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And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week
CMU Beef Of The Week #297: Damon Albarn v Safe Artists
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 11 March 2016
Hey artists. Stop being safe will you? Bloody safe artists. You know who I hate? Safe artists, that’s who. I’m well with Damon Albarn on this one. Why can’t everyone be more like Kanye West? There’s nothing safe about him, mate. Dangerous Kanye West they call him. The enemy of health and safety officers everywhere.
“I’d rather people were like [Kanye] than just really safe” declares Albarn in an interview with Kano over on that there Noisey channel. Damon’s a big fan of dangerous Yeezy, see. He loves the rapper’s “brilliant” ideas. Though not so much the “really bad” ones. And the rapper probably needs to have himself a good cup of tea. Oh, and stop putting his music exclusively on Tidal. Actually, it doesn’t sound like Albarn is such a big fan of risk-taking fearless mavericks like West after all.
Kanye came up in conversation because Kano and Albarn were discussing social media. “The thing about social media” said the Blur frontman, “is that it draws you in to what you are at that moment and doesn’t let you go, especially when people respond to it. That’s why I stay away from it, because I don’t want to be restricted by something I said last night when I was drunk”.
“I’m sure that I would be in so much trouble” he then mused, while imagining what he’d be like as a prolific tweeter, “because I have some quite strong opinions on occasion”.
Talk of mad tweeting, of course, brought things round to Yeezy. Should West take a “more Damon approach” to all things social? “Well” said he, “I’ve known Kanye since he first arrived. Some of his ideas are brilliant, some of them are really bad, but that doesn’t matter… He’s interesting, definitely”.
And that’s all that matters people. Be interesting. Not safe. “I’d rather people were like that than just really safe” Albarn declared. Though, “if I somehow ended up managing Kanye West, fucking hell, I’d definitely start with a nice cup of tea and a piece of cake. Then I’d take it from there”.
But what does Albarn reckon of West’s latest batch of unsafe tunes? What, you’ve not heard ‘The Life Of Pablo’ yet? But it’s up there right now streaming on Tidal. “He’s put it on Tidal, has he?” Albarn says. “That’s probably not the best place for it”. Ouch. And there was me thinking that making your music exclusively available on the Tidal platform was the least safe thing an artist could be doing in 2016.
Meanwhile, West himself has been getting all excited about Ikea this week. Prompting this warning from the UK’s former Deputy Prime Minister. Shut up Prescott, Yeezy’s not into playing it safe. Which is why Damon Albarn loves Kanye West. And hates everyone else.