Have you ever googled your email address?

It’s all too real

Hmmmmmmm

Granted, I wasn't around for the release of those three seminal albums, but Damn doesn't feel seismic enough in comparison, great and successful and lauded as it is

It’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Hahahahahahahahaha

Just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it not true

No it’s because it’s loaded with idiotic verses that will have no significance in twenty years

Objectively incorrect

That feels closer. That album was massive, hugely influential, and probably received even more accolades than Damn. But maybe we're too close to Damn's release to know it's true impact

It’s already a universally beloved pop culture touchstone that was ubiquitous when it came out, is still referenced constantly, and marked a sonic leap for the artist that other artists have desperately tried to catch up with

I want to acknowledge that my phone put an errant apostrophe at the end there, but I do not want to edit my post.

Hell yeah

this post brings me joy

Ok here’s why I really think this isn’t true:

The other albums mentioned helped usher in entire (white) cultural shifts, and harken to the environments of their time.

Dark Side calls to mind marijuana and LSD, lava lamps and black lights, vans with shag carpeting.

Appetitive brings the Sunset Strip, the Whiskey a-Go-Go, ripped jeans, leather jackets, Aquanet and cocaine.

Nevermind is obviously the grunge era, Seattle, anti-depressants and a mass feeling of disconnecting from the culture and politics of the baby boomer generation.

What the hell does MBDTF conjur up for white people? The only things I can think of are the concurrent rise of Brooklyn as a nebulous sort of brand (though as someone who lived in Brooklyn at the time, I’m not sure it’s true), and I suppose Power could serve as a sort of metaphor for the social media age.

But I’m totally open to MBDTF serving as a cultural touchstone for black people, due to the simultaneous rise of the Obamas, the Miami Heat, and hip hop music owning the charts in general. In fact, I suspect this will be ultimately be the case.

But I just don’t see that record having the sort of impact on middle class / suburban / white America as those other albums, because the cultural changes it ushered in were never theirs to begin with.

All of this could be true. And anecdotal evidence is meaningless. But... Kanye himself had been absolutely ubiquitous in my experience but I had never even heard of that record until a year or so ago. On RM. And I don't ever hear songs from it nor anyone outside of RM talking about it. My entire knowledge/ experience of that album is from this place. Even the other Kanye fans I know IRL don't talk about it. I feel like Yeezus is way more prominent and seminal, if we're going to nominate a Kanye record, and we should given what he's meant to pop culture over the last decade.

DAMN. is much more recent, so proximity bias and all that, but that record is literally everywhere I go and has been since it dropped. Maybe it's a Brooklyn/New York thing? But I literally hear it playing in the grocery store, in restaurants, from passing cars, in the Lyft I took last weekend, kids on the subway. It's everywhere, all the time.

Good LORD you guys are old and white...that was painful

So is Kanye though

Yikes

1. Born in ‘77
2. Regular appearances on Bravo
3. MAGA hat