"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"

To be honest, it's one of the best albums of all time.

People don't like Kanye because of his ego and because of his world view.  They think that he's a stuck-up asshole that doesn't care about anybody but himself; and that's exactly what he his.  The thing is, he knows that and he doesn't care to change it.  It's who he is, and it's what makes him the great musical talent that we hear today.

Despite what seems to be widespread unpopularity (especially among girls who are unhealthily obsessed with the ever-repetitive Taylor Swift) Kanye is always dropping something that tops the charts, at least for a short while.  His tactics may be unconventional, but Jay Z still hangs out with him, so he can't be that bad.

The MBDTF album is something that we have all heard of before, but really haven't.  It's the album that he secluded himself to write.  He dropped off the face of the earth and went into a self-imposed exile to produce it, and came back with this wonderful work of art that we have today.

I downloaded it, bought the vinyl, and bought a hard copy of this album not because I support Kanye as a person, but because I support his music and I think that the musical talent that he possesses deserves some credit.

MBDTF delves deep into the soul of the man and tells us what he really thinks.  The circumstances under which the album was produced are a testament to how deep the thought process was behind each of the songs that are included on the album.  G.O.O.D. Friday gave us a glimpse of a couple of the songs, and the singles that dropped gave a patchwork design of what the finished product was going to be, but the complete picture is what truly makes this album something for the history books.

Kendrick Lamar.

I don't see it.  People are saying that he's the new king of the West.  Dr. Dre and Snoop have basically anointed him the new king of gangsta rap and have said that he will rule the West when they give up or die.

I mean his new album is good, but is it really THAT good?

I said the same thing about Drake's Take Care album when it first came out, and it took me forever to get it and really start to listen to the songs on it and enjoy them, but now I can't stop listening to it day in and day out.

This Kendrick Lamar album might end up being the same thing and I kind of hope that it is, but who knows.

Also, Kendrick Lamar's last name is Duckworth.  Finding that out made my night.

"White Dress" download

http://www.kanyewest.org/2012/10/12/new-music-kanye-west-white-dress/

Follow the link, download, and enjoy.

Two songs from "The Man With the Iron Fists" Soundtrack

Kanye West - White Dress

RZA & The Black Keys - The Baddest Man Alive

The Man With the Iron Fists - Soundtrack

I don't know about you, but I've been waiting for this for a long time.  When I first saw the preview for this movie and saw that it was going to be a product of RZA and Tarantino, I nearly jumped out of my seat.

Then I saw that the soundtrack was going to feature some of my favorite artists, and I did jump out of my seat.  I literally stood up in the theater and put my fist in the air.  This is going to be the best movie soundtrack of the year.

The song that I'm most excited about is Kanye's song "White Dress", which he has already released a 60 second preview of, which can be found here (thanks to @Coach_Eli for the link).

In short, I'm stoked, and I've already pre-ordered it on iTunes for $7.99.. It should be well worth your money to BUY it.

Brew's SoundCloud

http://soundcloud.com/brewthetruth

Black Sunset Preview

I just got a preview from my buddy @BrewTheTruth from his new mixtape entitled "Black Sunset" which he plans to drop later this month.

The preview that he sent me includes three songs which are entitled "Fam First" "Droptop Dream" and "All We Have."

Follow this kid on Twitter and stay tuned for when he puts the songs on YouTube and his Sound Cloud account later this month.

I can't figure out how to post the songs on here but I will when I find out how.

#BlackSunset
GET IT TRENDING!!

The Weeknd - Trilogy

Yesterday (I don't know if this went up earlier and I just didn't see it), I saw that The Weeknd is finally going to drop his first studio album.  This is huge.

Most of you know The Weeknd even though you don't think you know him.  That song Crew Love that everyone has heard about 50 million times on the radio?  Yeah, that's The Weeknd in the hook.  Most people don't know it's him (even though the name of the song is Crew Love (feat. The Weeknd)) and it's a damn shame.

He also appears in The Ride in the background sample.  If you listen to something with him in, you will instantly fall in love.  It's almost Frank Ocean-esque the way that he sings, but it also has a little bit more auto-tune so it's more electronic when he appears on the Take Care album.

However, his solo stuff is just good.  He's released three mixtapes: Echoes of Silence, House of Balloons, and Thursday.  They are all available online for a free download.  Thursday is my personal favorite but to be honest I've never really sat down and just listened to them all from start to finish, despite the fact that I have told myself that I would over and over again.

You know what.. I'll do that right now.

In the meantime, just download his stuff and listen.  It's awesome.  His new album "Trilogy" drops on the 13th of November so be on the look out for a pre-order sometime soon.

Tweet me suggestions for what to talk about! @CBMARTIST

Country Music

Some people don't like.  To be honest, I didn't really care for it myself until I moved to Texas last year.  I knew that I was going to be constantly exposed to it when I moved there and my cousins loved it, so I thought that I would go into it with an open mind.

To be honest, I think that country music is the most honest and widely appealing genre.

We can all relate to having a bonfire in the summer with friends.  We all love to sit around and just sip beers with our family and closest friends and just talk about life, love, and what it takes to live a fulfilling life.

Country music stars are not perfect by any stretch.  Like any other famous musicians they do drugs and have rampant sex, but they seem to be more down to earth than the other musicians that are involved in different kinds of music, as a whole.  They sing about universal truths that we can all relate to and stuff that we can experience in our everyday lives.  They don't sing as much about the clubs, money, drugs, sex and opulence that accompanies most of the airwaves today.

The fact that most of the songs that are about love have to do with making mistakes makes them even more appealing to the wider public because we can all relate to making mistakes.  We have all done something to someone that we loved and cared about that we wish we could take back.  We don't know why we did it because deep down we care so much about that person, but we did it anyway.  This theme pops up in a lot of country music and is more of a true statement than something that a rap artist would probably say.

Also, country music just makes you feel good.  It's more about sitting around a fire with a guitar, laughing and talking with friends while watching football on a nice warm summer evening.

At least that's my take.

Drake, You're "Doing It Wrong"

It's simple.  He's not with the right group right now.  He could be doing much better things with a different group of artists.  His voice is powerful and he has great material.  If he would break off of Young Money and get away from the people that are dragging him down, his music would be able to really take off, as if it hasn't already.

The fact that he's tied down to people like Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne, who are both falling off at an alarming rate, troubles me.  He needs to take The Weeknd with him, and either form a new group, or join an existing group that has more talent.

He's selling himself short.  Take Care was a tremendous album, but he was forced to have to include some people on that album that didn't have a place on it.  Nicki Minaj almost completely ruined Make Me Proud, and I think that The Motto and HYFR honestly could have been if they didn't have Lil Wayne.  Weezy made three appearances on the album, which is absurd in my opinion.

Drake.  Please, for the love of all that is good, keep making awesome music, but please get away from the people that are bringing you down.

Bon Iver

There's something about him that's different.  Besides the fact that he doesn't sound like anything we've heard before.

It's something that Kanye noticed, and that's why he commissioned Bon Iver to appear in Lost In the World and Monster on the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album.  It's something that everyone else noticed when he was nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist, and won.  He's created a fusion that appeals to a lot of people for multiple reasons.

For me, its just good music to listen to on road trips and when I'm just chilling.  I love the soft sounds that he uses in a lot of his songs, and the subtle autotune that he throws in every now and again.  The fact that he recorded the entire For Emma, Forever Ago album by himself in a cabin in the woods is amazing to me.  He's obviously an extremely talented individual and has worked for a long time to be the musical genius that he is today, and now he is gracing our ears with his talents.

The uniqueness of his voice is something that should be touched on as well.  It's very distintive.  You can listen to any number of songs and pick his voice out of them all because of the strange tone that it is.  It's original, which makes it even more interesting.

That's my take on Bon Iver.

Some of my favorite songs: Woods, Skinny Love, The Wolves (Act 1 & 2), Flume, For Emma, Creature Fear, Re: Stacks, and Perth.

Campus music

Per the request of @saintanselm, I have decided to give a list of the music that I have heard about since I have arrived on campus that I thought was worth sharing.

After thinking about it, I really only have one instance where someone introduced me to a band that I had never really listened to, and that was when my roommate (the always single and sexy @Aaron_Bailey_23) introduced me to Of Monsters and Men, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

In fact, more often than not, I find myself introducing people to music more often than the other way around.  That being said, there have been some very notable album releases since we arrived.

Cruel Summer dropped, the new Mumford & Sons album was released, the Dave Matthews Band came out with a new record, and Big Sean dropped his new mixtape.  I haven't heard the official verdict on the new Lupe Fiasco album yet but just listening to the snippets on iTunes, I found it to be a little lackluster.  In Green Day's new release, they obviously tried to return to their roots and listened to the rantings of loyal fans from the 90s, but I think that they ultimately failed.

To be honest, I don't see why people aren't really liking the new Mumford release.  I think that they went with what they know best, which is a genre that can't really be defined right now.  It's sort of that bluegrass/rock fusion that iTunes likes to dub "alternative" that we all have grown to love and support.  I got a tweet from a friend back in Texas on the night that the album released saying that it wasn't good because they didn't go in a different direction.  There is no other direction for them to go in.  That genre belongs to them, and they did a good job of owning and dominating it once again.  If you sit down a listen to the whole thing from start to finish, it meshes so well and it all comes to the end you feel a sense of completion that is hard to find nowadays.

If you have any suggestions about what to listen to or what to talk about, tweet me. @CBMARTIST

I'm still waiting for the Cyhi The Prynce release date to show up somewhere, so please let me know if you see it.

Cruel Summer - Review

To start off, Cruel Summer was a bit of a disappointment in my eyes.  I thought that even though it was a good album and it broke a lot of the stereotypes about what a compilation album should sound like, it could have been better.

G.O.O.D. Music, which is under the direction of the always awesome Kanye West, was the record label behind the album.

I had a friend tell me that Kanye kind of took a back seat in the production aspect of this album, which I think was a mistake.  He was the one that took My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and made it a Grammy-winning work of art.  I can kind of understand what he might have been wanting to do with giving his people a chance to prove themselves and compose their own music for the compilation, but I think that some more oversight would have made the album a lot better.

The songs that particularly stand out to me are Clique, The Morning, and Sin City.  Each of these three songs have something that for some reason separates them from the rest of the album.

Clique has an awesome beat behind it.  Big Sean opens the track very nicely, and I don't think that Jay Z has sounded this good in a song for a while now, including Watch The Throne.  Kanye's verse is also pretty damn sick in this song, where he's lacking a little in some of the other songs on the album.

The Morning is good because the hook sounds nothing like the rest of the song.  Just like Clique.  There's the hook, and then the song drops.  Cyhi The Prynce, my second favorite member of G.O.O.D. Music, is also in this song, which almost automatically gives it a huge thumbs up in my eyes.

Sin City is the best song on the album.  I know for a fact that I will have people fight me on this, but it's what I believe is true.  Malik Yusef's spoken word portion really give it that intensity that is lacking in some of the other songs that need it.

Another reason why I really didn't like this album as much as much as I thought I would is the fact that half of it was released before the album dropped.  Kanye kept pushing the release date back farther and farther, and as apologies, he would release another single to ease the pain of his followers.  This just made the actual release that much more lackluster.  When we finally went to go and download/buy the album, we already had most of the songs, and most of the ones that we had were some of the better ones.

And that's my overall take on Cruel Summer.  Tweet me suggestions about what to talk about next. @CBMARTIST

The Frank Ocean Difference

What makes Frank Ocean different than the rest of those people that think they can break out in the rap/R&B scene?  Well, first off, he did break out.  He became a sensation.  I can't really tell if he really blew up after Channel Orange dropped, or if he was really that big before that because I get the feeling that not enough people knew about him before the album came, and there really aren't that many people  that know him still.

This troubles me.  He's a trailblazer.  He doesn't go with the conventional sound, he makes his own.  I think that his participation in the Watch The Throne project is really what solidified his place in my mind as one of the premiere artists of this age.

His affiliation with Odd Future is another thing.  Most of the artists that are a part of Odd Future are very strange individuals.  They have a very different vein that runs through their music that is hard to find anywhere else.  They have been alleged to worship satan, they talk about excessive drug usage and suicide, and most of all, they have extremely homophobic lyrics.  Tyler, The Creator, the leader of the group, came out and said that he had full support for his friend Frank Ocean when Frank officially came out to the world and said that he was gay.  This was another thing that separated him from the pack.  Not many artists today will outwardly express their homosexuality, especially in the rap community.  He wanted to be a different kind of artist from the beginning, and he wanted to set a trend.  Channel Orange did just that.

Even though, like most years, he wasn't truly a "new artist" this year, the VMAs were still a huge misrepresentation of who the "best new artist" truly was this past year.  One Direction, the plastic, fake boy-band from the UK does not ever deserve an award, unless it's an award for making 12 year old girls swoon.  I just had to throw that in because I truly think that he was cheated by the voting population out of a well-deserved award.  The performances that took place during the show this year should have been evidence for who was to win Best New Artist.  Frank changed it up and did a different take on Thinkin Bout You, while One Direction did the same plastic sounding version of one of their hit songs.  They didn't change it up at all, because they don't know how.  They aren't talented enough to change it up in the heat of the moment.

Frank, like most rap artists, sings about his past.  He sings about the problems that he sees in the world. He sings about the things that trouble him on a daily basis, and he does it well.  The variety of sound that we see on Channel Orange is very refreshing.  It's almost My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy-esque in that the different beats all complement each other, but they also are their own independent track in themselves.

Also, the focus on an R&B type music rather than a rap-oriented one is another thing that makes me think that Frank Ocean will end up being one of the best artists of the time, if not ever.  His collaboration with John Mayer on a couple songs goes to show that he is willing to bring that blues influence into his songs, which really makes them sound more diverse in the end.

That's my take on Frank Ocean and why he is amazing.  Tweet me with suggestions about what to talk about next. @CBMARTIST

Overall Musical Preference.

When people ask me what kind of music I prefer, it's usually a very simple answer:

Anything but dubstep and really heavy metal.

Dubstep sounds like angry Transformer sex and heavy metal has some stuff in it that just scares me and makes me frightened for the future of humanity.

Like anyone else, however, I have my go-to artists that I can stop and listen to whenever and wherever I happen to be at that point in time.  These are the artist that I stop shuffling through my library for (in no particular order) :

John Mayer
Jack Johnson
Frank Ocean
Kanye West
Bon Iver
Mumford & Sons
The Black Keys
Childish Gambino
Drake

My obsession with Kanye is very surprising to some people.  In fact, it's something that surprises myself sometimes.  He doesn't have anything in common with me in terms of political philosophy, of world view, etc.

However, he does make really good music.  In fact it's so good, that he went and made a music group called G.O.O.D. Music that released an album not too long ago.  It's called Cruel Summer.  Maybe you've heard of it.  If not, please crawl out from under the rock that you obviously live under and go listen to it.  Now.

So now that you know the music that I love, here's the music that I HATE.

Lil Wayne
Nicki Minaj
One Direction
Carly Rae Jepsen
Justin Beiber
Taylor Swift
Skrillex

These musical acts in particular make me vomit whenever I hear them come on the radio or on the speakers at a party, a friends house, etc.  If there is a suggestion for me to talk about any one of these musical "acts" I might choose to either ignore the request, or just publicly chastise the individual who requested it and ridicule their obvious lack of ear drums.

Well that's my musical taste in a nutshell.  Tweet me with suggestions for what to talk about, because I will eventually run out of things to say, believe it or not.

@CBMARTIST

Intro.

This blog will be mostly focused on the free-wheeling and unpredictable machine that is my own mind. That was deep, I know. I will try to post as often as possible about the music that I'm listening to at the moment. If you have suggestions about what I should post about, please tweet me @CBMARTIST. I try to listen to a lot of different types of music, and I like to keep it diverse on a daily basis and not get locked into one genre. My reviews will be more of an overview of what I truly think about that album/artist and might not be as detailed as a paid music critic, but I'm not a paid music critic, so I'm sorry. My name is Corben Barnett, and this is my blog.