Entries associated with the tag "Kanye West":

Rhymes with Snitch has a rundown on Dr. Jan Adams—the plastic surgeon who worked on Kanye's mother, Dr. Donda West, before she died—and the assload of legal problems he's had, including six malpractice suits in the last two years and a restraining order from an ex-girlfriend. I would hate to be in Dr. Jan's loafers right now, staring down a mega-rich superstar with a known aversion to backing down from fights and a mama complex of extreme magnitude, even for a rapper.

I did get to spend some time with Dr. West a while back at a fundraiser for the Kanye West Foundation. She seemed exceptionally intelligent, caring, and strong as hell, and it was easy to see why Kanye worships her the way he does. I think everyone in the room at one point or another during the event thought to themselves, "Wouldn't it be great if she was my mom?"

Like just about every other hip-hop fan in town, I love to bag on Kanye for repping Chicago so much without ever seeming to actually kick it here. But he's doing the city a solid through his Kanye West Foundation, which will be launching the Loop Dreams Teacher Training Institute next spring. The institute will train teachers to incorporate hip-hop into their curricula as a way to engage kids on a different level, with the intention of increasing literacy and graduation numbers. (For info on the Loop Dreams charter program in LA, go to the KWF site, click on the tab marked "The Foundation," and then on the one that says "Loop Dreams.")

Kanye himself will be in town on August 24 for a night of fund-raising (tickets go on sale 10 AM Saturday); $125 will get you in to his show at the House of Blues, which promises "surprise celebrity guests." (I'm guessing one of them will be a certain beanie-loving Gap spokesrapper.) For the show plus a gift bag it's $250; for $500 you get  the show, the gift bag, and a preshow reception at Hotel Sax, where there will be a silent auction with Kanye material up for grabs, including a wardrobe's worth of preworn Louis Vuitton neckerchiefs. (OK, that's just a guess on the neckerchief part.) Yeah, it's a little spendy, but if you know anything about Chicago schools you know their current situation is all kinds of bogus. Help them out a little. Plus you know he's going to do that Daft Punk song, and that's going to be bad as hell.

Fucking Kanye, man. He can piss me off again and again, talking crazy bullshit about how tough it is to be rich and famous or making an absolute fool of himself at European awards ceremonies, but every time he puts out a new record he wins me back all the way. The latest is Can't Tell Me Nothing, a new mix tape that dropped on the Internet over the weekend that's already shaping up to be the hot hip-hop joint of late May and early June. I can say without reservation that you have to download it right now and spend the rest of the day listening to it at full blast, on repeat, while hanging out the windows of a vehicle and screaming.

Kanye brought out all of his friends for the Can't Tell Me party, including Common (a couple of tracks from his upcoming Finding Forever), local track-killer GLC, Talib Kweli, Sa-Ra (who people really gotta start paying more attention to), and former Puff Daddy valet and current fashion plate Fonzworth Bentley ("I don't wear sneakers / I wear slippers"). The Lil Wayne verse on "C.O.L.O.U.R.S." is, like any Lil Wayne verse, reason enough to get the whole thing. The fact that he can make a line like, "When you're really rich / then asparagus is yummy" actually work goes a long way toward justifying his self-anointed Best Rapper in the World title.

As for Kanye's own contributions, he's still keeping up his role as hip-hop's premier smart-ass, flipping Rich Boy's "Throw Some D's" into an ode to breast implants and opening his take on T-Pain's "Buy You a Drank" by declaring that "this verse has not been Russell Simmons approved." But Kanye's been working on another part of his image for a minute now: the most up-on-it hipster in the rap game. Can't Tell Me has one song (a snippet of "Stronger," which is going to be Graduation's club-slayer) built off a Daft Punk sample, another ("Us Placers," in a supergroup with Lupe Fiasco and Pharrell) off a Thom Yorke solo track, and yet another where he shouts out being on the cover of Fader while riding the beat to Peter Bjorn and John's "Young Folks." He also makes a surprisingly big deal out of local scene star Kid Sister, whose fanbase is decidedly more Brooklyn Vegan than Murder Dog. Not to mention the cover art is by Takashi Murakami, who probably half the indie rock world would give a lung to score.

I'm all for Kanye's indie rock kick, but I'm afraid he's going to take it too far with an Arcade Fire collabo or something, and the resulting blog-gasm will basically melt the Internet. Please, Kanye, watch how far you take it: I don't know how I could survive without my daily LOLcats fix. In the meantime, I'll be sitting here with the 1:23 cocktease of "Stronger" on nonstop repeat for the rest of the week.

I doubt young Fiasco's too thrilled about it, but Nah Right has three new Lupe tracks up for the downloading. No mention of where the leak came from, or what kind of release (if any) is planned for these songs, but I feel like they probably aren't destined for his upcoming album, The Cool, which is slated to be released on Halloween. (Unless he freaks out over the leaks again and pushes the release date back six months.) I believe him when he says that they're going to try to do the record in a week to avoid leaks like this, and the songs are a little rough. I'm guessing pre-album mix tape. They have that "not really trying" mix-tape feel, and although the beat to "Bottom, Top" is pretty nice, these aren't A-game tracks. 

And speaking of Chicago-related hip-hop, have you checked out any of the new Common yet? "The People" has spent the past week climbing up my iTunes Most Played, thanks mostly to Common's line about "white folk focus on dogs and yoga"—Wicker Park get 'em up—and Kanye's primo gritty Jay Dilla biting. I like the idea of Kanye doing other peoples' styles, because as talented a producer as he is, I'm more than a little weary of sped-up soul samples.