Kanye 2049: Visual - Musical FanFiction
The year is 2049. The polar ice caps have melted, billions of people across the world face famine, displacement, and sorrow. President Barron Trump is looking for a way to alleviate the suffering, but the future looks bleak. A future that could have been avoided, damned by a past that didn’t seem to care.
Kanye West has been missing for 30 years.
The art of the mashup is an often misunderstood one. Written off by many as nothing more than a novelty, made for your YouTube sidebar, only to be clicked on when bored or just curious. Of course, this is a gross misinterpretation of a type of music that’s transformative, uniquely of its time, and endlessly creative.
It wasn’t long ago that hip hop producers were looked down upon snobbishly for their practice of sampling, chopping, and screwing with old songs to create the backbones for the newly formed beats that rappers would make playgrounds of. A couple of decades ago, give or take, one such producer made his debut on the world’s stage. Music, undoubtedly, has never been the same.
It’s a long-standing tradition in Kanye’s intensely loyal and fervent online following to remix and mashup songs from his discography. Mashups usually feature two separate artists, often of different genres. This creates a compelling crossover effect that, in theory, attracts listeners of all stylistic persuasions. And really, who could resist this 12-year-old Weezer collaboration with Weezy himself? “I’m me, me be” indeed. What I’m getting at, is that for an artist who’s spanned such a wide range of styles, influences, and genres, it should serve as a no-brainer that Yeezy would be mashed up with… Yeezy.
Okay okay okay, you’re not an idiot, you want to know why you should care about whatever this “Kanye 2049” mashup album is. I’ll tell you now, friend! I think this album is proof- scratch that- undeniable evidence that the humble mashup can not only provide fun refreshing takes on well-loved classics, but also can have the potential to offer triumphant career retrospectives, utopian “what-ifs”, and genuinely moving, conceptual art.
This album sees the blaring horns of Yeezus tempered by the contemplative beats of Kids See Ghosts, kicked off by the bouncy, goofy swagger of Lift Yourself. I can’t even explain what every song is made up in with complete detail. Mainly because I don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of every Kanye beat and acapella verse that Toasty Digital clearly has. But I’d be doing you a disservice in the first place. Listen for yourself, see what your ear picks up.
By the way, many of the songs aren’t just straightforward mashups of two songs, but oftentimes multi-dimensional, layered, segmented sonic palettes that float from one Yeezy highlight to the next. Hell, a lot of the music on this album isn’t even music made by Kanye West, rather songs that he originally sampled in their unaltered forms, “features” that host the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean, and many, many more. Beloved, classic cuts like “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” reckon with scrapped masterpieces like ”Slave Name”. In this universe, Ye & Jay not only reconciled their differences but never had a falling out, to begin with. We came together and managed to defeat a global catastrophe. Taylor Swift was forced into retirement.
In an alternate universe, Kanye West made this album to widespread critical and commercial success. And being no slouch, announced his presidential bid in 2020, winning the contest and securing a Good Ass Job as the Commander-in-Chief. And with that, we waged a war against climate change and won. To top it all off, using advanced inter-dimensional travel technology, he gifted us, the denizens of this doomed earth, a message of hope.
It might seem silly to get misty-eyed over a mash-up album on YouTube. But this isn’t just a mash-up album. A cursory look at Toasty’s channel reveals video after video, all featuring hand-crafted music videos communicating a visual and sonic aesthetic that’s simultaneously wholly unique and able to highlight the visual highlights of Kanye’s own singular and ever-changing style. It’s a love letter to the work of the greatest pop artist of our time, and a loving look at past, future, and present that could have been so much better than the one that we have made for ourselves. But maybe it’s not too late. After all, it’s not 2049 yet.
