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Like diamonds,

Kanye West

is indestructible

.

His value may have been devalued and even sunk, apparently, but nothing can damage his internal structure, pure carbon crystallized in songs and sounds that make him immune to any external aggression.

Few times has a cancellation request been more unanimous.

Tens of thousands of people burn Kanye West at the moral stake of social networks and ask that he stop listening to his music.

No one has come to his defense.

Not even the most liberal postmoderns lift a finger to defend the man whose round cheeks have flowed praise for Hitler ("I like Hitler"), criticism of Jews and blacks ("slavery was a choice"), and open

confessions

, without nuances, of admiration for Nazism ("I love the Nazis").

No doubt.

With a plummet known only in Tom Wolfe's characters and after a succession of crazy decisions, everyone hates Kanye West, now known as Ye.

But is it really possible to remove his music from our lives?

(and the more complex question: do we really want to do it?).

To know more

Music.

The madness of Kanye West, the superstar who "loves the Nazis" and who believes that Hitler invented the highways

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Adidas breaks with Kanye West in a decision that will cost him more than 1,000 million in sales

  • Writing: PABLO PARDO (Correspondent) Washington

Adidas breaks with Kanye West in a decision that will cost him more than 1,000 million in sales

On Sunday night

Rihanna

was flying over hundreds of millions of viewers around the world and at the climax of her performance she sang

All of the Lights

and the Super Bowl crowd simply went wild.

"If you want it, you can have it for the rest of your life," Kanye's lyrics sang without anyone, anyone, protesting.

But if one put moral rigor before the adrenaline that songs like that provoke, it is true that one could throw away his records, although not without a certain effort: the cover and the credits in the paper container, the plastic casing, the vinyl to the point clean and the CD in the trash, because the CD has been useless even for recycling.

You can also burn them in a ritual purification bonfire, whatever it smells like.

And then he could delete his songs from his Spotify playlists, never type his unique name into any search engine again, not Kanye or Ye, and skip it if it appeared by algorithmic accident.

We would still listen to Kanye though.

Because

Kanye is everywhere

.

His songs have dissolved like particles and have been dispersed through the air that the entire planet breathes.

They are universal and, moreover, they have been acquiring new forms.

They are another pandemic, if you want to see it that way, and there is no vaccine that can exterminate it.

The Chicago singer-producer is

one of the most influential musicians of the 21st century

, if not the most.

Success is ephemeral: the tens of millions of records sold, the billions of views of his songs and the awards hugged with a smirk can be forgotten.

Musical influence is an asset that is impossible to nullify.

It's like a stigma.

And that's where he's still unbeatable today, and why he could still rebuild his empire, no matter how damaged the reputation of the Kanye West brand, for so many years associated with the concept of awesomeness.

With a unique combination of talent, ambition, effort and audacity, almost 20 years ago he began to forge a sound that was imitated by pop music in all its shapes and forms.

Introducing soul music into hip hop and R&B was one of his most immediate contributions, when he was still a young and up-and-coming producer, more than 20 years ago.

At a time when people think you can make a good song at home with suggestive

hi hats

and a cracked

glockenspiel

, his more experimental productions

helped turn R&B into the new mainstream pop

: embracing the vision of Michael Jackson and his sister Janet in the 80s, his sound had a direct impact on Beyoncé, Rihanna, Alicia Keys or John Legend.

And that concoction jumped to pop: neither Britney, nor Madonna, nor Justin Bieber, nor even k-pop, would sound the same without Kanye.

In hip hop, the use of soul

samples

buried the claustrophobic environment of the dark 90s towards a rap of puffy and carefree exuberance that aspired to the top 1.

The first to see it was Jay Z,

who promoted it from Roc-A- Fella, his record label, but other stars like Nas and Common also embraced the

beats

of so-called

chipmunk soul

,

chipmunk soul

: old recordings from the '60s sped up to Alvin and the Chipmunks' vocals.

It was the sound of the first decade of the century and has survived to this day.

With his fascination for

futuristic aesthetics and digital editing

of sound, his scintillating music was also instrumental in the return of electro and synth-pop, and of course the black messiah was one of

Daft Punk

's apostles in the US.

And from there to the popularization of EDM there was only one step: Kanye's electronic passion lubricated the world stardom of the Skrillex, David Guetta, Kygo or the ill-fated Avicii, a plague that also still bounces off our ears.

A derivative of this was the success of the Black Eyed Peas and the so-called

electrohop

;

another was the rise of Afrofuturism, the black science fiction that has reached its maximum popularity with the two

Black Panther films.

, whose music has been the responsibility of Kendrick Lamar.

Kendrick is the biggest rap star today and is partly a disciple of our hated protagonist.

Not only musically, with that avant-garde ambition, but also lyrically.

West positioned himself against the current of hip hop with lyrics that introduced personal concerns and a somewhat naïve social conscience, so far removed from the exaltation of violence and the ghetto of the 90s. The man who criticized George Bush and later

Barack Obama

sang about his mother and about respecting the family, about having anxiety and depression, showed his vulnerability, or a mystical spirituality, and rejected drug use and dealings.

Then it was a rarity and today it is a trend.

At times he's been the biggest cocksucker on Earth, but he's also displayed a (hyper)sensitivity that has had and has a huge impact on a whole generation of rappers/singers: Canadians Drake and The Weeknd to begin with,

but

also Frank Ocean, Kid Cudi, Lupe Fiasco, Chance the Rapper, Childish Gambino, Vince Staples or Pusha T, all of them active and some of them with megastar status.

And beware: the radius of influence jumped the ocean and spread to Africa, where the

Kanye West sound

has had a direct effect on the entire continent, including the Maghreb, and especially on the great musical powers such as Nigeria and South Africa.

We further expand the radius of action.

Let's think of Coldplay, for example, or Bon Iver, or James Blake, or of course Lana del Rey, and

Rosalía

, of course.

Let's even think of Paul McCartney or Adele.

Would they have sounded the same?

Would they sound the same today?

As Amy Winehouse would say: No, no, no.

And now let's talk about

Auto-tune

, omnipresent in pop today.

Who puts it in the very center of the sound map as a tool to convey pain and sadness and enhance the emotions of a broken heart?

Donda West's son almost 15 years ago in that masterpiece that was and is '808s & Heartbreak'.

That album paved the way for trap and its advent as music of reference for global youth.

Without him, we probably wouldn't have had Future, Travis Scott, Lil Peep or XXXTentacion, or at least we wouldn't have had them in the same way.

And we wouldn't have spent the whole year singing "Stay that the night without you hurts-eeee-le."

Canceling Kanye West's clothing lines hasn't been so easy either: Adidas, Gap, Balenciaga and the rest of the brands with which he was associated broke their contracts months ago, with bleeding costs, but his products are the new extra perlo: they circulate on the internet at insane prices like chocolate bars in a war.

Try typing Yeezy on Amazon or Alibaba and you'll see.

The day before yesterday it was announced that Pharrell Williams will be the new creative director of Louis Vuitton occupying the gap left by the untimely death of Virgil Abloh and nothing can better demonstrate the

authoritas

that Kanye still exercises in US culture: Pharrell is a crony and Abloh was protected from the the first rapper to

wear fine luxury

and to team up with Vuitton itself, with Fendi, Givenchy, Celine, Valentino... Kanye was a pioneer in introducing urban aesthetics into haute couture and became a model of new masculinity in fashion. he was gender fluid.

Meanwhile,

marketing

degrees from half the planet continue to teach in their classes the

strategies of the self-adoring megalomaniac

to become one of the 10 richest black men in the US, according to a

Forbes

calculation prior to the tsunami in recent months.

Even his biggest nonsense has been interpreted by some as possible ways to improve his position as a businessman and artist, but his undoubted successes are today a model for many entrepreneurs: creating expectations, exhibiting great ambition without complexes, taking risks with a limit, promoting the secrecy to turn each news into a great event.

And, despite everything, the image of authenticity that he projects.

And now, what the hell does the most extravagant presidential hopeful in US history plan to do with his life?

Nobody knows it for sure.

Maybe not him.

But if she wanted to go back to recording or performing, she won't lack an audience: in the last month she had more than

50 million listeners on Spotify alone

, almost the same number as Beyoncé in the month in which she triumphed at the Grammys and announced a world tour.

He ranks 33rd among the most listened to in the world.

This diamond can still shine if he wants, and there is no cancellation campaign capable of avoiding it.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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