Maybe Kanye isn’t as talented as Bowie. Maybe his legacy won’t be as mighty. But he is the only mainstream star nowadays taking the same kind of risksAnd there it is. As sure as night follows day,the news that Kanye West is considering making an album of David Bowie covers and interpretations has provoked the inevitable apoplexy. The venom thrown at West is dispiritingly predictable, and to a degree comprehensible. After all, and he makes himself very easy to dislike – just as Bowie made it extremely easy for terrified parents and uptight bores to dislike him in his creative heyday. The fact is,though, that West is the closest we have to Bowie in the contemporary mainstream. There is nobody else who can sell as many records as West does (30m-odd album sales and counting) while remaining so resolutely experimental and capable of stirring things up culturally and politically.
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Source: theguardian.com