Send "Kanye West " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The producers of "VH1 Storytellers" must have thought they'd struck gold when Kanye West agreed to appear on the program. He was already responsible for four (and soon to be five) of the most WTF/OMG live TV moments of the decade: crashing Justice at an awards show (Taylor Swift would come later), his "SNL" freestyle, his Grammys performance, and of course, the famed Hurricane Katrina benefit. But VH1 wound up with too much of a good thing, or too much of a jaw-dropping thing: West's three-hour set had to be chopped to 90 minutes, including commercials. On record, it's all over in a little more than an hour.If you've ever seen Kanye live, you know what sort of stories he tells. There are no long intros explaining the hidden meanings of his songs, or where his life was at the time he wrote them. That would be unnecessary anyway, since his bio is already so entwined into his music. Instead, Kanye delivers monologues in the middle of songs. It's less storytelling and more golden age of entertainment-type stuff, like Sinatra or Garland holding court over an audience: Here's an anecdote, here's a joke, here are some inspirational words, here's what happens to be on my mind at this very moment. Dude should have had a highball in his hand. He was already wearing a bowtie. Live, West is an entertainer and a perfectionist-- a bang-for-your-buck guy. Those at this taping presumably got their money's worth, but other than the few excised morsels that leaked after the show (a long anti-Radiohead screed and a defense of Chris Brown's attack on Rihanna), we don't know what was cut. Alas, those who pick up this record get an abbreviated, neutered version. I understand the impulse: The people behind the album aren't looking to entertain us; they're looking to create a salable product. (A need that no doubt caused this to be released more than a year after it was recorded-- they were still working 808s and Heartbreak back when this was taped.)...full text |
| Musicradar. |
| Kanye West dissed Radiohead and said the public should give Chris Brown "a break" during a recent VH1 Storytellers. But don't expect to see these segments - they've been edited out. A Storytellers spokesperson who requested anonymity told MusicRadar, "A lot of thought went into what to leave in and what to take out. Between Kanye's song performances and anecdotes, the taping went on for over three hours. "As it is, we're expanding the running time for the Kanye West Storytellers to 90 minutes instead of the standard one hour. Lots of bits had to go - those were just two of them." "When [Thom Yorke] performed at the Grammys, I sat the fuck down" Kanye West, on his hurt feelings at being snubbed by Radiohead's frontman According to Reuters, during the taping, which took place 13 February at the Sony Studios in Los Angeles, West was still smarting over Radiohead singer Thom Yorke's alleged snubbing of him backstage at the Grammys five days earlier. That stung, West told the audience, because he worships the British band and considers them one of his few creative rivals. "So when [Yorke] performed at the Grammys, I sat the fuck down," West said. West backs Brown West then moved on to the matter of singer Chris Brown, who is accused of assaulting his girlfriend, singer Rihanna. "Can't we give Chris a break?" West told the crowd. "I know I make mistakes in life." (It should be pointed out that the taping occurred before the photo of a battered Rihanna leaked out.)...full text |
| Popmatters |
| Don’t look now, but Kanye West stands at a crossroads. He may be waiting for a certain lord of the underworld in order to sell his soul to this überdämon, if indeed that transaction has not already been completed. But there he stands, and he really doesn’t have anybody but himself to blame. Platinum certification and critical raves aside, 2008’s 808s and Heartbreak represented at least a slight stumble from the dizzying commercial and aesthetic heights of his collegiately-titled album trilogy, and even slight stumbles can prove debilitating to pop figures as outsized as Kanye West. An astute student of American mass culture, he perhaps should have foreseen such an alteration in circumstances. Times change, styles shift, audiences are fickle; they are especially fickle when you down a bottle of Hennessy at an awards show and proceed to humiliate America’s newest country sweetheart in the midst of her televised coronation. The dubious foofarah over West’s act of oratio interruptus fit snugly into a pattern of absurd mass freak-outs that defined the American cultural landscape of last year, and it isn’t yet clear that the brief froth of Twitter-amplified outrage it kicked up will have any demonstrable effect on his future popularity. But it did provide a clear exemplification of the terms of West’s appeal for all to see. A rapper more invested in the genre’s dominant narrative of ghetto authenticity might well have benefited from an act of defiance aimed so squarely at the self-congratulatory preening of white-bread corporate culture (see Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s interruption of Shawn Colvin at the 1998 Grammy Awards, which only served to burnish his bona fides as a troubled hip-hop eccentric). But West was widely criticized and put through a very public humbling process, culminating in a neutered apology before Jay Leno, that chortling gatekeeper of the middle-brow. It laid bare the truth that West was more of a mainstream pop star than he was a hip-hop outsider, and with that came certain expectations of polite behavior. Transgress them, and some bowing and scraping should be anticipated....full text |
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