Right now there’s a small but nonzero chance that any given working musician in the world will get an out-of-the-blue invitation from Kanye West to fly out to Hawaii and contribute to one or another of his recording projects. Or at least that’s the picture I’m getting from the tracks he’s been releasing to the Internet, which highlight both his eclectic tastes and his occasional bursts of prolificacy. Like for instance this weekend he released two songs that include appearances from artists as varied as Rick Ross, Justin Bieber, Raekwon, and Bon Iver.
Friday night, hot on the heels of his announcement that he and Jay-Z are about to drop a five-track EP, he leaked one of the songs intended for it. Jay and ‘Ye get top billing on “Monster,” but Nicki Minaj runs away with the song, as she so frequently does. In terms of simply drawing attention, indie-folk standard-bearer Bon Iver takes the prize, by virtue of being the last person on earth whose name you’d expect to see right after Rick Ross and Nicki Minaj’s.
And then, as if to prove that he’s just fucking with us, this morning he dropped a remix of Justin Bieber’s “Runaway Love” built around the beat to Wu-Tang’s “Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit” and a verse by Raekwon, which again suggests that ‘Ye is choosing collaborators by rolling dice or maybe throwing darts at a Pitchfork RSS feed.
Next up for Kanye is a track with Too $hort over a beat that samples Gang Gang Dance’s “House Jam,” with vocal contributions by Attila Csihar. Or something like that.