I love the way the vocal samples and weird elevator-music keyboards cascade over muted drums on “The People.” Lily Allen’s voice floats beautifully through the staccato keyboards on “Drivin’ Me Wild.” I love the nakedly populist dentists’-office one-two punch of the instantly recognizable Nina Simone and Paul Simon samples on the last two songs.
RAP GEMIUS COMMON FINDING FOREVER FULL
More often than not, the final effect is really full and pretty. Kanye takes those same sounds and makes them sound like they’re suspended in amber, hovering inert above drum-shuffles and airy synths. Dilla took snatches of noise from old jazz and soul records and refashioned them into a sort of diffuse psychedelic boom-bap, layering them up in all sorts of disorienting ways. fucking sucks.) Kanye might not be able to recreate Dilla’s thick, heavy bass, but that doesn’t end up making his work on this album any less weirdly powerful. (Let’s set aside for now the indisputable fact that A.I. A.I., after all, turned out nothing like an actual Kubrick movie, but it wasn’t that much like most Spielberg movies either. But that’s sort of what’s interesting about Finding Forever in trying to find common-ground with a dead master, Kanye’s figured out some new corners and eddies in his own sound. Most of the negative reviews for Finding Forever correctly note that Kanye basically comes nowhere near meeting his goal. was Steven Spielberg’s attempt to make a Stanley Kubrick movie. Kanye West has been saying in interviews for a while that his production for Finding Forever is an attempt to recreate J. Let’s Get It is a much better album than Finding Forever, just like Resurrection is, but I still like it way more than I expected to. Let’s Get It went for overblown gothic melodrama just like Finding Forever goes for soothing soft-pop languor, and lyrics are almost irrelevant to the success of both. In a weird way, Finding Forever reminds me of Young Jeezy’s Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101 because of the way both albums so single-mindedly pursue a certain aesthetic. The album is all surface, and I mean that as a compliment. But I like him on Finding Forever, and I like him because of the way he disappears into the music. Resurrection might be a great album, but Common even sort of pisses me off there, if only because his intonation has this unbearable smugness, like everything he says is this divine jewel of knowledge that he’s deigning to bestow upon us.
Speaking as someone who sort of hated Be, with all its tweeting flutes and somnambulant drums and flat righteousness, I had pretty much no expectations for Finding Forever. But here’s the thing: I sort of like the way the album fades into the background. There’s no urgency in his delivery, and combined with all the pillowy Fender Rhodes noodling in the beats, the album fades right into the background. As plenty have already pointed out, Common’s pop-culture references have somehow become so boring and mainstream that they distract: the first verse of “I Want You” is a really evocative meditation on the physical sensation of absence that comes with a breakup, but then he gets to that “it’s kinda like The Breakup with Jen and Vince Vaughn” clanger and everything goes to hell immediately. Virtually every song falls into one of three cliched conscious-rap subjects: the vague and nebulous for-the-people non-statement, insight-free world-gone-wrong cautionary tale, and the sickly and pandering loverman song. There’s certainly plenty to dislike about Finding Forever.