Listen to VH1 Storytellersby Kanye West on Slacker Radio, where you can also create personalized internet radio stations based on your favorite albums, artists and songs.
Beyond the often-exciting performances of already-exciting tracks ('See You in My Nightmares', 'Touch the Sky', 'Stronger'), the main appeal of this episode of VH1 Storytellers lies in West's idiosyncratic take on the vaunted 'storytelling' portion of the show. Instead of grinding the sonic proceedings to a halt to pontificate on the mysteries of the Muse, West's 'stories' take the form of rhymed freestyle tangents on his favored subjects: music, American society, the media, and, obviously, himself. He testifies about the vagaries of fame, discusses being a divine vessel with mock-humility, praises the interracial ideal represented by Barack Obama, talks about 'fight(ing) the war on traditional thinking', and expresses his pride at approximating a Tenacious D lyric.
An outpouring during 'Amazing' even includes an ambiguous apology for his jerky awards show behavior that looks backward but also, as we now know, forward. Taken as a whole, this set reasserts West's most vital quality: his self-awareness. It's this quality that is so often lost on those who quibble over his public self-aggrandizing, just as it is inflated by the post-millenial hipster culture that embraces him as the vanguard of their arch, self-commenting discourse. There's a degree of accuracy assumed by all that doesn't jive with reality.
West is not precise in his rhetoric about himself, but then he never has been; from the perspective of Kanye-philes, what was most surprising about the VMA incident was that, for once, he was snatching up the spotlight in order to point it at someone else. West is not invested in precision, but then neither is the culture that he adapts into his art. He may be the lead in the story he's telling, but he's always in the story; his VH1 Storytellers album powerfully reminds us that that is where he's at his best.