perfidy

Let me take you back to Ohio, December 1991. I was a senior in high school, and deeply into music. It was all the wrong music, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Jane's Addiction excepted, but music nonetheless. It was the era of hair metal, big ballads, and soaring, heroic guitar solos, and the radio was full of Warrant, Extreme, and other truly barrel-scraping dreck my memory refuses to give name to.

Then one day my friends and I started hearing this sound on the rock stations… crunchy and dumb, aggressive and sullen. Some band called Nirvana, and they were awesome.

I don't really want to mythologize it, but the genre of rock criticism-- the genre of rock itself-- kinda begs for it, so I might as well. I can’t quite describe what it was like for me. It was as if someone flipped a switch, and one day me and my friends were driving around in the Lust Bug or the Deathtrap Toyota listening to a tape of AC/DC or Pink Floyd and the next we were driving around obsessively combing the radio dial for that sound, that one song, named after a deodorant or something. For me at least, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was a total break with the past, a Big Bang replete with loud guitars. In five minutes flat, the horizons of my world unfolded a thousand times. Music was reborn, a million possibilities surged forth, and Rock and Fucking Roll wielded infinite glory and power.

I can't overstate how different (and how incredibly good) Nirvana sounded, but I can't for the life of me figure out why that is. I was already into what we called at the time "progressive music," and was passingly familiar with the history of Rock from "Hound Dog" to "Pretty Vacant, so it wasn't like punk was terra incognita. Neither was the Black Sabbath-meets-Ramones riffage that was the song's bedrock. So Nirvana didn't contain anything new, but the way it was all put together sounded perfect... like the future.

I'm starting to get that feeling again. I've been hearing Chicago-born hip-artist Kanye West's music everywhere, and I love it. I don't understand what’s so great about him, really. His debut single, "Through The Wire" (off his major-label debut “College Dropout”) shouldn't add up to anything special. I can think of half a dozen hip-hop songs in the last year that are as hooky, that have as much soul. So he used a sped-up Chacka Khan sample-- who cares? Wu Tang did that in 1994, and now everybody does. The rhyme is interesting, not a 'ho in sight, but Eminem was funnier on "Slim Shady" and more poignant on "Stan." Even the central gimmick of "Through The Wire," namely that he's rapping through a wired-shut jaw thanks to a car accident, is nothing compared to 50 Cent's rhymes about multiple gunshot wounds. What's the big deal?

West raps about mundane stuff. His records sound kind of like Jay-Z's, which makes sense considering he’s on Jay-Z’s label and produced some of the big guy’s hits. On the surface, Kanye West should be no more or less interesting than Aceyalone, Mr. Lif, or any one of a thousand quirky local MC's with plenty of talent but no spark of genius.

But for some reason he is different. Despite the protests of my cynical, rational, music-industry-veteran mind, "Through The Wire" is totally irresistible and utterly perfect. I can't get it out of my head. Friday night I stayed awake waiting for MTV to play the video. Yesterday morning I heard “Through The Wire” twice on the way to the grocery store, but only because I was looking for it. Later, Goodwife Two-Cents and I drove up to Maine, and the whole time I was changing the radio, pretending to be sick of Journey and Missy Elliott, but really hunting for that song again. Last night I saw him perform on a rerun of Chappelle's show, doing a song about working a steady job for shitty pay, opposite a live performance by rap superstars N.E.R.D. on Saturday Night Live, and Kanye West made Pharrell & Co. sound like a bunch of uptight posers in an airport karaoke bar. That hook! That bass! That flow! That sound! Holy shit!

I’m usually wrong about what America will like, but I’m positive about this one. Kanye West is modern hip-hop’s Nirvana moment. Something about his sound seems to be from the future, or at least a map of how to get there.

Nice place.

[wik] How white am I? I'm going to refer you to an article in Slate for some background on who Kanye West is.

[alsø wik] How white am I? When I link Kanye West:[other epochal event], I think "Teen Spirit," not "The Message," "Roxanne, Roxanne/Roxanne’s Revenge" or "My Adidas."

[alsø alsø wik] How white am I? I like Kanye West so much, I wrote an essay about it! On the internet! I'm so white I make Alan Greenspan look like Chuck D!

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] And yet, there's the bass playing thing. I can bring the funk when I come to play.