>Given this new defensiveness, Millennials will not see T.I. as an uneducated, mentally meandering throwback, but as one with those brooding, unapproachable Millennial wastrels from the TV series Atlanta. The grievance reflex gives T.I.’s role in “Ye vs. the People” the illusion of black solidarity — all blacks seen as cadging, feckless, pissed-off reprobates. This perspective, which stubbornly adheres to old 1960s civil-rights imagery, is a political aberration. T.I. is well cast for the sound of black Southern and urban political loyalty (which one West tweet audaciously cited as “plantation mentality”). T.I.’s twang suggests a new version of the lazybones comic caricaturist Stepin Fetchit (whom Kaluuya also resembled). Black Lives Matter kids may not make the cultural association due to PBS and Democratic propaganda making sure that they connect instead to civil-rights-era lunch-counter beatdowns, despite the fact that they (and their Starbucks-restroom martyrs) have never actually experienced such atrocity.
>Based on unresolved social issues (from housing to education to jobs), black Millennials ignore recent political change and possibility. They stick to the usual discontent propagated in hip-hop’s very rhythms and intonation, whether as the sped-up, psychotic cadence that Kendrick Lamar adopted from Eminem or the rap lingo that deliberately resists what used to be known as “proper English,” embracing slang and profane dialect as acts of defiance and self-redefinition.
>“Ye vs. the People” is an art document that confronts the dilemma of a new “double consciousness” (to use W. E. B. DuBois’s legendary phrase to describe black folks’ awareness of their personal and social identities). In the form of an argument, West portrays the halting terms of black political discourse as led by black politicians and activists who prefer comforting stereotypes but are challenged by an increasing set of blacks like himself who pursue new potential and avenues of change.
>West’s previous hit, “Ultralight Beam,” was an ecstatic neo-gospel tune that transcended politics to imagine black spirituality. Its beauty contrasts with the pathetic motif of Kendrick Lamar’s Damn. (His repeated lament “Ain’t nobody praying for me” pleased secular critics.) Acclaim for Lamar’s negativity by a major cultural institution is no surprise when that institution is part of the mechanism that perpetuates and fetishizes black misery. Mainstream media’s overall intention to make a monolith of black political thought goes against the best hip-hop from Public Enemy to De La Soul, Geto Boys to Migos (especially their recent “Walk It Talk It”), who all epitomize the range of black political thinking and social experience.
This nigga actually thinks people are going to read all that.
Kevin Reed
MBDTF is overcompressed garbage, and you don’t understand the first thing about music production. There’s no winning with you idiots though, trust me, I’m aware of that. I’ve been shitting on your retards for a literal decade over on Yas Forums
Camden Roberts
that's one hell of a life
Adrian Evans
>“Ye vs. the People” is the most audacious hip-hop single since Geto Boys’ Willie D released “Rodney K” in 1992 to condemn what he saw as the late Rodney King’s appeasement to the patronizing media. West has kept up the apostasy on Twitter, but this single moves into a realm that sustains the person-to-person essence of his argument. I’m reminded how in 1998 Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates wrote a promotion of Warren Beatty’s hip-hop-inspired political film Bulworth for The New Yorker that conspicuously repeated point by point from my 1992 City Sun analysis of “Rodney K” (included in my anthology The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World) without ever citing the source. But that was before social media made it possible to keep a record of nonconformist ideas and trace how they get twisted into conformity from the commanding heights. West’s single makes the ideological conflict among black Americans part of hip-hop’s drumbeat commentary, and that may be the toughest resistance of all.
>I hate Kanye West & Rap music what a fucking shitty genre music for black people >*Kanye West becomes a good friend of Donald Trump* >You know ... "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" is the best rap album ever made, Kanye west is a genius >Just listen to Runaway's outro it's fucking magic, bro
Easton Wilson
>some literal who soundcloud "producer" zoomer thinks his opinion is worth a shit kek thanks for admitting youve been crying about kanye online for a literal decade by the way. imagine being this pathetic
