I was asked to contribute to Metal Lungies’ Kanye West Beat Drop. As expected, I’m way more pretentious and long-winded than the rest of the dudes, oh well. The beats I picked were ‘Guess Who’s Back?’, ‘Never Let Me Down’, ‘Selfish’, ‘Go’, and ‘The Glory’. Follow the link below:
“This is from Kanye’s best beat-making era. Right after the success of The Blueprint and before he became a superstar, Kanye laced a whole lot of rappers’ albums with two or three beats and usually one of them ended up a street or radio single. In addition to the obvious “trademark” chipmunk-soul, all of Kanye’s beats from this mini-era had these strange, really-thick-but-rather-limp drums on them. It’s like he chopped the drums so short that he removed the beginning and end of the drum sound and sucked out all the bump. Similar drums — probably the exact same drums, really — are all over The College Dropout and critics cited them as a weakness, but it moves Kanye’s production even further away from conventional boom-bap. The drums don’t charge through, they contemplatively knock in the background as basslines and soul strings and subtle “Guess who’s back?” vocal scratches bubble up. My single of this song — it’s the B-side to “On My Block” — credits Kanye, but I’m pretty sure that’s Mos Def on the hook…”
