We try to find our analogues to parse it in hopeless American idiom – beats like Public Enemy, words like The Hold Steady's Craig Finn (by which people must really mean poet John Barryman, perhaps). But these comparisons are never quite right. We just don't have fiercely nationalistic artists who gleefully spit in the eye of fascists and hypercapitalists and the entirety of the government; we are, as a nation, too young, too jaded, too greedy, too lacking in a true poetic tradition that's millenia-deep to pull this off. Kanye's rants, for instance, seem more whiny and self-involved than ever in comparison; he's trying to make a flimsy Camelot of his own while we're all enraptured watching Mr. Williamson turn into a modern Fisher King instead. ∆
