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Kanye's Haunting New Love Song
The host of BET’s The Black Carpet tells The Daily Beast what he’s listening to this week.
In an era of Barack and Oprah—intellectual blacks with funny names who love and are loved by both blacks and whites—it’s necessary to have an intellectually-zealous rapper like Kanye West. My favorite song at this second is his new single “Love Lockdown,” an ominous, grandiose, end-of-love song with eerie, echoey, electronically-distorted vocals. It’s a song that considers love with more nuance than you generally hear from male artists, and perhaps because it’s a deep love song, Kanye chose to sing it as though it were a bluesy plaint—deepening its emotional power. This is not at all a hip hop song, except for the fact that Kanye made it (it’s more of an electric soul power ballad partly inspired by some of Stevie’s early 70s electric soul stuff). Hip hop generally doesn’t do well with anima, sensitivity, or intimacy. That’s what R&B is for. Hip hop does well with power, ecstasy, mettle, anger, intensity, nihilism, narcissism. So for this one track, the Louis Vuitton Don sings. Perhaps rhyming wouldn’t fit with cleaving down to the emotional depths he’s singing about.
Presumably Kanye’s referring on some level to his recently ended engagement, but then, the guy also lost his mother this year. He’s probably working on a PhD in heartbreak right now.
He sings, “I’m in love with you, but the vibe is wrong, and that haunted me, all the way home.” He succinctly paints an image of a man driving back from a date with a woman he’s been with for a while, who he loves, but with whom something is off. They’re at one of those tipping points where the relationship’s gotta lurch forward or die, and he feels it’s time to end it. Not because there’s someone else, not because he’s fallen out of love, but because it’s just not all the way right. This is the melancholic calm before the stormy breakup. The chorus exhorts, keep your love locked down, and that’s what the character does; he moves on and protects his heart (because in the world of love songs, a heart can survive being broken but so many times). Presumably Kanye’s referring on some level to his recently ended engagement, but then, the guy also lost his mother this year. He’s probably working on a PhD in heartbreak right now.
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Indeed the title of his next album, for which Love Lockdown is the first single, is 808s and Heartbreak (making this Kanye’s first album outside of the college theme, following College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation, after which the theme is naturally exhausted. What would come next? GRE?)
Kanye says this is his favorite song of his to date and he debuted it on the MTV Awards less than two weeks after writing it. After the show the Gray Lady’s Jon Pareles sniffed, “a new love song in which he made the mistake of singing rather than rapping,” a snarky dismissal that goes down as example #2,167 of why Pareles should not write about hiphop.
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Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.
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Touré is a columnist for The Daily Beast. He's also an NBC contributor and the author of Never Drank the Kool-Aid, Soul City, and The Portable Promised Land. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, was CNN's first pop culture correspondent, and was the host of MTV2's Spoke N Heard. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times.
He should just go back to "Gold Digger"... it's what the 13-year-old girl audience wants from him... and, by they, that audience doesn't even remember his name now. They've moved on to more interesting "artists."
I saw a breakdown online today for women willing to appear at a live gallery event with Kanye West--a "listening event" in Beverly Hills, that's going to be filmed. The women have to be willing to appear completely nude and walk around the gallery like that during the entire event. Heartbreak over losing important women he's respected in his life? Gee, that sounds like a swell way to get over it....
Kanye West wouldn't know a love song if it smacked him in the face. He needs to stop thinking that his bastardized version of real music is art, just because it sells. Kanye needs to learn how to write good love songs. Off I would commend him to, for example, songs like "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing," "Hello," "I Can't Make You Love Me," or even "I Kissed A Girl." What I'd like from Kanye, is poetry not childish rhymes, music not electronic chimes, authenticity not "I'm so hip-ery." I used to be an ardent fan of the hip hop genre. Like Kanye, its proponents have become way too bombastic, simplistic, materialistic and full of themselves. In short, I would never buy this dumb song.
Big thanks to Tour� for expounding on this (english is my 2nd language, so I get a pass on big words).
I think the song is a real achievement in many ways, and it represents a very inspired moment in Kanyes career. It's not his best song, but it represents so much and the earnestness coupled with the emotional truth in it and that understated, repetetive crescendo type structure.. great stuff!
For him to do this and still expect the public to love it the same way he does, for him to not retreat from the ambitions of mass appeal while doing this kind of material (which would be the safe thing to do for an artists ego), I really think this also shows a very positive worldview. ..Maybe I am reading too much into it :) But really, there's a lot to like about this song and about Kanyes career and genre broadening exercises in music and fashion.
And the nuance in it is definitely lost on many.
Toure, like so many, are so far up Kayne's butt he could release an album of his farts and they'd sniff it up.
As with Puffy, he's an excellent producer. But he's no more than that--a technician. Sure, his massive head has now convinced him he's a songwriter, too (just as it once convinced him he was a lyricist), and unfortunately the cult of personality that surrounds him prevents otherwise intelligent people like Toure' from seeing through the ruse.
But let's get real: Love Lockdown is feeble, amateurish at best. It's a first draft that may have led to a song, but Kayne's convinced he's laying golden eggs on the first try, so the necessary edit never happened. Can there be any debate over whether it would be receiving radioplay if it didn't have Kayne's name attached? As with Brittney, those who've swallowed the kool-aid will buy up anything she puts out. But bet your bottom dollar: if you subjected them to a "blind taste test," they'd call it shit.
Of course, that should be "Toure . . . IS so far up Kanye's butt . . "
As with Kanye, my first draft sucked.
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