I just wish you'd write longer pieces Gavin, or if you do that you'd point me towards them, I really rate what you're saying.
What gets me on reading K-punks New Statesman article is the musical reductionism; I'm not nearly good enough to critique the rest; however what I can say is that he's fundamentally misheard an idea of hiphop, in my opinion.
"But Sa-Ra are not alone: it is possible to hear their music as the culmination of an anti-gangsta tendency – including J Dilla, OutKast and Kanye West – that has quietly coalesced in hip-hop over the past decade. In fact, it is difficult to classify West’s last album, 808s and Heartbreak (2008), with its strange electronic melancholy and uncanny auto-tuned singing, as straightforwardly a hip-hop record at all. Instead, West and Sa-Ra are perhaps best considered a return to psychedelic soul, the genre synthesised from out-there rock, jazz and funk by Sly Stone and developed by the Motown sonic conceptualist Norman Whitfield in his experimental productions for the Temptations and the Undisputed Truth."
I fundamentally disagree with this. I personally think Premiere, Lord Finesse, Havoc and any of the NY 'golden era' (heavy inverted commas) producers were a definitive link to the Norman Whitfield productions he cites as being 'psychedelic soul', and it's a triumph of content over form that K-punk doesn't see it. It's like saying Phil Spector wasn't psychedelic, it depends on how twisted you see the form, how 'dark' you see psychedelia going, and I think he isn't hearing the form at all, in fact. It's refusing to see hiphop as art, and with that I just *brushes dust off my shoulder*.