but whatever. Fuck 'em. As Lou Reed said in the review I posted earlier, "It's all the same shit -
it's all music..
A lot of people in this thread don't seem to get that last point and won't ever get it. The only reason I'm even wasting the time to argue about it is because it frustrates me that people whose opinions I respect in this thread (you, Far-L, Damage) know music as well as or better than I know music, but you don't seem to 'get' what is so clearly and plainly obvious to me. If even just one of the three of you listens with an open mind to Twisted Fantasy or Yeezus and tells me about it, even if you don't like one of them, then I'll feel it was worth the hassle to take the time to write these posts and deal with the idiot trolls.
Also, to answer your question about Prince vs. Kanye... No, I don't think Kanye is in the same league as Prince. Nobody really is. He's an excellent guitar player and plays all the instruments on all his albums. He writes all his songs. He produces them. If there is any one musician who I would consider to be a true 'genius', it would be Prince. You know that and I know that and I'm sure Far-L knows that, but there still does exist the perception that Prince is just merely an 80s pop artist. You guys are making that same mistake by saying that Kanye is just another rapper. Anyway, here's some music. That's what it's all about, right?