Loading ...Kanye West’s new single, “Love Lockdown,” has some potential to it, with the MC/blogger busting out a bit of quivery-voiced emotion through a classic-sounding R & B vocal line. But being who I am, I do have a few notions as far as what could make the song a bit better: a, a bridge; b, an instrumental progression that would at least add a little bit of tension to the proceedings; c, a vocal by either Ne-Yo or Lloyd. Not that I don’t appreciate Kanye’s sincerer-than-sincere attempts to break free of the AutoTuned tyranny that characterizes so much pop music today, but they could at least interpret the song so the intensity, you know, built itself up throughout the song, instead of it cresting at moment one. [video via Xhibiting]
In Which We Discuss Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown”
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It was apparently written a week and a half ago:
[www.kanyeuniversecity.com]
i dunno, i guess that’s if you hear the song as straight r&b, which i don’t. or maybe i should say that i like hearing an “r&b” song without the showboating, but the showboating is what makes a song “r&b”(?), therefore it’s not really r&b to me.
wait, did that make sense? i need my morning cookie.
I feel the opposite. It needs to be more minimal, and longer. It doesn’t need a bridge, just a couple of wordless sections, which will build the tension just fine. It’s actually almost perfect the way it is.
I think you’re dead-on. The song is totally salvageable — it only becomes boring when you realize halfway through that he only came up with one melody line. And surprisingly, I don’t mind him singing as much as I thought I would. But it’s half-baked in its current form.
Again, like I said in last week’s post, I’m really wary of him rushing the album, and this song is Exhibit A.
It’s funny, given everything we know about Kanye, you’d think all of his records would feel rushed, but they don’t–the reason he’s released (arguably) three consecutive near-four-star albums now is they all feel carefully labored and tinkered. (I wish he labored as much on some of his rhymes as he does on his beats/hooks, but that’s a different, can-Kanye-actually-rap argument.)
But, again, given what we know about his impatience and need for love and approval, rushing an album to meet a release date and save Universal’s fourth quarter seems like an even bigger disaster in the making for West than it would be for most other artists.
Here’s a working video:
[xhibiting.wordpress.com]
I am his target audience in every way. And I didn’t like the song. Maybe it’ll grow on me.
hmmmm…
Ol’ boy is obviously in the process of “progressing” with this one.
It’s pretty cool, but it’s obviously an intro or a piece of a much larger puzzle. I’m w/Chris M–this album has disaster written all over it. But this is Kanye, so I’m sure he’ll find a way to make it amazing…
I’m cautiously optimistic about this album. The biggest problem I see is that he’s tried to go back to old-school with his beats of late (”Swagger Like Us”) and not quite resurrected the chipmunk soul that made College Dropout so good when mixed with it.
Also, that Jay gets every good beat ‘Ye makes this fall. That’s a potentially stupid move for Little Brother. (No Phonte.)
Remember when this guy used to come up with hooks and melodic ideas for songs, and would then shop the beats to capable R&B singers and co-writers? Those were the days.
If this was golf, he would have hit a spectator.