The Singles Jukebox

Infamous.

[Video][Website]
[4.91]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: There’s not a more fascinating producer/sample-source relationship than Kanye and Nina Simone. Both of them are iconoclasts that made careers of out their sheer, unfiltered expression and/or total madness, and at the same time marked by a sickening obsession with excellence. All throughout Ye’s ouevre, Miss Simone has been present in his most ambitious artistic statements, from his greatest track for another rapper (a creative use of the vocal/piano acrobatics of “Sinnerman”) to the chilling Yeezus centerpiece “Blood on the Leaves” (which sets her pained take on “Strange Fruit” to menacing mecha-trap). Here we get the Four Tops-via-Nina, Nina-via-Rihanna and Italian prog-via-his most inmediate beat in a while. “Famous” is all Kanyes at once –the self-aggrandizing celebrity, the ineffable musical genius, the misogynistic asshole, the redemption-seeking family guy — and, despite the record’s “unfinished” nature and offensive lyrics like the Taylor line (which definitely took points from my otherwise perfect score), it’s a crystal clear testament to the man’s brilliance. That moment where Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam” kicks in is sonic gold; it’s a reminder that this dude can still agitate the zeitgeist by flipping a sample. 
[8]

Crystal Leww: I don’t care about the Taylor Swift line. I do care that this is boring. I can’t believe that Kanye West sounds boring!
[3]

Jibril Yassin: Kanye crafted the sweetest kiss off to fame here – who else would juxtapose Sister Nancy with Nina Simone, Rihanna and sprinkle a ton of Swizz Beats ad-libs? He plays a lot with the contrast of old sounds on The Life of Pablo in a seemingly random fashion, yet “Famous” is one of the few cases where everything feels seamless. That switch-up happens and you find yourself skipping with joy. Again.
[7]

Jer Fairall: Nonsensical provocation, sweeping misogyny, egomaniacal bloviating–would it be too obvious to point out Kanye’s complete transformation into the Donald Trump of music? No longer does he even offer the salve of an occasionally intriguing production quirk: between its flailing aimlessness as a composition, Rihanna in maudlin “Love the Way You Lie” mode, and Kanye’s own hectoring, tone-deaf flow, “Famous” is as gaudy and ugly as a Vegas hotel.
[2]

Brad Shoup: All that editing and his drums still sound like wet cardboard. I like it though. I like the first draft feel of these tones. They’re rough and not serrated, muddy and not murky: deliberate haste. Marshaling Rihanna to trace over Nina: is this subtextual flaunting? Perhaps he wanted three women to redirect the heat generated from that first verse. Or maybe he’s just piecing knocks and rings and whoops together because he’s a master sculptor, even when the results still seem in-process. I just wish he’d turned the verses entirely over to Swizz.
[6]

Alfred Soto: I’m up for a Kanye-curated R&B/hip-hop revue like Quincy Jones’ Back on the Black or Diddy-Dirty-Money’s Last Train to Paris. Dance hall, Nina Simone, and Rihanna? Sign me up. Shut his mouth though.
[4]

Claire Biddles: A mess that gets more incoherent and laughable as it slogs through its 3 minutes of garbled samples and half-arsed guest vocals and spare lines from other songs. I’d advise checking out at the dumb Taylor Swift namecheck. Most importantly Rihanna deserves better, and I never thought I’d be equating Calvin Harris with ‘better’ in any sense, but here we are.
[1]

Will Adams: Oh hey, that Taylor Swift line. Oh hey, a complete lack of any other noteworthy thing in this song.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: I can’t fully hate anything that has the Sister Nancy sample in it, even while Kanye’s attempts at punchlines have now fully morphed into Andrew Dice Clay being unable to distinguish the difference between self-aggrandizement and self-parody.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: My chief problem with “Famous” is the same problem I have with the majority of The Life of Pablo: Kanye won’t fucking shut up. The production is pretty consistently interesting (though, my god, eight credited producers on this track?!?), and I like Rihanna’s re-singing of Nina Simone (who chimes in at the end, herself). But Kanye’s verses are garbage, including the line you’ve already heard about Taylor Swift. He can do better, and he has done better, and Yeezus showed me that he’s not out of ideas yet. But I blame him for foisting Desiigner on us, and I blame him for the not-good-enough-ness of Pablo, continually tinkering with it or not. That goes double for “Famous.”
[4]

Anthony Easton: I wonder, after Lemonade and Pablo, if Rihanna is frustrated by taking third place, though her album is perhaps more interesting. I wonder if Kanye cares more about music or everything that surrounds music. I wonder about what to do about all these media tie ins and streaming services and cross overs, and the failures of capital. I wonder about Pablo itself–with its exhausting move between the vulgar, the offensive, the self-loathing, the pure, the formally beautiful, the self-aggrandizing. That perfect Black Power loop between Rihanna (singing as best as she has in a very long time) and Nina Simone (who is Nina), and how it book-ended so much of the complexity and confusion, the compiling of an album that just refuses to be stable. I have no idea what to do with Pablo, a work of genius and a nightmare, and I don’t even know if it works as music, but music matters less than concept, and that Rihanna/Nina loop is defiantly proof of concept.
[8]