The One Nobody Escapes

How can anyone making this music not be influenced by Kanye West? That is a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one, and I do not think there is an honest answer that is no.

What actually changed

Several things that are now simply how rap works trace back through those records.

• Sampling as emotional argument. Not just a loop to rap over — a sample chosen because of what it means, carrying its own history into the new song.
• The album as a single statement. Sequencing, pacing, a record built to be heard in order, in an era that had largely stopped rewarding that.
• Permission to not be hard. Enormous, and under-credited. Space for vulnerability, insecurity and ambivalence in a genre that had narrow rules about them.
• Genre as a buffet. Gospel, prog, electronic, orchestral — whatever the song needed, with no apology for the crossing.

The buffet is the big one

That last point is why someone can have Modest Mouse and The Mars Volta on a rap influence list without it reading as a stunt.

Before, bringing an indie rock structure or a prog arrangement into a rap record was a novelty move that needed justifying. After, it was just an option on the table. That door was opened for everybody who came later, including people who would never cite him.

The album as an object

The sequencing lesson is the one I have thought about most, because it is the hardest to execute and the easiest to skip.

Streaming rewards individual tracks. The economics push you toward twelve things that each work alone, and a lot of records are assembled that way now. Building something meant to be heard front to back, where track seven only lands because of what track six did to you, is a deliberate decision to make life harder.

Bluebonnet Plague is built that way. Some of why it took ten years is that arranging a whole record as one argument is slow, unglamorous work that nobody notices when it is done well.

Production as writing

The other thing is that the beat is not a backdrop.

A sample can do narrative work. A chop can make a point the lyric never states. Once you hear production as part of the writing rather than the floor the writing stands on, you cannot go back to treating it as something you shop for after the verses are done.

That is the lesson that most changed how I build songs, and it is why the arrangements on this record are as strange as they are.