Body Language
Latest blockbuster by Kanye West fleshes out shared human experiences
by Scott Manzler
“George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” Kanye West charged during his appearance on NBC’s hurricane relief telethon a couple months ago. The rapper-producer’s statement was blunt, to be sure, but whether or not you acknowledge the truth of his claim, its directness, amid the usual star culture platitudes, was bracing. Just as telling was his body language. Alongside an on-script Mike Meyers, West was uncomfortable yet sincere—a snapshot of his current between-and-betwixt dilemma. In a society where economic status is as much a determining factor as race, West is more a product of Meyers’ universe than that of Katrina’s victims. It’s hip-hop’s perennial contradiction—upwardly mobile African Americans coopted by the materialist media engine to pimp an ill-remembered or never-experienced past.
And it’s a contradiction at the heart of West’s second album, Late Registration, where the extended sex-obsession metaphor “Addiction” precedes the conflicted dissection of bling culture, “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix).” “Diamonds,” in turn, is upended by a newly added Jay-Z cameo pumping his business acumen as if it were his jimbrowski. Elsewhere, a snippet from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” is undercut by the track that follows, “Crack Music,” which features an allusion to the rap forbear’s struggles with drugs. A similar complexity informs the lead track’s gospel-tinged update of “Inner City Blues,” as well as the album’s attempts to unpack hip-hop’s institutionalized sexism.
West is hardly the first gifted artist to note that stardom’s brass ring rarely guarantees spiritual well-being, but as with his ’70s soul samples, it’s the context and usages that signify. On an album where striving serves as a structural conceit, it’s no surprise that West liberally references his youth in Chicago, if only to establish some continuity with the here-and-now. For all his arrogance, the rapper locates his greatest pleasures and sorrows in common human experience: the gift of a newborn child, the helplessness of watching a loved one suffer, the lure of quitting the game. The mother-love of “Hey Mama” is as naked and tender as any in hip-hop.
Free of having to prove his bona fides, West indulges the beautiful music in his head. With massed strings, jazzy R&B loops and vocal pyrotechnics, the album’s lovely textures may be unprecedented in rap. Where on his previous album and productions West’s sped-up borrowings served as a bridge between the past and the present, Late Registration is immersed in ’70s soul, is effectively of it.
West knows his strengths; his album is punctuated by luxurious instrumental breaks and codas. Stripped of its rap overlays, it would remain a fairly compelling work. His recent appearance on Saturday Night LiveLate Registration captured body language just as telling: the rapper enjoying a moment on the sidelines as Maroon 5’s Adam Levine rode the string bed of ’s “Heard ’Em Say” to its finale.
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