By Nigel Mika

This generation’s closest thing to Einstein, don’t worry about me I’m fine.” – Kanye West

Kanye West (who I will now refer to as Ye) is a once in a generation talent. He is an artist who is impossible to pin down. He’s not a rapper, but he raps; he’s not a producer, but he produces, he’s a designer, fashion mogul, burgeoning technology giant, visionary, A-list celebrity, Christian, the list goes on. The all-encompassing term that I believe applies to Ye is algorithm breaker. By this I mean, Ye does exactly what he wants to do when he wants to do it, no matter the public opinion. In doing so, he changes the culture. In his own words on Drink Champs: “I change algorithms, when I said (on his song New Again off of his newest project Donda) “if I hit you with the ‘WYD’ you better not hit me with the ‘hey’ it better be like ‘hiiiii’ with a bunch of i’s or ‘heyyyyy’ with a bunch of ‘y’s” that shit actually happened, I now get texts with ‘hiiiiii’ or ‘heyyyyy,’ I changed the algorithm.” This article is going to examine how Kanye West has changed modern culture, using examples from hip hop and modern fashion. Ultimately, I will draw the conclusion that Ye has the ability to change culture because of his uncancelability.

We will begin our journey into Ye’s influence by examining the facet of his life that most people think of when they hear the name Kanye West: his music. We won’t be examining his sonic influence, however, as the revolutionary change he has made here is already well documented. Rather, we will assess his influence on how music is released and streamed. Ye has released 10 studio albums, all of which, except The College Dropout, charted number one in the US billboard top 100. Ye has teased, delayed or surprised us with projects about half of his discography. He is the first mainstream artist to do this so brashly, most notably with The Life of Pablo (which I will now refer to as TLOP) and Donda. Both of these album’s rollouts had never been seen before, however, his methods have since been mimicked.

TLOP is the most notable example of Ye’s brash approach to releasing albums. The chaos of this rollout began during the naming of the project. When Ye announced the album following his sixth studio album, Yeezus (his experimental industrial rap album), he named the project Turbo Grafx 16, this then changed to SWISH, then WAVES before he settled on TLOP. There are also rumours that this project had other names. This is because on the album cover of Ye’s song with Rihanna and Paul McCartney named FourFiveSeconds there was a sign on it with the abbreviations S H M G which was then deduced that Kanye was going to name this next album, So Help Me God. Ye went so far as to tattoo S H M G on himself, but when it was all said and done, he named it TLOP.

If you are thinking the naming process of this album sounds insane, it was, and this was just the start of the chaos. Kanye played the album at his Yeezy Season 3 fashion show on February 11th. Kanye decided the album wasn’t good enough, so he played with it, making more than half a dozen changes to the album in 3 days before releasing the project on February 14th. If you think that releasing the project would be the end of the rollout you obviously haven’t been paying attention. Kanye pulled the album from all platforms after releasing it. He then released it on his mentor and friend, Jay Z’s, music streaming platform Tidal, which became the most downloaded app in the app store. Then Kanye pulled the album off Tidal and said it would never be released. However, in a tweet hours later he said it would be released in a week. Ye modified the album more and finally released it to all streaming platforms on April 1st. The album went number one in the US, selling 3.48 million copies in the states. This formula has now been mimicked by rap artists of the younger generation such as Playboi Carti with his album Whole Lotta Red as well as Lil Uzi Vert with Eternal Atake. Kanye has changed how an album is released.

Another algorithm breaking moment is how he influences sales. Dubbed the ‘Kanye Effect’, a ‘Ye beat’ on average will: have an artist chart 20.3 places higher and increase single sales by 17% for an artist. His production will also increase chart position for an album by 7 places on average and increases average album sales by a not-so marginal 23%.This leads into my next point, Ye’s influence on fashion and the effects of his presence on a project.

Ye is no stranger to the fashion industry, beginning his career by founding the fashion brand Mascotte in 2004 and then abandoning the project in favour of Pastelle in 2006. He then coined himself the ‘Louis Vuitton Don’ in 2009 and arguably was the first rapper to bring high fashion into hip-hop. Prior to Ye, hip-hop mostly consisted of street fashion (think 50 Cent on the cover of Get Rich or Die Tryin’) and while this was an algorithm shift in its own right, the most ground breaking algorithm shift Ye has concocted in the fashion industry would have to be his Yeezy line of sneakers. Ye was signed to Nike in 2008 for a limited couple of runs of sneakers such as the ‘Red Octobers’ which have become infamously pricey in resale. However, due to Nike’s poor treatment of Ye he went on to secure a sneaker deal with Adidas in 2015, leading to the Yeezy line of sneakers. Now, while Ye proclaimed in ‘Heat’ “Yeezy, Yeezy, Yeezy, just jumped over Jumpman.” Alluding to the fact that his Yeezy sneakers were outselling Jordans. This isn’t true. Yet Ye wasn’t wrong to predict that they may overtake them. Considering Ye has only been in the shoe game for 6 years now and his Adidas Yeezy line grosses 1.7 billion it doesn’t seem far off that he could overtake the prince of air, with Nike’s Air Jordan line grossing a healthy 4.7 billion after being in the shoe game for almost 40 years. Yeezy’s also resale for much more which is something to consider when one realises that Jordan’s price point is on par with Ye’s.

Oh, and the last algorithm shift I can fit in this article, when Ye announced he was signing to The Gap, The Gap stock gained $700 million, in one day.

Now, this short essay is not nearly exhaustive of the ways Kanye has shifted algorithms in the modern landscape: getting blackballed after storming the stage after Taylor Swift won the VMA; bringing artists like Kid Cudi, Big Sean, Pusha T, all into the mainstream; producing experimental hip hop off of the back of his most commercially successful album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and foregoing all expectations of sonic consistency. Yet, this has all been because Ye is uncancellable. No artist could switch their public persona and polarize as many people as he has without being the pinnacle of modern culture.

ST. ART Magazine does not own the rights to any photos used in this article.