Day 18 (April 6): Kanye West - We Don't Care

15 Things You Didn't Know About Kanye West's "The College Dropout ...I have not listened to very much of Kanye West's music.

Apparently, this is a cultural blindspot. Okay, it's definitely a cultural blindspot. Sue me, I'm white! Wait, no, that's completely the wrong thing to say here. Oh dear. Sorry. Let's back up a little.

Yeah, Kanye just passed me by until he was impossible to ignore because he was loudly proclaiming his support for Donald Trump and releasing 27-minute gospel albums. I don't know, he seemed beyond me. Too full of complications and baggage - the kind of culture that needs a whole book of surrounding context to fully appreciate, and maybe the culture that a responsible leftist shouldn't try to appreciate?

After some outside pressuring, however, I'm trying my very best to fill in this hole, and therefore today's song of the day is My Very First Kanye Song (For Kids!). More specifically, it's 'We Don't Care, the first full track from Kanye's first album, 2004's The College Dropout. 

 After all that concern about politics and controversy and paratext and referencing, it came as an honest surprise to me how easy-going The College Dropout is. It's just a very entertaining, occasionally piercing and exceptionally well-produced rap album with next to no barrier to entry, even for a vitamin D-starved white child in his twenties like me. I cannot speak for the immeasurably complicated mega-famous Kanye of 2020, but the Kanye of 2004 appeared to just care about making fun music with little pretensions, and that is an honest relief.

Take 'We Don't Care', a bouncy tune that touches on drug dealing and inequality but with child choirs and a relentlessly upbeat tone. This is a song that wants to be liked, and I am pretty happy to oblige. Maybe Kanye wasn't so difficult to get into after all, he says, with no irony whatsoever in his voice.

 

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