Go West

Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the way. This extraordinary rapper-producer first won over a worldwide audience with the 2004 anthem ‘Jesus Walks’, disrupted hip-hop’s bling-bling materialism with the us-vs-them challenge of his Jay-Z collaboration Watch the Throne, and then released the confounding My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which rightly became the most highly acclaimed hip-hop album this century. He went on to make controversial public art with his ‘New Slaves’ video, which was projected in 66 locations around the world (called Orwellian by admirers and dumbfounded detractors). With news-making political statements occasionally interspersing that résumé, West is, at the very least, the single most important hip-hop artist ever. He occupies the same place in popular culture that Bob Dylan, a preceding musical, political, cultural game-changer, did in the 1960s.

US cultural gatekeepers have, historically, launched objections when black American artists dare to express political ideas. (The militant hip-hop group Public Enemy never had a Rolling Stone cover; Barak Obama has had at least eight.) Objections to Kanye increased with his recent public statements encouraging black Americans to go against political orthodoxy and be free-thinkers, not mentally enslaved political stooges. But Kanye’s call to arms should not have surprised the listeners he’s won since his 2004 debut album, The College Dropout. That title itself went against the carrot held out before black and working-class youth as potential consumers of the higher education industry. Kanye himself left college to blaze his own trail, hoping that other hip-hop fans would recognise the uniqueness of his records and the individuality of his neo-nerd, Polo-wearing fashion-plate image and identify with it.

Kanye’s music gained popularity, and hip-hop loyalists, through his originality, not from following the genre’s clichés. His musical innovations, via electronic vocal treatments and esoteric samples from a diverse pop heritage, altered the genre, setting standards that other hip-hop recording artists would follow.