That's Amazing! Duets are really interesting cause you need to have a good relation with the musician you're playing/studying with.

Btw, I love Liszt as well, and Bb minor sonata is probably his masterpiece indeed!

...You don't need to have listened to every artist to see his influence. He literally changed the trajectory of both hip hop and pop. Some of the biggest musicians of today literally wouldn't exist today without the path Kanye paved for them with the music he's put out.

Drake, B.o.B., Kid Cudi, Childish Gambino, Frank Ocean, even The Weeknd would not be relevent as they are now if Kanye hadn't introduced the kinds of sounds and subject matter they've since built their entire careers off of in 808s and Heartbreak to the mainstream. Some of them wouldn't even have careers. Same with Graduation. College Dropout literally redefinied hip hop when it came out. It redefined the sound, the dress code, the subject matter, the culture, and the image. Notice the severe drop in baggy pants, oversized tees, and flaunted boxers, replaced instead by skinny jeans and fitted polos in young black urban culture in the past 15 years? Who do you think did that? Eminem? 50 Cent? Bruno Mars? No, it was Kanye West and his pink polo. And that's not to even remotely get into his revolution of the perception of rap and hip hop in white culture.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is inarguably one of the greatest mainstream albums of all time. It's definitely one of the most dense, well produced, well organized albums ever created. No one makes albums like that. Some of the most important musicians of the past century - MJ, Queen, The Beetles, some of the greatest musicians of all time, haven't made albums as tight as MBDTF. If 808s introduced the sound that would go one to define much, if not most, of modern pop (which has been the most dominating and successful genre of, what, the last 35 years or more?) MBDTF pressured that sound to a lazer focus and perfected it.

Even his most recent album, Yeezus, which is his most controversial album since 808s, is already showing blooming influence in Rihanna's most recent album Anti, which came out less than a month ago. That new wave of dark, industrial, distorted sounds will only drip more into the mainstream over the next five years as the top artists become influenced by other big early adopters like Rihanna and the success of these new sounds.

So no, it's not a silly thing to say. The consensus isn't just clear - it's screaming. Love him or hate him, no musician is more important to the 21st century than Kanye West. Not one.

Neowave presents - Roots Of Trance anthology 1993 (Part 6: Hard Trance One)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA57mDAM-5Y

Perfect accompaniment for buckyballing it back to the bubble in ED: Horizons.
(Translation fly as fast as possible back to civilization for repairs)

Yeah. There's no doubt in his influence. At least I can say that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a game changer and one of (if not the) all-time higher points on rap music. That's almost universally accepted by music critics, and it's indeed an awesome album.

I'd say OK Computer is my favourite Radiohead album, and the first one which give them fame. 

MBDTF is my favorite album of all time, do I definitely agree there.

It's funny that you recommend OK Computer, because I actually listened to that waiting for your suggestion last night. A friend recommended it to me. Very very good album.

It's usually the introduction album for Radiohead, since it's kind of accessible and it's universally praised. Though if you're into electronic music you should listen to Kid A/Amnesiac too. It's a very, very different sound of Radiohead and it shows another side of the band. They're a very heterogenous band and they don't fear to step out of their comfort zone, so it's like hearing different bands actually. 

The same person who recommended OK C recommended Kid A next too, so I'll definitely try that after I've listened to the former a few more time.

I don't disagree that he's very influential, very important, or very talented. You make very good points to support all 3. I just think it's silly to say that any artist is the "most" or "best" anything because music involves so much subjective taste. Statements like "No one makes albums like that" aren't based entirely in fact; their based heavily on taste, and that's totally fine. That's the way it should be, really.

As for the change in clothes, I would argue that the change was inevitable. Kanye might have been the impetus for the change at that particular moment, but in general, the change was a reaction against baggy clothes in the same way that baggy clothes of the 90's were a reaction to tight fitting clothes of the 80's. Our whole culture right now is repeating the 80's style (obsession with exercise and tech, clothes that are bright and bold, women wearing tights as pants, music that is much more electronic sounding than guitar based--I even saw a commercial recently with a woman wearing a sweatshirt that had the neck cut out, hanging off of one shoulder), so it was only natural that clothes style matched that.

Is definitely not silly to say he's at least the most important and influential. That can be proven. Who else has influenced music and culture more? No one. This is quantifiable stuff here.

While the statement about albums is slightly subjective, it's mostly based on an objective academic knowledge of music. It's what I major in in school. It's not just me saying that it sounds nice. It's based on music theory, on counter-point, harmonic reductions, and synergy between songs, and structure throughout the entire album. Music doesn't just sound good because someone writes with heart - it sounds good because of what is essentially music maths. I understand that music maths, and that statement was almost entirely based off that music maths. No one makes albums like that. Even if you remove all subjectivity from that, which factors in lyrics, themes, metaphors, pleasentness, etc., you'd still get that no one objectively makes albums put together as perfectly as MBDTF is. Not even his other albums are as perfectly structured as MBDTF. MBDTF is like music Tetris. Academic courses could be taught on MBDTF.

You can argue that change is inevitable, but you can't argue that the specific change he brought is. These people aren't just repeating the 80s. They are dressing like him. They're Kanye clones. His look wasn't 80s fashion - it was completely his, and he made that cool for a traditionally urban community and more. Even if you did try to argue that it was inevitable, the fact that he specifically pioneered that "resurgence" isn't unsubstantial, either.

Importance and influence definitely cannot be proven. They can both be argued with evidence, but they cannot be proven. What is important varies wildly from person to person, and how things truly influence us is far from known. Oftentimes we have no idea that things are influencing us.

Even if your statement is based in theoretical analysis, that doesn't make it any less subjective. A song can have harmony, counter-point, structure, etc., but that doesn't mean that the song does any one of those things well. And deciding whether or not those aspects of a song are any good is more than a bit subjective. 12-tone music has a whole host of cool music theory concepts built into it, yet the vast majority of people hate it. Why? Because they just don't like how it sounds. Explaining the theory might make them like it more, but it might not. If these things weren't subjective, then music theorists would end up agreeing on everything, and we both know that's not true. (Schenckerian analysis, for example is still controversial.)

I've studied quite a bit of music theory, too (unfortunately it wasn't offered as a major at my school), and precisely as a result of that studying, I've come to appreciate that very little of what makes music good is quantifiable. There are a whole host of things that can be quantified that can make music more or less complex, but what makes the music good or not is how it all comes together, which is completely subjective. If it weren't, scientists could just create the perfect song and be done with it.

There are plenty of artists that have made albums that I think meet all the criteria for what you've said makes MBDTF so perfect (ones by The Smashing Pumpkins, Imogen Heap, Rush, and Alice In Chains off the top of my head), but you might not agree with me about any of them, and that's a good thing. So yes, I still think it's ludicrous to claim that "No one makes albums like that," as if that's a provable fact.

You make a good point about the distinction between change vs the specifics of the change (talking about clothes). Kanye doesn't exist in a vaccuum, though. His reactions are just as much a product of the society he lives in as anyone else's. Who's to say that, if he hadn't dressed the way he had, someone else wouldn't have? I just don't think there is any way to prove that kind of stuff.