These comparisons won’t always involve great expertise or
indeed superfandom. Neither is hip-hop my natural milieu nor am I completely
familiar with all of Kanye or Jay-Z’s back catalogue.
But I’ve listened to both quite a lot, and I like both quite
a lot, and I think their friendship/rivalry is pretty interesting. I was also
amused to discover that both share birthdays with close relatives of mine, so I
looked up to see if I also shared a birthday with a titan of rap. I found
Coolio. Oh well …
They are the only two rappers to have headlined Glastonbury,
Jay-Z in 2008 and West in 2015. How the two sets went down is instructive.
Probably there was more pressure on Jay-Z, being the first and with more
consistent luddite outcry, but his set was a triumph. He got the crowd onboard
with his covers (inc Wonderwall and Rehab) and converted many new fans. At that
point (pre ‘Empire State of Mind’) he didn’t actually have that many massive UK
hits (not including Crazy in Love and Umbrella, on which he was very much in a
supporting role. )
Whereas people somewhat assumed Kanye West would be a
triumph. 2015 was pretty much peak “Kanye is a genius” … not only was he an
acclaimed artist, he also had an awful lot of well-known bangers he could call
on. Yet his set was odd, and in the end, a disappointment. He read the crowd
wrong, basically. It’s not that the songs weren’t good, he just didn’t really
provide a great show, chose the wrong guest (Bon Iver, big in indie but not
Glastonbury-headline exciting) and the wrong cover (Bohemian Rhapsody,
dreadful). His judgement was poor. It was weird. He didn’t control the
narrative.
A pretty simplistic comparison is that Jay-Z is like the
hip-hop Rolling Stones and Kanye West thinks he’s the hip-hop Beatles, but he’s
more like …hmm … I don’t think ELO is quite right, maybe … Queen – maybe he
thinks that himself actually, maybe that’s what Bohemian Rhapsody was all about
(though of course Queen famously seized their big gig). He is capable of
brilliance, but there is so much excess, all his albums have induced boredom
and the skip button in me at some point.
Whereas I’d say Jay-Z is generally compelling, concise,
funny, clear-headed. When I listen to Kanye West there are a lot of attention-seeking
phrases which turn out to be not much more than self-serving wordplay
gibberish. I think the thread, the point of Jay-Z songs is nearly always clear.
You know, these kind of things by and large come down to
“whose voice do you prefer”, “whose rhymes do you prefer”, “who’s done more
great songs” but I do think, with major hip-hop artists more than in other
genres, staying congruent and steering clear of being ludicrous is pretty important.
Kanye West has seriously damaged the acclaim in which he might be held, and I
think that infects his music.
What else? Kanye West’s music is exhausting. Even his best
albums are exhausting. At his best, there’s a punkish, claustrophobic
questioning brilliance to what he does with both music and words, but you can
never just settle into it. And too often, when it challenges you, you don’t end
up going “god, that’s something I hadn’t considered before” but “you know, that’s
just silly”.
At his worst, Jay Z is still pretty decent, whereas Kanye
West, at his worst, is dreadful. Honestly, I think I started out thinking it
was quite close between them, but the more I listen to them, it’s really not
close.
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