Switched on Pop - Were We Wrong About Kanye West?

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

A lot of people miss the old Kanye. The last time we reviewed his music was back in 2016 when he released the work-in-progress album “The Life Of Pablo.” Since then, Kanye has put out four albums: Ye, Kids See Ghost (with Kid Cudi), Jesus Is King, and Jesus Is Born (with the Sunday Service Choir). In the same period he’s also caused a media ruckus with his union to the Kardashian family and his foray into political punditry. His public persona has largely overshadowed his musical offerings. But what does the music communicate when we separate it from its messenger? We take the opportunity to listen with an open mind, especially to his most recent two albums. In the first half we examine his recent innovations as one of hip-hop’s best produced with the help of RapAnalysis.com’s Martin Connor. In the second half we speak with music industry veteran and gospel expert Naima Cochrane in order to place Kanye’s spiritual turn in a larger arch of gospel history.  Songs Discussed Kanye West - Follow God, Closed On Sunday, Father Stretch My Hands, Freestyle 4, Every Hour, Golddigger, Famous, Jesus Is Lord, I Thought About Killing You  Fat’s Domino - The Fat Man Run DMC - Walk This Way (ft. Aerosmith) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm

songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, I want to talk about a difficult subject. All right. Something that you and I have discussed ad nauseum off mic, but have ignored on the show. What could this be? Is it that mole I showed you the other day? Essential musical stuff. It's a song that bends a lot of the sort of pop rules and conventions that you and I geek out on all the time. And yet we passed over it. That's Kanye West's follow God. I suppose we didn't delve into this song

or West's last record because it is such a kind of hot button issue in the music industry. It's almost easier in a way to gloss over this. controversial artist rather than deal head-on with his music. Yeah, I mean, we are in post-Maga embracing Kanye. There's the Kardashian relationship narrative. You have him starting a cultish celebrity church. I mean, I really sort of tuned out. What I want to do today is explore the things that we have missed.

And in the first half, I want to look at some of the musical innovations that Kanye has created. And in the second half, I want to see how Kanye applies his creativity as a producer when he uses the sound of gospel music. We last covered The Life of Pablo, his record that came out in 2016, but he's had four albums since then. They were successful albums. And last fall, he put out his ninth consecutive number one debut album on the Billboard, 200. Jesus is King. Wow. It's an album about his sort of Christian conversion and finding God.

This Christmas, you my chick-fil-A. Closed on Sunday, you my chick-fil-A. This Christmas, he put out Jesus is Born, a gospel album with his Sunday service choir, and it succeeded on the gospel charts. It was number two on the gospel charts, number 73 on the billboard, and has a much more church-oriented sound. This is Father Stretch a song that he first released on Life of Pablo and one that he's updated with the Sunday service choir. While I've been in relative lockdown at home, I've been eating a lot of comfort food and listening to a lot of comfort music.

And actually, Kanye is one of those artists. You know, someone for me who, going back to our college years, early Kanye is stuff that I really vibe on. And yet I totally passed over this work. And I want to figure out, like, was it because the music was bad or is it simply that I'm, I've sort of reached peak Kanye capacity, given all of the larger stuff. And I feel like it sort of compels us to think about his music. You know, a lot of us are probably wanting through the wire. Or, to quote Kanye, they miss the old Kanye.

I miss the old Kanye, straight from the gold Kanye, chop up the soul Kanye. Right. But I think this deserves a listen. The critical consensus of these records was best. summed up, I think, by a Forbes review that said that Kanye West has not been at his creative peak as of late. In the last two proper studio albums, Jesus is King and Yeh, they're rushed. They call it uninspired collections of demo quality tracks and corny punch lines that offer just enough flashes of brilliance to keep listeners hooked and frustrated while West has grown increasingly sloppy. I know, harsh words.

But then I was researching the record and I bumped into someone who turned this perspective upside down. And it really got me thinking differently about Kanye's latest material. I just make the assumption that what Kanye West gives us is exactly what he meant to give us. That's Martin Connor, a music writer for the website Rap Analysis. So he believes that we should take Kanye sort of at his word. And that if you go back to his album, Life of Pablo, the last record that we covered on the show, you start to notice that Kanye is subverting the pop formula. I think his song structure is really one of the most interesting things to change.

And Life of Pablo has great examples of these. Freestyle 4 from Life of Pablo is probably like my unexpected, most underrated Kanye song of all time. So the song gets its title from that freestyled verse by the rapper designer at the end of the song. And Martin believes that this song is an example of Kanye pushing boundaries because there's something really critical that's absent. There's no chorus to it. It plays a sample for a long time. Kanye sings, Kanye raps. The beat absolutely explodes.

And then designer comes in, just fuzzed out, autotuned over the top. Can't even make out any word besides Versailles and upside down. You know, lots of freestyles lack choruses. So you would think that maybe this isn't particularly unique. But this is really a whole fleshed out composition. And that's really what brought me back to what we have been talking about. off mic we have been sort of intrigued by the way in which he has been messing with song for him yeah no i think the track you played at the very beginning of this episode follow god

is another great example of that there's no true chorus to speak of which a life like riding on a white bite smelling like a sight bite resting on the gas supernova for a night like dreaming at my dad and he told me it in christ like but nobody never totally i mean it's a successful song it's a single as of this recording it has over a 140 million plays on Spotify. So it's connecting with people. I think when we hear Follow God, there is not any sort of structural,

formal chorus. There is the main sample. And it almost acts as the hook. But it's just this tiny thing that comes back in between the spaces in Kanye's verse. So that opening saman, is from the group Whole Truth and their song,

Can You Lose by Following God? Mm. We then, of course, get this beat, we get these verses, and it comes back again in those little moments in between. And that's kind of it, right? Like, that's the hook for me. Yeah, and otherwise it's this almost James Joyceian kind of stream of consciousness monologue approach here.

That seems really effective in the context of a devotional, song. It has that rush of spontaneity and urgency that literally sounds like a prayer. The music and the lyrics all create the circumstances for you to be brought into West's personal religious world. I really like that take on it. Follow God does show that he is working with musical material in new ways, perhaps where on earlier albums, It was perhaps experimental, a little anti-pop. Here, perhaps it actually resonates with the message that he's trying to convey. Song structure, though, isn't the only way in which Martin claims that Kanye is subverting traditional pop.

He actually points to the fact that many of contemporary Kanye songs lack an essential rhythm. Backbeats, right? Bunts, Bunn. But one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. It's basically propulsive. Simple stuff that we hear so often we take for granted. I want to talk just a little bit about the importance of the backbeat in contemporary popular music. Yeah.

The backbeat is the rhythmic foundation of like 95% of popular music. It stems from black musical practice. and involves a heavy emphasis on the two and the four of a four-beat measure, which creates this propulsive and yet kind of groovy syncopation. So the backbeat is like the essential rhythmic framework of popular music. But it wasn't always the case. And in fact, it was really only in the middle of the 20th century that the backbeat became the fundamental rhythm of popular music.

I tried to find some early examples. It's quite contested who originated the backbeat. Surely people have been playing it for a very a long time, but one of the first popular songs to really bring it forward is the song The Fat Man by Fats Domino. Earl Palmer on this 1949 track, and when he moves into, to the outro of the song.

He flips the beat. For the whole song, it had just been like kick on the down. And then when Fats Domino comes in for that final shouting outro, the snare starts hitting on the two and the four. And all the sudden in popular music just takes a wild turn. This is something that we now hear everywhere from rock and hip hop. to the combination of the two. Of course, the backbeat is not unfamiliar to Kanye West.

Most of his music and many of his most popular songs contain a backbeat, especially when he's sampling some of that earlier music. I think a great example would be, of course, his song, Gold Digger referencing Ray Charles. Those rim shots that won. Two, four, two, four. Every time on the two and the four, that is that backbeat.

But on Kanye's latest albums, that backbeat starts to fracture. Here's Martin again. Kanye just refuses to let the backbeat have full rain over the song and really drive it forward. And he does this in tons of ways. Sometimes he does this by not having a backbeat on the chorus, but only having it during the verse, which is what happens on Famous from a 2016's Life of Pablo album. So here on the verse of Famous, we have that very clear backbeat. As we move into some of the newer albums, the backbeat stays away.

Sometimes he'll have songs that don't have. any backbeat on it at all. Like Jesus is Lord. At other times, he won't bring in the backbeat until the very end of the song, which is what happens on I thought about killing you on Yeh from 2018. And I think about killing myself.

So best believe, I thought about killing you today. Premeditated mother. And now we're in a totally new sound and the backbeat is there. It's a different type of rule. So Martin is establishing that Kanye is using this sort of anti-pop aesthetic. He's messing with song structures that hold our attention. He is playing with rhythms that have been so thoroughly established over the last 70 years of pop music.

And doing this intentionally. Yeah, I mean, I love Martin's analysis here because it's a nice insight into the way that West is sort of deconstructing the conventions and norms of popular music. And he's someone who I think has always been such an influential figure in music and culture because he's able to do that, because he's able to experiment and push the envelope. Perhaps if we haven't been paying attention to Kanye over these recent releases, we might be sleeping on some of the more avant-garde musical experiments happening in pop right now. Yeah, I think there's a difficult tension here, right?

It's like what Kanye wants more than anything, it seems, is attention. And I feel like it's difficult to try to grab people's attention by pushing things in such an avant-garde direction that it can actually force you to turn away. And then he's sort of off on the sidelines being like, you know, pay attention. I'm a genius. You've got to be paying attention to what I'm doing. So I'm not sure that Kanye is actually fulfilling what he's attempting to do, especially if he's trying to, pull people into pews by playing with these forms in such a serious way because I think for a lot of people it might be too far of a stretch. And yet, as we're doing with some deep listening,

it's like, oh, that is interesting. I think it has this problem of the first impression, my first impression, and I think a lot of other people's was like, this isn't connecting. Okay, I'm going to go do something else now. Yeah. So I think there's a question here is like whether or not This is an attack on the pop formula and a anti-pop sort of like art statement. Or is his latest work really just a pivot? That after the break. Euforia of Calvin Klein. The new collection elixir.

Three new elixir is perfume intense. Solar. Magnetic. Boll. Pulsan the banner. Does the quiz and discover your fragrance euphoria. Kanye on one hand, maybe using this anti-porexiety. pop kind of sound to be perceived as an innovator.

But what he's doing, especially on these last two records, is heavily borrowing from the sound of gospel. And I felt inadequate to go into gospel because it's really just not a music or tradition that I know particularly well. That's why I wanted to call on our producer Bridget Armstrong who grew up in the gospel church. Bridget, so great to have you. Thanks for having me, guys.

Bridget, when we first talked about this, you heard Kanye's latest albums, Jesus is King and Jesus is born in a really different way than I had heard them. Right. So like the both of you, I largely ignored Kanye's last two albums. I've been ignoring Kanye for a while. The whole slavery is a choice. Voting for Donald Trump thing really turned me off. But recently, I was hanging out with one of my friends who also grew up. up going to church and listening to gospel music, and she brought up the Jesus is Born album. So I was already like, yeah, girl, I don't want to hear that. I'm purposely not listening to it. I'm not even into gospel rap. I don't want to listen to the weird cult music.

Like, I'm good. And she's like, insisted I listen to this particular track called Excellent. So that song is kind of like a standard contemporary gospel song that you would hear at like a lot of black churches. In fact, it's a song that, like, I grew up singing when I was in the youth choir. But the version that I was familiar with was performed by the Mississippi Mass Choir. As you can hear, it's extremely powerful, it's soulful, but it's also like a recording that's probably from the 90s. So it's not as crisp. It doesn't, you don't get all of the layered sounds that you would get, like, if you were actually in the church,

listening to this choir, sing it. But what I found on Kanye's album is that, like, this music sounds so good. He's able to capture this sort of layers of voices. I think, Nate, you commented on the organ that comes in on. It sounds excellent. It sounds like you're there. For me, that's something that really made this album special. And one of those things that was like, okay, I guess I can't ignore this.

So that's on the Jesus' Born album, which is like a straight-up gospel album. But Jesus' King is also really heavily influenced by gospel. It's kind of like a gospel rap sort of take, but the difference between the two albums that you really don't hear Kanye's voice on Jesus is Born, where Jesus is King is a Kanye album. Switcher, switch your attitude. Go ahead level up yourself. Just that different latitude.

Surprisingly, though, both albums did really well on the gospel and Christian charts. Yeah, but since both of these albums were so heavily drawing from gospel, it felt like it was really important to bring someone to the conversation who is real expert on this music. and could help us sort of set it in context to Kanye's larger body of work. I'm Naima Cochran. I am a music and culture writer and critic. I'm the creator of a platform called Music Sermon, which examines soul and hip-hop music that was released pre-2000. And I am a longtime multi-decade music industry veteran. Starting in late 2018, but really starting in earnest in the beginning of 2019,

Kanye started doing these weekly gatherings that he called Sunday service. it started as kind of an invite only, for lack of a better word, kind of hang in like a random wooded clearing in Calabasas where everybody was wearing the same colored, I guess, easy gear and kind of taking traditional gospel songs or taking some soul or contemporary songs or even some Akay songs and either updating them so that they sounded more current, or in the case of taking secular music, flipping it so that it worked as gospel and or praise and worship. It started really as a sort of jam session, and it was very kind of mysterious.

Kim Kardashian would post, random clips, clips to her Instagram, and, you know, celebrities were there. But the choir was phenomenal, and the music was phenomenal. It was definitely creating a kind of energy and there was definitely something happening there. Allegedly, Kanye, at the time, was going through his own kind of spiritual evolution, so it continued to grow. By mid-year, we learned that he was done with secular hip-hop,

that he was only going to do gospel hip-hop from here on out. The album that he had said was going to come in 2018, which was at that point going to be Yandi, was now going to be a gospel album that we eventually came to learn was going to be called. Jesus is King. So in October, he puts out Jesus is King. He takes Sunday service on the road. He takes it out of Calabasas. He had already done that once by taking it to Coachella. Now he's taking it to Chicago. He takes it to Detroit. He takes it to venues, you know, to concert venues where tickets can be sold for it. Then he starts taking it into church spaces, starting with

Atlanta. So like they would go through regular service and then Kanye would take the pulpit and the Sunday service choir would kind of take the stage and it would be more like kind of an addendum to service. Nothing too hard for nothing. The power belongs. I know that. And then a few months later on Christmas Day we get Jesus is born. I can tell this was a gospel album that was meant to be an accessible gospel album.

It's a gospel album, like even people who don't necessarily listen to gospel, who didn't grow up in church, can enjoy, the choir is phenomenal. That just is what it is. They're the heart of Sunday service. It's great songs, great arrangements, great singing, but I do not consider that a Kanye album. Kanye as producer, 100%. Kanye as rapper, absolutely not. Kanye as producer, when he's really in that space, is where he still shines because he knows how to manipulate beats and samples in such a unique way that I think gets lost when he's doing it for himself versus when he's doing it for somebody else. And I think that's part of what makes Jesus is born so great sonically. Jesus' king uses a lot of gospel samples. How does that fit into Kanye's larger body of work?

I mean, Kanye is definitely flirted with touches of gospel, gospel messaging, gospel sampling, and also just some soul sampling that has a very spiritual feel to it. You know, Hammond organs, things that we, that even if it wasn't specifically gospel music, that we relate very closely to elements of gospel music, I do think that Jesus walks coming so early in Kanye's career, we attributed a much closer alignment of gospel. God show me the way because the devil's trying to break me down. There are people who say Kanye's been doing gospel his entire career. He actually hasn't.

Like, yeah, he did Jesus walks, and he referenced it a couple of times. I made Jesus walks. I'm never going to hell. You know, he did, I am a God. He's called himself Jesus. He was going to call himself Yondi. But he hasn't really, until he got to Life of Pablo, done another song that really examined his face the way Jesus walks did.

And that was, what, a 10-year gap, if not a little bit more? So Jesus's King is Kanye's attempt at a gospel album, I guess, his version of a gospel album, which he had been teasing that he was going to do. Originally, the Life of Pablo was supposed to be a gospel album, which you can hear in some of Father I Stretch My Hand and Ultra Light Beam. The challenge with Jesus's King is that it's very kind of like hat, bat, cat gospel music, right? It's super basic. It's pretty superficial. there's a lot of quote unquote kind of like churchy buzzwords in there but there's not like a lot of real messaging in there and that's the challenge that some people have with accepting it as a gospel

album and it's a little too Kanye centric for me so I've referenced in a piece that I did for billboard last year that snoop put out a double gospel album a little over a year ago Somebody prayed for me at one still standing. I shall never forget. Snoop doesn't even appear on all the tracks. He pulled together a whole bunch of legends. He pulled together a whole bunch of contemporary artists. And he pulled together some new people.

And he appears here and there. But the point of the album is really to edify these other people for the sake of the overall messaging of the album. Snoop knew that it didn't have to be about him. Whereas for Kanye, Kanye's memory. intention is always that if I had to identify Kanye, in my opinion. No surprise. Right. So by doing another album with just the Sunday service choir, that indicates to me that

he understood that there was more power in them than even in him with them. Kanye's conversations about Jesus, God, spirituality in his music has always very much been about his own proximity or even kind of declaring himself a God, which is kind of which is not unusual in hip hop, but it comes from a different place. So to me, it's kind of like Kanye's certain brand of spirituality and music. It's kind of like I have an all-access pass to go backstage with Jesus and kick it. Like, that's what it feels like to me, rather than really talking about the goodness of God for everybody. It's more about like the goodness of God for him, if that makes sense.

People are saying that Kanye is helping bring gospel back into, hip hop and R&B. Does he deserve this credit? The idea that what he's doing is just like amazingly groundbreaking and has never been done before is absurd. First of all, just urban music period is so steeped in gospel roots and influence and it's kind of always been a thing. Like, you want to do a really massive live performance at a choir. You know what I mean? Like it's just like, it's what you, you know, it's what you do. The thing about Jesus is born, it is a gospel album. And it's a, It's a really good gospel album, but it's also, I think, a very kind of accessible gospel album. I would say it's a gospel album for people who don't really listen to gospel, but it's also

100% something Kirk Franklin could have put out in 1996. You can't take my joy, devil. Makes me cut. Make me cut. That's not a bad thing, but it's the Kirk Franklin formula. I'm going to take young singers. I'm going to take some standards and update them, like maybe a third of the track. thing is classic songs like How Excellent, which is the second song on the track,

anybody who grew up in the black church and sang in the youth choir saying that song. It's a standard. The total praise, which closes it, everybody who has sung on any choir in a black church in America knows that song. Then we're also going to take some contemporary hits and flip them. So Follow Me is like a 20-something-year-old house track. Follow me. You know, they take Gen Yon so anxious and flip it into a gospel song.

They take ultralight beam and expand on it. They take Father, I stretch my hand, and expand on it. So it really is a formula that Kirk started. And when Kirk started it was the same thing. It was people who don't traditionally listen to gospel all of a sudden had an access point that felt familiar and easy for them. Like it was gospel music that they could groove to. and that's kind of what the Sunday service choir did with Jesus is born.

When you spoke with here or now, you said that West isn't singing faith-based hits for the black community, that he's co-opting the black church experience for non-black consumption. Can you unpack this statement? Sure. I will say that I don't believe that of Jesus is born. I believe that Jesus is born is for everybody. But what I meant by that is, A, Kanye didn't grow up in the black church. That's one. I think that people assume he did. just because of his musical acumen because so many of our great producers did come out of the black church. Farrel did. Rodney Jerkins did. Teddy Riley did. Zathoven did. So it's not unusual for them to learn their musical chops in the church. And it gives you a certain amount of adaptability with music to be able to flow and do a little bit of anything. You know, so the way he is kind of packaging

and presenting the black church experience, which again is centered in the choir, worship through music, And praise and worship specifically, which is a little different than the traditional hymn, praise and worship is a form of musical worship where you are looking for kind of like a really easy line that's repeated over and over again. So instead of it being first verse, second verse, third verse, every verse being different, plus a chorus, it's more of like one or two lines that are just repeated over and over again. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And there's some modulation and, you know, there's some harmonies

and maybe then you change the tempo. But it's meant to be very easy and it's meant to be easily remembered. So what is happening at Sunday service is largely praise and worship music. But the thing is that it's a very like... Okay, I'm going to describe it this way. Tourists come to Harlem and take bus tours on Sundays and visit

some of the more historic black churches. And they sit in the balcony and they watch and they wait to see people catch the Holy Spirit and they stand up and take pictures when the choir is singing because they're coming for that energy. They're not coming necessarily to worship. They're coming for the energy that worship brings. And that's what Sunday service feels like to me. As an illustration, and some people may say this is an oversimplified example, a few

weeks ago, Kanye had Justin Bieber at Sunday service to sing Marvin Saps never would have made it. It never would have made it without. Massive hit. Massive, massive, massive, massive gospel hit. But also like a very soulful, guttural, like, outpouring declaration, you know, of salvation and in testimony. Marvin's tap is like this massive black man. And Justin Bieber is Justin Bieber. And I'm not saying it's a problem.

Like, Justin has some soul to him. But the other reason I say that it's not for us, meaning black people, is because even at Sunday service, he's still doubling down on slavery was a choice. Or he's wearing a maga hat. Or he's talking about how, you know, making decisions based on skin color is slavery. Or, you know, it's just he's saying things that are very anti-black, even in this space that is modeled after, you know, call and response traditions. in musical narrative traditions that go back to slavery, which in and of itself is just completely toned of. You were saying, like, you know, how is, we're talking about how is this received?

In some ways, I think there is an argument someone could make words. Like, Kanye is acting as a bridge builder exposing people into a gospel music that who might not have otherwise heard it before. This is great, especially, you know, those who are hoping that that might bring people into the church that could have a positive message. And yet that's not really what I'm hearing from you. I'm hearing that the way in which he is presenting this music is misrepresenting what it's actually about. So you're right.

And that's the argument that people who are kind of of the let's give Kanye a chance faction do argue. Like, listen, if he brings some people to gospel, if he brings some people to the word, if you bring some people to Christ, it's a positive thing. Which on one hand I agree with, right? Like gospel music in and of itself, music, let me not even say gospel. in and of itself is a great bridge builder. There's a lot of people who won't necessarily be captivated by scripture itself, but who will be drawn into it by music,

which is the entire point of gospel music and of the gospels and of singing, you know, praises. So the thing I'm about to say next is not from Naima, the music and culture critic. This is from Naima the Christian. The messenger matters. And the challenge I have with Kanye is that, so for example, the Sunday service that he did at Coachella, right? So first of all, it's on Easter Sunday. Easter Sunday is the most sacred day in a Christian calendar.

It is the Resurrection Day. Some people think it's Christmas. It's not. It's Easter. And the fact that Kaye does, like, this performance on a mountain, on Resurrection Sunday, and sells merch at the bottom of the hill, like, $200 sweatshirts, you know, $100 socks, $60 socks, whatever it was.

But that's exactly what Moses did when he found the stone and the tablet. He came right back down and he sold merch. Yeah, he wasn't. He was selling merch. He was selling Ten Commandments merch. I'm talking about the merch. Yeah, the merch. Moses had Ten Commandment merch at the bottom of the sermon and the mouth. Exactly. So it's like the contradiction just there in and of itself, right? And then even just the way the performance

is designed and they've changed it a little bit. But last year, initially when he was doing it, the people who are there as spectators, for lack of a better word, because I don't really consider them worshippers. The people who are there as spectators are like on the outer part of this circle. And then on the inner part of the circle is the choir, but the choir is facing in towards Kanye. They're not projecting their energy out to the worshippers, right? It's in. And then in the middle of the circle is Kanye.

So at this Coachella performance, it's even more drastic. You have these throngs of people at the base who are fenced off. Right. And then there's like another level where you have the VIP. And then there's another level where you have some of the choir. And then there's another level. And at the most elevated level is Kanye. So this is about, this is about not about Jesus.

This is about Jesus and his network. Yeah, to me, I believe that Kanye believes in what he's doing. Let me say that. Kanye is more inviting us to watch. his spiritual journey rather than taking people on a spiritual journey with him. So going back to our earlier conversation and thinking about the way in which he centers himself and his politics and music which is supposed to be teaching the gospel, do you think there's a way to listen to Kanye and separate the music from the beliefs of the man who created it today?

Part of the challenge with Kanye and separating Kanye's art from who Kanye is is that so much of who Kanye is is his art, right? Like he talks about his personal life and his music and he talks about his antics and his music. But also, he seems to have until this point hit a bit of stagnation creatively in his music. His lyricism, topically, the stories he's telling the depth that you, used to be there seems to be gone. And Kanye also always did kind of go back and forth between things that sounded semi-deep but weren't really that deep, but they were at least clever. And even that doesn't seem to hit as much as it used to. So I think it's a combination of people just kind of feeling like his output isn't as good as it used to be. Plus, feeling like he's just become more intolerable

and not willing to accept both. It's like it's got to be one or the other. I still think that Kanye as a producer is brilliant when he's focused. I think that what Kanye is able to do with music, which again is why Sunday Service was able to take off in the first place, what he's able to do with music and how he's able to transform it and how he's able to reimagine it is brilliant when he's focused. Kanye as rapper is all over the place.

And when Kanye is playing both roles at the same time, time, the production also tends to get muddled and or overdone and or it's just, again, there's a lack of discipline there that you can see in his creative output that used to push his music right to that level of greatness because Kanye would take something like one step further than everybody else would, but now kind of makes it feel a little incomplete or unfinished or unfocused. So I even think that this whole walk that he's on right now is kind of about regaining that focus.

I believe that he really is searching for something and I believe that he's trying to find the fire again. He also wants so badly to be revered and respected. Like he's compared himself to Marley and he's compared himself to Thela, musicians who were also political and movement leaders, which Kanye is not. You know, he's just not.

He wants to be. He may imagine. himself to be, but he's not. I believe he wants to be great. And it's not so much that he wants to be great is that he wants to be considered great. He doesn't know how to separate the two. And that is where his work gets convoluted because he's trying too hard to get the reaction he thinks he should get. I think if he were to just go on his journey and let it evolve organically without professing himself to be, you know, the greatest artist God ever created, et cetera, then people might be more receptive to it, but it just feels like more of the Kanye show.

Thank you so much for chatting with us. I really enjoyed talking with you. I really appreciate your perspective and the expertise that you bring in the topic. It was a really exciting conversation for me. Thank you. Bridget, you helped produce that conversation with Naima. What were your impressions coming out of it? Listening to the conversation with Naima made me feel a lot better about sort of like my like of the Jesus is Born album and dislike of Jesus' King. As Naima pointed out on Jesus' King, Kanye very much centers himself. We know that that's something that Kanye does and pretty much everything he makes unless

those few times where his production genius shines. And I think that's what we get with Jesus is born, right? So for me, I think that's what gave me that visceral reaction. But that's also the issue, I think, with when I hear Jesus' King. He uses a lot of soulful sounds from gospel. He even has collaborations with gospel artists, right? But that stuff doesn't come together for me to give me that feeling. There are no goosebumps.

If you look, there's some larger historical arc here that it makes me think about, a lot of people will point to Ray Charles' use of gospel and turning it into popular R&B as sort of a sort of a pivotal moment in the change of the sound of popular music. And if you think about sort of the secularization of that music over the course of, you know, a half a century, now it's almost as if like Kanye is bringing us back and taking some of those sounds of hip-hop, R&B, popular R&B and bringing them, you know, into a gospel tradition, using some of the more familiar songs to bring people into that sound. But as much as I'm interested in that larger arc, I feel like if we sort of have to pull back and think about a scorecard of this conversation, on one hand, there's some interesting creative choices, you know, the changing of song structures, dropping choruses, the lack of a backbeat. in much of the music. But on this third part of sort of his use of gospel,

I'm left feeling like there's less creativity, innovation, whatever the right word is, in his use of that music. I get what you're saying there, Charlie. It's on the surface, it can seem like, oh, he's doing something different. But after listening to Naima, it's like, no, he's just borrowing from a very old tradition

and kind of putting a little bit of a Kanye spin on. It. These conversations bring to mind some of the perennial criticisms and controversies around Kanye's music. I can remember when certain songs came out, like his cover of daft punk's better, faster, stronger. There was a question is where the line between originality and mimicry lies. Kanye has always walked that line, and these recent albums are no exception. So I think by arming ourselves with the knowledge of where these samples come from

and the traditions that he's dipping into will be better informed as to how to judge and appreciate this music. So I have to ask you, now that we've sort of gone through this whole thing, do you regret ignoring Kanye? You know, as I said at the top, like, he makes me uncomfortable just because he's one of these figures where it just feels so difficult. to separate the music from the persona. But I am really glad that we dug into this work. Like, I feel like on one level he's succeeding, especially with the Sunday Service album, because I want to go listen to more of that music,

and I want to talk about it. I would love to learn more, Bridget, about what you grow up listening to and what sounds I've been missing out on. So I'm glad that we dug into it, and maybe I shouldn't have ignored it. Nate, what say you? I feel like this worked out pretty perfectly.

Maybe this is how we'll always treat Kanye. Whenever he drops the new album, we'll kind of sit back, wait for the dust to settle, and then we'll step in and say, okay, Bridget, what are we hearing here? I think I'm still where I was before. I'm glad I listened to it. But ultimately, the messenger matters, especially when the music is trying to have a message. And so I still don't rock with Kanye. He's not going to go away.

And even in this time of isolation, and I'm sure. there will be more and more to hear in the coming years. So, yeah, let's give it some time. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by Bridgett Armstrong. Our extraordinary editor is Brandon McFarlane. Megan Lubin produces the show, and our executive producers are Liz Nelson and Nashat Kerwa. Social media by Abby Barr and illustrations by the wonderful Iris Gottlieb.

Chat with us on Twitter and Instagram at Switched on Pop. I don't know, Nate. I don't think you and I can ever create a TikTok. We're much too old. It's just never going to happen. You know, that ship has sailed. But we love talking to you about music elsewhere. We're going to be back again another week with a really fun episode about some of my favorite music in a hit TV show.

Until then. Thanks for listening.