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Somewhere downthread, Kanye West was said to have written some of the best wordplay of the past few decades. Could anyone cite some examples? (ideally text rather than video links)
compared to who, yknow?
set the board, 2000 and newer.
k, wipe off every artist who doesn't rap. i like plenty of pop, Heat Waves is great. lyrically nothing.
off Drake's 2021 Certified Lover Boy the T-1 most viewed Genius track is Fair Trade. Drake's longest verse: https://i.imgur.com/elNr1KT.png
off Kanye's 2021 Donda the most viewed Genius track is Off the Grid. Kanye's longest verse: https://i.imgur.com/bWkIdP0.png
listen to both if you want the best context. reading lyrics alone can miss delivery and the point. Hurricane also off Donda has a couple examples:
"I'm that one at Yale" can be heard as "I'm the one that yell" connecting by subject with the subsequent line.
Later
Kanye gives ambiguity in performance, as it can be heard as "ask Him, 'What do you love?'" -- Donda isn't subtle about being a gospel album, but this line is.
but it's not representative to compare Kanye to Drake. it's plenty fair: drake is a worse lyricist, rapper, and producer (and not that i ever really care when it comes to celebrities, a worse person)
representative would be closer with Kanye and Kendrick Lamar.
off Kendrick's 2022 Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers the most viewed Genius track is N95. Kendrick's first verse: https://i.imgur.com/78q6xtA.png
Kanye's is the best of the three by lyricism, performance and production. my method for selection has influenced this, but i think it's better than selecting their most highly viewed tracks on Genius. for Kanye: Mercy, for Drake: God's Plan and for Kendrick: Humble. Kendrick is firmly the best here, but it seems the overall popularity of a song often negatively correlates with its lyrical complexity. see Donald Glover/Childish Gambino. unsurprising of the great polymath-artist of our time, you'd have trouble finding tracks by him that aren't brilliantly written. his most popular is This is America.
Kanye's not as good of a lyricist as Donald Glover, but that's no criticism. Kanye is a better musician, rapper, and producer, and production is where i'll stop.
few artists have a separate wikipedia article for their production discography. Jay-Z isn't the artist he is today (or married to Beyoncé) without Kanye's production on The Blueprint. Artists including John Legend, Common, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, and Travis Scott likewise owe significant success if not their careers to Kanye's work with each. these are careers, on genres? his 2007 Graduation and off it Flashing Lights is the major moment of synth use in hiphop and from it you can draw a straight line to the ubiquity of synth in modern pop. beyond Kanye, only The Neptunes--Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo--have comparable production bona fides. (A little thing I find funny about Pharrell is Happy from Despicable Me isn't even his best song titled Happy. Also this no-right-to-be-a-bop with Trey Parker.)
FiveHourMarathon mentions this below. Kanye's not just the greatest discography of the genre (and MBDTF and Donda are two of the greatest records ever made). his influence can be seen across post-2000 hiphop, and from it all modern pop. in the last 100 years of music, the artists the same can be said of is an extremely short list.
I'm still not sure how you're deciding who had stronger lyricism. Rhyme schemes? Wordplay? Jay-Z is past his prime but latest album blows Kanye out of the water by any technical metric:
Hold "the Uzi vertical", a reference to Lil Uzi Vert, one of the new generation of rappers who can't rap by traditional standards and would be laughed at for his look in the days Jay-Z is reminiscing about.
Or from his verse on 'Drug Dealer's Anonymous' a few years back:
"Before Reasonable Doubt (Jay-Z's first album) dropped, the jury hung/jewelry hung". As the case was concluding, there was a hung jury/before Jay-Z had money from music he was already rich. The "Bling Bling" is him making it obvious that the wordplay was on purpose. The purposeful ambiguity you praise Kanye for is standard in hip-hop.
And as for rhymes, I'll just post some of Black Thought's verse on 'Crowns for Kings':
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MBDTF is one of my favorite albums of all time, so hearing you praise Donda in the same breath puts it on my list.
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