Move Over Mr. Warhol

artist
1 one skilled or versed in learned arts
2 one who professes and practices an imaginative art
3 a skilled performer
4 one who is adept at something

Artists express emotion through their work. Real artists manipulate and change their style in order to effectively convey those emotions. What is an artist if he or she doesn't expand his or her means for expression? Surely not inventive. Surely not original. Surely not creative.

For those who have been hating on Kanye's new CD (808s & Heartbreak), imagine having gone through your mother's death as well as a broken engagement in the same year. Try to rap about it and have it convey the true, raw emotion of sadness and hurt. 10 of his 11 songs touch on the subject of his broken engagement. The other song? About his mother's death.

"THIS ISN'T A HIP-HOP RECORD. I SING ON ALL THE SONGS. I WANTED A POP ALBUM."

I've heard enough of "how is he being creative when he's just getting that voice thing from T-Pain?" It's called Auto- Tune, and Kanye uses it for a lot of the vocals throughout the album. This machine manipulates the voice, making it sound more robotic, much to the same effect as Cher's hit from 1998, "Believe," which is a Grammy Award-winning, multi-platinum single. So if anyone wants to talk about who Kanye's ripping off of, aim for accuracy and give dues to whom they belong; it's the Cher effect.

"BUT YOU DO GET THE IMPRESSION THAT, HAVING CONQUERED HIP-HOP, HE MIGHT BE AFTER MICHAEL JACKSON'S KING-OF-POP CROWN."

"I don't know what hip-hop's problem with pop music is: pop has given us the best musical moments ever. The Beatles were pop. I wanted to use my position as the biggest hip-hop artist around to make a statement on this record. You know, hip-hop now is the most cred thing you can do. And I'm a black guy, and I'm from Chicago, so I have a lot of cred stuff going on for me, but at every step I like to stand back and just get people to open their minds up.

With fashion, I said, through what I was wearing, that is ok to dress stylishly again. I also said that people shouldn't bash gay people - that we need to be respectful of gay people. And now I want to say: "It's ok to like pop music.

As little kids, we all listened to pop music - when and why did it become a bad thing? With this album, I've invented a new genre called 'Pop Art', which is not to be confused with the visual art movement. I think I'm producing pop, but in an artistic way."

Move over Mr. Warhol, Kanye West is taking Pop Art to an entirely new level.

[Read Kanye West's entire interview with the Irish Times here]