Can Kanye Keep On Going With Tricks?

Let me put something out there: I love Kanye West. His music has provided a jolt to hip-hop as far as sampling and incorporating a wider range of stylistic influences and approaches, but his future development is going to be limited by the fact that he isn’t a very good rapper. Sure, his lyrics can be clever and funny, but he can’t deliver them well and has a tendency to force rhymes that aren’t very cohesive.

I’m afraid his new single, Flashing Lights, while very well produced, may be indicative of what West has to offer for the rest of his career.

So if West can’t actually rap that well, will he ever just go back to being a producer? Or maybe a producer/occasional guest on his songs like Timbaland? As with most West-analysis, it all comes down to his ego. West, of course, already was a phenomenally sucessful producer, but he wanted to be a rapping superstar. I guess the best we can hope for is that more and more of his material is like “Stronger” – very chorus and production heavy with little emphasis on the quality of the flow or what he’s actually saying in the rhymes.