KANYE WEST, DOPENESS, AND MAS

This Zane Lowe interview of Kanye is a fantastic, as a recording artist, West is loved and loathed by many, but say what you will, no one can deny his genius. In this interview West not only vents his frustrations about the people or organisations that seem bent on preventing him from expanding artistically and financially all his talents, but he also talks about rap and the industry and the mediocrity that now sells as the ‘dopeness’.

“Dopeness is what I like the most , dopeness, people who want to make things as dope as possible, and by default make money from it, the thing that I like the least, are people who only want to make money from things whither there dope or not and especially make money and making things as least dope as possible.” 

“There are plenty musicians that sold the fuck out and changed the art of music where people don’t hold that

to the highest level of genius anymore...If there is a high level visual artist or clothing artist they will be held at a higher level of genius than a musician because the things in music that are selling the most are the least inspired by the most part and the least genius...”

The aspirations and passions that west wants for the industry and himself and the masses that is stunted by the mediocre majority can be paralleled to contemporary mas in Trinidad and her satellite carnivals.

  Mas now lacks the creative passion, that once made it great, single celebrated genius such as Bailey, Berkley and Minshall, and their carnival presentations that not only defined the periods they were produced in and are now established part of Carnivals memory and woven into a nations history, have been replaced by big brands with multiple designers who don’t have a clue of what they are doing. There are no one eyed men in this kingdom of the blind. 

As a child the carnival magazines by Key publications educated and entertained, not the magazines today, you hear stories, see documentaries describing how George Baileys mas changed the way Afro Trinidadians saw Africa and them themselves, I listened as Minshall use the analogy of the panorama competition to explain the transformation of a mas, I learned of the splendour and opulence of the Titanic and the disaster that befell it on the savannah stage via Wayne Berkley’s Titanic. Such was the ‘dopeness’ in mas, the ability to depict, to define and defy, expressing creatively in a language that all understand in mediums we understood.

We have already seen what most of the big bands have to offer for 2014, more of the feathered sameness no dopeness or to paraphrase Kanye West, the things in mas that are selling the most are the least inspired by the most part and the least genius...

 Take in Mr West.