| spemanig said: 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.
