Bogan Via :: "Kanye"

A high school acquaintance of mine relays the following story about meeting Kanye West. I suspect many people have a similar version with personal specifics. On the night his second LP, Late Registration dropped, West shuffled past my former high school classmate at the release party. After exchanging pleasantries, West said, "Have you heard my new record?" Before allowing time for a response, he answered his own question, "It's fucking incredible." This moment, and thousands of others like it, lodged Kanye firmly in the consciousness of the modern music fan, a brand of excellence and arrogance of the type that yields single-name soccer players and single-name musicians. Kanye. Or consider Bono, who once leaked his own music by listening to it at volume with the windows of his French villa conspicuously open. It resounds with arrogance bordering on the sublime. After all the anxiety, relativism and pragmatic thinking, it is a relief to hear confidence in art. Brooklyn-by-way-of-Phoenix band Bogan Via have released a single, "Kanye" that reflects this cultural evolution. But instead of brashness, they hollow out the center, replacing it with minor key synthesizer progression and lyrical urgings like, "Give your heart to everything, you gotta move when the move seems right." The vocal duet and somber mood evokes something caught between Mates of State and Beach House's records before you knew about Beach House. This is a diet of sadness, the knowledge that so many have put hope in your arrogance, alone in a tower of your own making, sentenced to a lifetime of the same conversation and your same trope answers. Here, this is beautiful, but they already know that.

Listen :: Bogan Via - "Kanye"