Kanye West's Influence On Popular Music

Kanye West has a large influence on popular culture and in music. His life is a continuous rollercoaster of highs and lows, but the music that he releases is always pristine. While he has had trouble in the media, his music is far from terrible, he puts a lot of effort into his records, and thousands of radio stations play his music. The Rolling Stone describes him as “arrogant, but self-deprecating, materialistic, but religious, remarkably rude but also sensitive. Rather than sublimate those conflicts, his music shows them off” (n.d.). His pursuit of perfection moves the hip-hop genre and popular music as a whole forward. The discussion of the following texts will further explain how Kanye’s music and life have been influential in both

His release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010 is considered “his masterpiece, the work that contains the fullest possible expression of his aesthetic vision” (Graves 2014, p. 3). The author of this book claims that this album is his best work because it shows so many different sides of him, from his struggles to his accomplishments, and everything in between. He also continues by arguing, “few compete with the album’s greatest theme… which is the saga of its creator’s pathological need for greatness” (p. 6). The Rolling Stone agrees that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is his most maniacally inspired music yet, coasting on heroic levels of dementia, pimping on the top of Mount Olympus” (Sheffield, 2010). Kanye’s emphasis on perfection is what gets him noticed by organizations like the Rolling Stone, and allows people to understand what is important to

In the album’s opening track, “Dark Fantasy,” the song opens with a fairytale spoof of “Cinderella,” spoken by Nicki Minaj (West, 2010), which “parodies the courtly romantic idealism of the original, transforming the eponymous heroine from a demure diamond in the rough into a shrill entitled wench” (Graves 2014, p. 53). Kanye is starting the album by saying that his listeners are old enough to hear the ugly truth, which is “ a life free from bondage of fairy tales, a quiet mind, and a content heart” (ibid.). Kanye wants his listeners to hear reality when they hear his album, not something made up to paint the world in a better light, like fairytales. Starting his lyrics by recalling a nostalgic memory coincides with what he wanted before he found that he wanted greatness in his life without all of the made up fillers that fairytales seemed to have. He escapes the fantasy that he thought of when he started his career in the music industry. What Graves communicates to his audience is that Kanye’s life is extremely important to his career and he wants his viewers to understand that not everything in life is reality; there are ways to pretend that the world is better than it is, and Kanye wants his fans and listeners to see that there is so much more to this world than just the glamour and fun of being a hip-hop