The Eraser in Love Lockdown

This is Jesse on the fly:


Kanye himself claims to have his finger on the pulse of what the people want. Three albums in, we can't argue--whether or not it's tickled our individual fancies, a Kanye hit hits. In the opinion of this artist and listener, Graduation was a pitch-perfect pop album. Though with it Ye shrunk from his normal creative diarrhea, with results either economically beautiful or uninspired and predictable, he managed to condense a lot of forward movement into thirteen or fourteen beautiful songs, depending on which version you have. And if you listened to chatter before Graduation dropped, you might have heard that Kanye said Thom Yorke's Eraser was his favorite album of the year. And if you listened to Graduation you might have heard a little bit of Yorke's influence in tracks like "I Wonder" and "Drunk and Hot Girls" (and in his choice to work with Thom Yorke Lite from Coldplay... damn a big brother).



Either way you cut it, I look at the recently dropped "Love Lockdown" as a complicated mixture of Kanye's bead on pop culture and his love for the musical sensibilities of Thom Yorke. The frequently repeating melodies wrap back into themselves, cycling and recycling in the same minimalistic fashion which Radiohead introduced to us with their flawless Kid A in 2000, yet the lyrics are not quite up to snuff if you'd like to sniff above your Radiohead listening to this track. For this listener, Ye's sloppy vocoder work and simple musical structure are shout out enough to the giant of Radiohead and its troubled, self-reductive and sensitive lead singer, who will explore any musical possibility only to frown while he employs it. This is Kanye using the tools given to him by Yorke. I applaud him even if he doesn't understand where they come from.

Red