The wisdom of Kanye.

A series of tweets from Kanye West, yesterday, from oldest to newest:

Your conscience should allow a physical manifestation of your subconscious but right now most peoples conscious is too affected by other people’s thoughts and it creates a disconnect from you doing what you actually feel now

Instead of doing what you feel
you just do what other people think you should do

it's really cool to say I hate you. But it's not cool to say I love you. Love has a stigma

we are more worried about what we can lose than what we feel

spread love. Put more love into the universe.

Artist transform tragedy into beauty

I'm afraid commenters will be distracted by the use of "subconscious" and "conscious" as nouns (they are, officially, only adjectives), whether the use of the word "conscience" (a bona fide noun) led to this confusion, and whether West even knows the difference between "conscience" and "conscious." But West is (I think!) considered a genius in the use of language, so I recommend beginning with the assumption that he's saying something important in words that millions of people can feel and understand in a deep way.

ADDED: Let me pursue the fleeting thought that West is "considered a genius." Writing this post, I thought of Bob Dylan, because the line "you just do what other people think you should do" made me think of Bob's "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)": "But, sooner or later, one of us must know/You just did what you’re supposed to do...."

That got me looking for comparisons between West and Dylan, and there was a lot of material. Much of it was something I'm sure I've already blogged: a linguistic study that showed Kanye West used a larger vocabulary in his songs than Bob Dylan:

Eminem was found to have the widest lyrical vocabulary of all, using 8,818 different words – almost double Dylan’s 4,883 and over four times more diverse than the lyrical content of the Beatles. He was closely followed by Jay Z, whose musical vocabulary encompassed 6,899 words, and West, who has 5,069 unique words in his repertoire, ensuring that hip-hop overwhelmingly emerged as the most lyrically expansive genre overall, greatly exceeding the average lyrical vocabulary size of 2,677 words.

West’s high rankings in the analysis could prove particularly interesting in light of a backlash against the rapper about the worth of his music. “He can’t write, sing, or play. At all,” tweeted David Crosby of Crosby Stills and Nash last month, describing West as “dumb as a post – he creates nothing”.

Ha ha. David Crosby. I was just listening him giving an interview on Alec Baldwin's podcast. He insults a lot of people. Using a bigger set of words than the we-know-he's-a-genius Bob Dylan doesn't  insure that Kanye West is a genius. Some of the worst writers dump words onto the page straight from the thesaurus, without a feeling for idiomatic speech or even the specific meanings.

Here's a piece from WaPo's music critic Chris Richards, from 2015: "Kanye West, Bob Dylan and why one man’s trash talk is another man’s treasure": Kanye West had just said Beck should give up his Grammy to Beyoncé, and Bob Dylan had "specifically dissed Merle Haggard, Tom T. Hall, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller." Dylan's "trash talk" got a much nicer reception than West's. Richards thought it should have been the other way around:

And on Sunday, West was an agitator at a lethargic Grammy ceremony in desperate need of some agitation — and his trash talk was completely germane. West wanted to know why the Grammys consistently fail to recognize innovative pop music in its own time and he refused to sit back and watch history get written. It wasn’t polite, but politeness doesn’t bring change.

Dylan’s dirty laundry session on Friday night was a bit more mysterious. Like Michael Jordan delivering his unexpectedly sour Hall of Fame enshrinement speech in 2009, the bard seemed to be settling old scores, calling out songwriters who he felt had slighted him or just did lousy work. Here was this colossus of American song, exposing himself as an insecure human being, just like the rest of us. Still trying to win the game, a competitor to the end.

So ends my little search. The sense that there was a lot of material shriveled and died after I got past that linguistic study.

AND: Here's my 2015 post on that linguistic study.