Search Results for: Kanye

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Matt, Flickr

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Chuck Klosterman on the Success of Taylor Swift, and the Word ‘Calculating’

If you don’t take Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. With the (arguable) exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel—she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, during an era when most major artists are thrilled to move 500,000 albums in a year. If a record as comparatively dominant as 1989 had actually existed in the year 1989, it would have surpassed the sales of Thriller. There is no demographic she does not tap into, which is obviously rare. But what’s even more atypical is how that ubiquity is critically received. Swift gets excellent reviews, particularly from the most significant arbiters of taste. (A 2011 New Yorker piece conceded that Swift’s reviews are “almost uniformly positive.”) She has never gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy. There’s simply no antecedent for this kind of career: a cross-genre, youth-oriented, critically acclaimed colossus based entirely on the intuitive songwriting merits of a single female artist. It’s as if mid-period Garth Brooks was also early Liz Phair, minus the hat and the swearing. As a phenomenon, it’s absolutely new.

-In GQ, Chuck Klosterman interviews Taylor Swift on self-awareness while deducing whether or not she’s as shrewd and “calculating” (a word she hates) as her reputation suggests.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Illustration by: John Ritter

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

When Dave Chappelle Met Rob Ford

I know this is the exact opposite of more privacy, but what would the world have to do for you to get active on Twitter or Instagram? Because that’d be hilarious.
I have a pretty dope selfie gallery.

Do you really?
Kanye, Kim, Jay and Beyoncé. Jessica Alba. There’s a great picture from Radio City of me, Chris Rock, and Aziz. Selfies are my shit. I love taking selfies…. Rob Ford.

Holy shit. Rob Ford?
Seriously, you can Google it. I was in Toronto for a few shows, and they told me I couldn’t smoke onstage. And I was like, “Well, can’t you just waive the rule tonight?” And they’re like, “It’s a citywide ordinance.” So I got up the next morning and went to the mayor’s office. This is before all that shit about him came out.

What happened? You actually met him?
I was like, “Is the mayor in? Could you tell him Dave Chappelle is here to see him?” He was in a meeting. I said, “I’ll wait for a few minutes.” So I just walked around his office. The walls were lined with all these disparaging political cartoons. And I asked somebody, “What is this?” They’re like, “He thinks that motivates him.” I thought that was an interesting character nuance. I had never seen him before, but he looked like Chris Farley in the pictures. He walked in and was like, “What can I do for you?” And I told him, “These ordinances exist in the United States, but they’re often waived in contexts of performance, because it’s an integral part of what I do.” He replied, “That’s it?” “That’s it,” I said. Then he told me, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. The laws of Toronto are the same for everybody. We appreciate you coming, we’re glad you’re here, but we can’t change the law because it disagrees with you.” He really gave me this whole speech. I should have said, “You didn’t let me finish: ‘smoke crack rocks onstage!’ ” Maybe a year after that was his first scandal.

— Dave Chappelle, in an interview with GQ Magazine, on the first time he met Rob Ford.

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Photos: Davej1006 and Shaun Merritt

Dave Chappelle Is Back (This Time We’re 100% Sure It’s Maybe Totally for Real)

Longreads Pick

An interview with the comedian, who is back in the business after a long sabbatical. Things discussed: Kanye’s surprise performance at one of Chappelle’s shows, Rob Ford, mean critics, what it’d be like to hang out with Chappelle at a BBQ.

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 18, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,828 words)

Kendrick Lamar, Hip-Hop’s Newest Old-School Star

Longreads Pick

The young M.C. is on a quest to become the best rapper in the world.

‘Everybody just wants to have fun, be with the scene,” Kendrick Lamar said when we met in his cramped quarters inside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn last fall. “Certain people get backstage, people that you would never expect. . . . You ain’t with the media! You ain’t into music! You ain’t into sports! You’re just here.” The rapper, now 27, had just finished his set as the opening act on this stretch of Kanye West’s Yeezus tour, and he was sitting low in an armchair in his trademark black hoodie surrounded by exactly those people.

Published: Jun 25, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,978 words)

Creativity, and How to Start Over

MCQUEEN: Talk to me a little bit about Yeezus. The album before that one, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was a phenomenal success. Did that wear on your mind when you went in to makeYeezus?

WEST: Yeah! So I just had to throw it all in the trash. I had to not follow any of the rules because there was no way to match up to the previous album. Dark Fantasy was the first time you heard that collection of sonic paintings in that way. So I had to completely destroy the landscape and start with a new story. Dark Fantasy was the fifth installment of a collection that included the four albums before it. It’s kind of the “Luke, I am your father” moment. Yeezus, though, was the beginning of me as a new kind of artist. Stepping forward with what I know about architecture, about classicism, about society, about texture, about synesthesia—the ability to see sound—and the way everything is everything and all these things combine, and then starting from scratch with Yeezus … That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want to use the same formula of starting the album with a track like “Blood on the Leaves,” and having that Nina Simone sample up front that would bring everyone in, using postmodern creativity where you kind of lean on something that people are familiar with and comfortable with to get their attention. I actually think the most uncomfortable sound on Yeezus is the sound that the album starts with, which is the new version of what would have been called radio static. It’s the sonic version of what internet static would be—that’s how I would describe that opening. It’s Daft Punk sound. It was just like that moment of being in a restaurant and ripping the tablecloth out from under all the glasses. That’s what “On Sight” does sonically.”

Kanye West, in conversation with Steve McQueen, on the necessity of a fresh start for any creative project, in Interview magazine. Read more on Kanye.

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Photo: peterhutchins, Flickr

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Longreads Best of 2013: Here Is What Happens After You Write a New York Times Story About Lindsay Lohan

Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie

Stephen Rodrick | New York Times Magazine | January 2013 | 31 minutes (7,752 words)

 

Stephen Rodrick (@stephenrodrick) is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, contributing editor for Men’s Journal and author of The Magical Stranger.

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Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

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The Producers: A Reading List on Musical Masterminds

From Matt Graves: Here are six of his story picks on the topic of music producers, the often-overlooked architects of the music we hear and love.

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1. “The Song Machine: the Hitmakers Behind Rihanna,” by John Seabrook (The New Yorker, March 2012)

In her ascent to the pop throne, Rihanna had some unlikely help: a singer from Muskogee, Oklahoma and a two-man team of Norwegian producers. Meet Ester Dean and Stargate, pop’s unknown puppeteers.

2. “Disco Architect: 12 x 12 with Brass Construction’s Randy Muller,” by Andrew Mason (Wax Poetics, Fall 2004)

The true story of how one 18-year-old, born in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, became the unsung godfather of 1970s disco.

3. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee,” by Kembrew McLeod (Stay Free! Magazine, 2002)

Public Enemy burst onto the 1980s hip-hop scene with a sound unlike anything the world had ever heard. Their groundbreaking beats were supplied by The Bomb Squad, a two-man team who turned sampling into a complex, noisy and compelling new art form that changed hip-hop forever.

4. “Philippe Zdar: The French Touch,” by Amber Bravo (The Fader, June 2012)

Is Philippe Zdar the best producer you’ve never heard of? From Parisian disco and Phoenix’s “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” to records from Cat Power, Beastie Boys and Cassius, you’ve probably felt his influence, even if you didn’t know his name.

5. “Arthur Baker: From Planet Rock To Star Maker,” by Richard Buskin (Sound on Sound, June 1997)

How Arthur Baker, a failed disco DJ from Boston, made his musical mark on the 1980s—from hip-hop (Afrika Bambaata’s “Planet Rock”) and dance (New Order’s “Confusion”), to pop (New Edition’s “Candy Girl”) and rock.

6. “Rick Rubin: The Intuitionist,” by Will Welch (The Fader, 2004)

From Kanye’s “Yeezus” and Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” to Johnny Cash’s cover of NIN’s “Hurt”, Rick Rubin has been the music world’s (mad)man behind the curtain.