Transcript
You know, I met Kanye one time in the studio and we actually had a little rap battle. Right? And, you know, this is before he was the big Kanye West, but something he said to me that now I could see obvious in his style. He said, “Yo, you may be able to battle me in toe-to-toe combat, but where I’m going to beat you at is that I’m going to be remembered, because I’m melodic and I focus more on melody.”
And you can see that in Kanye’s rap style. Kanye is a producer and he’s a musician, so he focuses on melody. And the voice, or his lyrics, is another instrument, and it has to follow the melody of the track. So that’s one key part that you’ll find with Kanye. He’s always focused on melody.
Another thing about Kanye: he’s pro-black and he’s very much about black history, black awareness. His background, he’s a spoken word artist, so he’s very much about using his raps or his poetry to say something, to give it some meaning. But, in between the meaning, he’ll also put a line that’s very superficial. And, this way, he gets to kind of dumb down the complexity of what he’s talking about, but at the same time, he’s slipping in.
So, you can look at it two ways. He’s dumbing down complexity, or he’s speaking to a mind that’s not too complex to give them something of a higher thought process or speak on something that a conscious rapper might say. Kanye’s background is that he’s from the conscious circle. You know, his mom is a professor.
But, he’s also very much an artist and very bragadocious and is into superficiality, so to speak. He’s into fashion. He’s into art. So he merges these two worlds where he’s actually talking about cool, fun stuff in pop culture, but he’s also slipping in things that we should know historically, politically, and just as a culture around things that matter in the world. And that’s pretty much Kanye’s style in a nutshell.
