It’s been just over a week since Kanye West released his latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and the verdict is already in: it’s a classic. With 518,755 copies sold in its first week, MBDTF debuted as the number-one album in the country. It has received perfect ratings from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and countless other publications. His personal brand, too, has more than fully recovered from the public disgrace and rebuke he suffered in the aftermath of his Hennessey-fueled Taylor Swift bashing at the 2009 VMAs. Once pop music’s biggest asshole, he seems more popular now than at any other point in his career. Everyone loves Kanye.
MBDTF is his best album yet, but it took more than music to win back the goodwill of American music consumers. It’s impossible to separate West as a person from the music he makes. More than any other rapper, his releases are indelibly imbued with his own personality. He’s petulant and precocious, cocky but insecure, and makes up for what he lacks in technical rapping ability with intimate honesty and witty charm.
Where you stand on Kanye’s music depends largely on whether he comes off as an egomaniacal douchebag or an earnest, charming guy. The fact that he never misses an opportunity to act like an asshole in public—showing up four hours late to his own show at Bonnaroo, posing as Jesus on a magazine cover, etc.—turned many listeners against him, trunk-rattling soul beats and infectious energy be damned.
But since his return this summer after a self-imposed, post-Swiftgate exile in Italy, West has been on his best behavior, waging a massive campaign to win back the goodwill of everyone he’s ever offended. His frequent (and hilarious) Twitter updates made him seem interesting and personable, and the free music he gave away in his G.O.O.D. Friday series, with guest features from the biggest names in rap, set the blogosphere on fire every week. He apologized profusely for all of his transgressions. He smiled a lot, partially to seem friendly, but also to show off the fact that he had replaced his bottom row of teeth with actual diamonds. He was funny, egregiously over-the-top, and seemed almost—gasp—humble.
Clearly, it worked. Two years ago, salty critics would have questioned the authenticity of West’s transformation from a consciously conflicted megastar to a cosmopolitan aesthete and art film director. Boom-bap classicists would have derided flourishes like the extended vocoder noodling at the end of “Runaway” or the minute-long string interlude that precedes “All of the Lights” as pretentiously artsy and unnecessary. MBDTF has plenty of blemishes—Nicki Minaj’s painfully affected British accent that opens the album, Chris Rock’s weirdly hilarious and vulgar but totally out-of-place skit at the end of “Blame Game,” the presence of Fergie and Swizz Beatz—but they’ve been mostly overlooked on account of his newfound niceness.
West’s situation is unique. Most of the time, rappers are able to keep their personal identity and the character they inhabit on wax separate. 50 Cent lives in a mansion in Connecticut but still raps about drug money and bullet wounds. Rick Ross doesn’t let his past as a correctional officer in the Florida prison system get in the way of his grandiose mafioso rap fantasies, and so on. But the success—and necessity—of West’s public redemption campaign highlights the increasingly blurry line between rappers and their music.
No one embodies this new paradigm more fully than Berkeley oddball rapper Lil B, who releases hundreds of self-produced, stream-of-consciousness videos and mixtapes via his Youtube channel and blog. With little more than a digital video camera and a Twitter account, he has built a passionate cult following for himself and a bizarre, new age-y philosophy which he calls “based.”
But by any traditional standard, B’s music is objectively horrible. At his best, his words (it’s a stretch to call them rhymes) are arrestingly funny and weird, but barely rhythmic; at his worst, he cackles and mumbles nonsense like a lunatic over ambient noise.
Yet no other rapper is able (or willing) to connect with fans like he does. He exudes intimate warmth and enthusiasm that resonates deeply with his fans, who revere him (at least semi-ironically, you have to hope) as a “based god.” It’s a personality cult disguised as rap fandom. It’s fandom disguised as friendship.
New technologies have made it easier for artists to connect with fans, but increased access and visibility makes digesting and contextualizing music that much harder. We’re entering a time when microblogging acumen and people skills could soon be more important than street credibility and actual rapping skill. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, but it will be exciting to witness.
Lil B is not objectively horrible.