“when Kanye West greeted me, chopping up the Jackson 5, drawing from Bobby “Blue” Bland, pulling from David Ruffin, arrived with Jay-Z, an MC who dated back to the Golden Age,”
It’s interesting how one’s occupation can shift perception. At the start of his article, Ta-nehisi speaks of Michael Jackson about the way I felt it. But once he talks about Kanye, I’m out of sync. I was diving deeper and deeper into music at that time and I didn’t feel those beats the same way.
I didn’t connect with Kanye’s output. Sampling the past wasn’t special either. I shrugged.
The real Gods and geniuses of music are still from that 60s-70s-80s trilogy when musicianship, technology and (almost) total absence of social media and shallowness allowed people to reach out for the stars, sonically. It’s still so true. Maybe even more now. There are more emotions and soul in one George Duke song intro than on an entire album of contemporary pop music.
I’ll probably enjoy and study the gods forever.