Internets,
This new Kanye song with Paul McCartney is pure cynical calculation, right?
"Only One" hit the Internets at midnight on New Year's Day, i.e. yesterday. If you haven't already, you can stream it at Kanye's website,
kanyewest.com, or if you've got money to just throw away, you can cop it from iTunes.
Paul McCartney, of all people, plays piano, and it sounds like he might contribute backing vocals during the chorus. Supposedly, this might be the first of many Kanye-Macca collaborations. Will this whole album be Kanye and Paul McCartney? That can't possibly be a good idea.
If it is, they need to figure out a way to flip "The Girl Is Mine," the song Michael Jackson and McCartney did on Thriller. Kim Kardashian would be a natural fit both as the subject of TGIM 2K15 and as the star of the video, for a number of reasons, including the following.
1) I heard she likes to appear in videos. LOL
2) She dates old white men for money in Europe. I think she was doing this even after she got with Kanye. Check the archives at the YBF or somewhere for evidence.
3) There's already one song about a love triangle of sorts involving Kim Kardashian, and it's brilliant. (Hint: One of the chapters in Kanye West Superstar is named after it.)
Brandy and Monica flipped the TGIM concept, switching the gender roles Leelah Alcorn-style, on "The Boy Is Mine," and it ended up being one of the most popular songs of the 1990s, despite being almost completely unlistenable... so it must be a pretty good concept.
The OG "The Girl Is Mine" was the first single released from Thriller, despite being maybe the worst song on that album. In something I read recently, maybe the book Let's Go Crazy, on the making of Purple Rain, someone suggested that "Baby Be Mine" was the worst song on Thriller. No one would argue that it's the best song on Thriller (literally no one), but come on. Don't be silly. That song cranks! "The Girl Is Mine" is gay.
No one really gave a shyt about "The Girl Is Mine," and Thriller didn't take off in popularity until DJs started spinning "Billie Jean," which had yet to be released as a single. The rest, as they say, is history. Thriller became the best-selling album of all time, of ALL TIME. Nothing was coming near it even before the music industry shyt the bed.
I'm gonna guess that the idea behind releasing the song with Paul McCartney as the lead single was to appeal to white people. You don't get to 30 million copies sold without appealing to white people. It's a demographic impossibility. When I was a kid, i.e. when Thriller was out, there were only 260 million people in the US. If, say, 12% of them were black, I'm not sure how many people that would be, because math, but it's probably less than 30 million.
Of course that was back when Paul McCartney was only 10 years or so removed from being in the Beatles. These days, they let him go on stage at the Grammys, and people don't even know who he is -- and not just black kids either! So I imagine Kanye working with Paul McCartney is less a matter of trying to drive album sales and more a matter of seeking the white community's approval, after Yeezus.
It's not unlike when Elton John was brought in to placate the teh ghey community back during the height of the Marshall Mathers LP era. The TIs probably arranged that performance. Eminem was generating entirely too much revenue to drop him like a bad habit just because he was writing songs about sawing gay people's heads off. Elton John will do anything for money. (Nullus?) He once played apartheid Israel, Rush Limbaugh's wedding and Arizona during the Papers Please boycott all within like a year of each other.
Beyond enlisting Paul McCartney as his white public cosigner, there's the fact that he's singing about his dead mother again, upwards of a decade after the fact. I guess he figured, it worked so well on 808s & Heartbreak. For all of the hype surrounding My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which Chris Rock declared the best rap album of all time, or something silly like that, during the seemingly endless press run for Top Five, 808s & Heartbreak outsold it by about half a million copies. Nothing he's released since then has been as popular.
2014 came and went without a new Kanye West album, as promised/threatened. When it was announced, earlier in the year, I figured the idea may have been to make up for the lack of sales on Yeezus. For a while there, it looked like this new album might drop in August. I was hoping it would, and sales of Kanye West Superstar -- which dropped 8/18 -- would benefit from the publicity. Instead, Mike Brown was shot maybe a week before, rendering the book's admittedly kinda ridiculous subject matter largely irrelevant.
An essay I wrote about the Mike Brown shooting was read by maybe 5x as many people as an excerpt from Kanye West Superstar I published, which, keep in mind, was intended to drive sales of the book. My most recent essay, on the history of rappers vs. the police, was read by 3x as many people as the one on the Mike Brown shooting. The 15,000 words or so I dropped on XXL's demise, meanwhile, were read by literally eight people. No one gives a shyt about anything right now other than the anti-police brutality protests, it seems.
Which raises the question, why is it that Kanye is writing songs about his dead mother with Paul McCartney, rather than on TV somewhere explaining to Murica that Pat Lynch doesn't care about black people? 2005 Kanye never would have stood for this. shyt, even 2013 Kanye was on stage ranting and raving about racism in the fashion industry, while Jay-Z was on Life+Times copping a plea for white supremacy.
For the first time in his career, it seems like Kanye has been placed firmly in check. Like, maybe he took things a little bit too far with Yeezus and the subsequent failed tour/media meltdown, and that's why there wasn't a new Kanye album in 2K14, and that's why now he's supposedly in need of your sympathy.
Tragically, this is happening right when we need the old Kanye as much as we ever did, which is to say kinda.
Catch you bytches on the flip side,
Bol
http://www.byroncrawford.com/