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Ye

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It’s impossible to talk about a Kanye album without discussing the circumstances of its creation, since those circumstances usually inform the listener with the underlying themes of the ensuing work. The promotional cycle behind Ye has been a tumultuous one, to say the least: associations with conservative firebrands, assertions of brotherhood with a President supported by Nazis, misogynists, and all sorts of awful people, and even allegations of slavery being a choice are all the highlights from this era. West attempted to clarify his thoughts, but all that came across was West’s inability to apologize or even admit he might have been wrong about something. He never was able shake the fiery allegations lobbed at him by the press and social media: the stream of memes referencing “Get Out”, the allegations that Kanye forgot his activists roots, that he’d been trapped in Calabasas too long to forget what it was like to be black in the real world.   For the faithful, there l
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"DAMN." and the Freakout Album.

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There’s a storied history of artists creating what I am dubbing “freak out albums”; an album that exists as the oddity in their catalog, the album which splits their discography in those works before & after that record, that album that acts as a resultant of some huge emotional event in the artist’s life. In the case of Kid A , it was Thom Yorke undergoing a mental breakdown of sorts and the other band members experiencing burnout after a period of immense popularity leading to copycats and fear of an inability to satisfactorily follow-up OK Computer . For Yeezus , it was Kanye West on the precipice of domestic bliss, with a wife and a child on the way, as well as a violent reaction to the maximal tendencies and excess that had defined My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Watch the Throne. Even for records like Nirvana’s In Utero or Neil Diamond’s Trans or even when Bob Dylan went electric, this idea of a radical shift or destroying expectations permeates these works or mom
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This is my response.

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This is what I want to talk about today. I really want to address this. I feel like this article describes quite a few people who voted for Trump; the women, the Latinos, the African-Americans, et al. The article in a nutshell talks of a Muslim woman, an occupant of two of the demographics whom Trump has offended at every turn, and why she chose to vote for Trump. I want to talk about this because I just want to break down her arguments and understand why she did what she did. "But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, “HOPE NOW,” didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration." To which I say, congratulations your anecdotal evidence is more than enough proof that Obamacare and his mortgage loan modific
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Suicide Squad is Not Good.

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Suicide Squad is not very good. It's the worst kind of "not very good"; it isn't spectacularly awful, its not incredibly over-the-top, its not filled with that one standout character that makes everybody say "they saved the movie." No, it's just your run-of-the-mill aggressively average type of "not very good." The plot is straightforward and rote, none of the Squad are particularly memorable, Rope Guy dies in 2 minutes but I'm guessing everyone saw that one coming. There are so many problems in this movie, I kind of just want to break down each component one by one to see how detrimental each is to the movie. Let's start with point number one: The Joker. To put it bluntly, Jared Leto does not understand who the Joker is at all. Nicholson did, infusing the same manic energy he brought in "The Shining" with some who was cunning and twisted. Ledger did, eschewing humor for a very visible sense of off-kilter, demonstrating h
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