kanye is not a great thinker, contrary to popular belief, if anything he's pretty limited, so i was considerably less than surprised to hear that this was q-tip's idea a while back. after all, listen to most of the college dropout (an album i love anyway) - a lot of the messages are seriously conflicted and there's a lot of bile in the skits against formal education etc. in many ways this plays up to all the worst ghetto stereotypes, rather than exploding them, and can also be seen as far from "positive". it seems that it's really important to the media (and kanye himself) that kanye is put forward as a "conscious", intellectual presence in mainstream hip-hop (of course, "conscious" rappers are the only worthwhile kind, the only kind with any positive effect on society - as if!). he's not really, he's just kanye, talking from a very personal perspective (he has an insanely big ego), but laying it down like a manifesto for the world, which i think is his mistake. after all, this is a man who, in a channel 4 interview, when asked how he compared to his heroes, as a rapper, said "can you compare 9/11 to the holocaust? they're both different things." not exactly the wisest or most "conscious" analogy. that said, the jay-z remix of diamonds is astounding and gold digger, sampling ray charles is one of the best tunes i've heard in a long, long time.
