a grammar

Filthy, Rich: Kanye West’s Royal Fantasy

^^ That’s a link. I reviewed the forthcoming Kanye West album for New York Magazine’s Vulture website, and if you feel like reading it, I hope you enjoy it, because I realize that many of you are probably already drowning in Kanye-talk right now.

I actually have one geeky “tell it to your blog” outtake thought, the kind of thing that’s not even close to relevant for this review. But at the end of the song “Lost in the World” — Kanye’s collaboration with Bon Iver / Justin Vernon, a white indie singer from Wisconsin — there’s an extended spoken clip from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1.” What’s fascinating is that the clip cuts out the main thrust of the original text: the thrust is that it’s Gil Scott-Heron explaining why he won’t make common cause with young white radicals and revolutionaries:

They become runaway children to walk the streets downtown with everyday Black people sitting on the curb crying because we know that they will go back home with a clear conscience and a college degree. The irony of it all, of course, is when a pale face SDS motherfucker dares look hurt when I tell him to go find his own revolution.

Kanye’s sample ends with the repeating line “who will survive in America?,” which — while I don’t have time to double-check it — I think might come from an Amiri Baraka piece, one that omits the “in.” It’s just … who will survive America. And the implication is that there’s a “one or the other” involved in that question, a you-will-or-we-will.

So that’s the part of the source text that’s omitted, and while I have nothing good to say about it, I just keep dwelling on it, how it might be sort of like a secret contradiction, except that the contradiction is excised, so it’s not actually a contradiction? Maybe I should just stick with “FUN FACT.”

(Source: perpetua)