Kanye West ft. Young Jeezy – Amazing
And this is how Kanye is sad in America…
[Video][Website]
[5.64]
Ian Mathers:You know, maybe if we could get Kanye’s obsession with himself and his autotune out of the way, this wouldn’t be half bad. It’s certainly well constructed, but he doesn’t sing about his neuroses with enough force or detail to make me care.
[4]
Colin Cooper: Ok, take two with Mr. West, this time featuring Young Jeezy sounding much less comfortable with the tempo than his boss here, doing a daft rap about keeping an eye on your sodium intake (wtf?) and congratulating Kanye West on having endured a break-up and the death of his mother in recent times. Why weren’t we told?! Anyway, the beat (which the video kindly asks you to believe is tribal) is kind of cool, and the whole thing is certainly much more hooky than the choice of single for the UK. It’d be all too easy to write puns for a single with a positive adjective for its title, so instead I’m just going to call it hyperbole, and be grateful that on this record, Kanye is at least packing that.
[6]
Chuck Eddy: “I’m a monster, I’m a killer, I know I’m wrong/I’m a problem that will never ever be solved/And no matter what you’ll never take that from me.” Or as Alice Cooper put it, “I’m a picture of ugly stories/I’m a killer, and I’m a clown.” And as Axl Rose put it, “It’s not a problem you can solve, it’s rock’n'roll.” And as Frank Kogan put it, “Not like I get sick or you get sick but real sick/And no one can take that away from me”. So this was a right gloomy hero-of-fear techno-blues dirge to hear on the car radio for a skeptic like me who will probably never get around to listening to 808s and Heartbreak. It’s also very slow.
[7]
Tal Rosenberg: The lurching beat – woodblocks, handclaps, the speaker zips on the two and the four – plus the practically Nicky Hopkins-style piano is Dr. Dre G-Unit beats launched out of Game’s palm trees and 50’s high rises and crash landing into Kanye’s Siberia. The lyrics are vacuous braggadocio; but it’s Kanye, so it’s perennially braggadocio. But at least this time it’s self-aggrandizement instead of an ego boost at the expense of somebody else, which is pretty much the rest of the album, with prose cribbed directly from an 11-year-old’s book report. Ditto Young Jeezy, but here his shallowness is excusable: He’s bigfoot, roaring so hard it melts the ice as the shrieks and wails of wounded animals fade into the dark recesses of the snow-capped mountains.
[8]
Al Shipley: The drums plod and the piano sounds like a MIDI preset, while the first verse teases out a version of the chorus that’s far more interesting than the actual more monotonous hook that gets repeated over and over. Here, the problem isn’t actually the AutoTune, but the extra layer of cheapo distortion on his voice that makes Kanye’s usually expensive-sounding production sound tinny and cheap. The low point of a bad album, with an incongruous guest spot thrown on to distract us from just how awful it is.
[2]
Rodney J. Greene: With Kanye taking “Viva la Vida” and tossing out the big words and approximation of a pulse, Jeezy’s “victorious/warriors” and “podium/sodium” schemes are the nearest this comes to wit, while the slow-moving beats, sluggish piano, and slothful vocals threaten to flatline.
[3]
Martin Skidmore: You’d think autotuning could at least make singing sound vaguely in tune, but not on this – for me, flat, painfully off-key vocals with the vocoder effect is the worst of both worlds. There is intermittent drama in the production, but unlike the UK single, this US one does nothing with it: the lyrics are fatuous and carry nothing to help or even fit the music. I always like Jeezy, and he’s okay here (highlight of the song), but there’s bugger all to work with.
[3]
Alex Macpherson: “Amazing” casts Kanye West as a weary grinder, an artist who’s not so much tortured as just tired. He mumbles that he’s “got everybody fired up this evening”, but he couldn’t sound less fired up himself. It’s an effective track; clip-clopping beats and mournful piano evoke the image of a lonely wanderer, and “I’m a monster, I’m a maven, I know this world is changing; never gave in, never gave up, I’m the only thing I’m afraid of” is probably the best line on the album. Still, it’s undeniably a relief when Young Jeezy is ushered in by an episodic pause and distant howls, in an inversion of his own “Put On”; though even that’s somewhat double-edged, as it immediately reminds you how much more listenable “Put On” was as an evocation of the grind.
[7]
Hillary Brown: One of the weaker tracks on Yeezy’s record, including the weird interjectory guest appearance by Jeezy, which doesn’t add much, but it will get stuck in your head without your meaning for it to do so, and the percussion is really beautifully produced and interesting.
[6]
Renato Pagnani: “Amazing” finds Kanye attempting to remove as much as he can from his music while retaining maximum pathos. The use of space on this is astounding; the track isn’t minimal so much as bereft of all hope. The insistent, tribal lurch anchors Kanye’s repetitions of amazingness; it’s clear from this battering of his head against the wall that Kanye is spewing what is expected of Mr. Ego himself but inhabiting none of it. Jeezy sounds worn-out as he staggers through his verse, searching desperately for his footing amidst the all that wide-open space. He sounds even more larger-than-life than usual, but in the kind of way that perturbs rather than triggers. Yeah, his president is black and his Lambo might be blue, but none of that matters out here. Not quite amazing, but as close as mortals can get.
[8]
Jordan Sargent: In the context of 808s, “Amazing” is the moment where Kanye looks in the mirror and remembers -— as he loves to do -— that he is still Kanye West. And even though he wants it to be a dark and sad chest-thumping anthem, it mainly comes off as foreboding, as if Ye and Jeezy are murderous 9 foot monsters lurking in caves. So it doesn’t really fit on the album, but as a single it’s energizing and inspirational, especially when Jeezy, master of all things energizing and inspirational, emerges from the forest.
[8]
It hurts to see so much hate on Kanye’s autotune opus. I think he’s made the best possible defense of autotune in modern hip hop / whatever this actually is. He so explicitly says ‘this is not a gimmick’ by making a concept album out of it.
How in the holy what-have-you is making a concept album centered around a gimmick not gimmicky? Or is it the self-serving faux-narrative that’s doing the heavy lifting?
(And now you might know why I didn’t bother to weigh in on these traxx!)
Matias, I’m very pro-autotune, but not in the service of this. Give me goofy T-Pain jams over this any day of the week. He’s a more sympathetic sadsack, too. I think the “this is not a gimmick” quote is so telling because Kanye saps out all of the fun that gimmickry might imply.
And btw, Kanye is GREAT when doing goofball novelties (among other things). The fact that “Slow Jamz” and “Gold Digger” and “Through the Wire” exist make something like “Amazing” that much more inexcusable.
Well it’s not like he lost the tune-making ability with this album. And autotune can be used as a gimmick, but in the end it’s just another tool, and on this album it’s used to its full extent. Instead of plopping an autotune track on his usually to “mixed bag” album releases, for once he decided to go all out and make a coherent work. And while all I can find on his other albums are strong songs and bland songs mixed together randomly, on this every track compliments eachother, and there’s a sense of purpose to the whole thing. The vocal effect is a part of that, it’s not “kanye soul beat 124″ with autotune on top of it, the sparse soundscape is a perfect match for it.
The importance of Autotune on 808s is really overstated, I think – Kanye uses it in an interesting and effective way, but that doesn’t stop a good proportion of the album from being total crap.
I think this is a decent song, a lot better than the other 808s singles. But I still want to know why we accept a rapper singing ATROCIOUSLY when singers who rap terribly get routinely pilloried. Reeks of double-standard, and Kanye’s singing is – with or without autotune – as bad as, say, Madonna or Nadine Coyle’s rapping any day.