His third studio album, Graduation, was particularly avant-garde for its time, and its revolutionary sound was evidence of West's confident and exclamatory movement to evolve the genre. Undoubtedly one of the most important of such trailblazers is Kanye West, who in 2004 released his first of a string of records, which, over time, would come to break new ground in the music world. The genre of hip-hop alone has made groundbreaking strides since its birth in the early 1970s, an evolutionary leap which took the strong will, audacity, and pioneering vision of a number of artists over time. Like any number of its artistic counterparts, music has been shaped by a wide-reaching and intricate history of change. Do his more robust paragraphs work? If so, why? If not, where might he cut? How does he maintain clarity of expression? Or does he?īiography Works Cited Print Page Top of Page
The essay seems at once interested in making an analytical argument about the way Kanye West uses his cover art to present himself in a certain fashion, and in making an evaluative argument about West as a musician.Does that matter? How does Burke legitimize his analysis? What questions does he ask of the album art? What contexts does he consider it through? Certainly, in aesthetic terms, the album cover probably doesn't compare to some of the great works of cultural history we might discover in the Snite Museum. Some might consider Burke's choice of an album cover as a focus of analysis a curious one.