I guess one can say that Jay was a real influence on Kanye. Talking about what Kanye's lyrics could be. What about if Jay wrote his lyrics? The new breed of
"MCs" think in order to get respect or be considered in the same breath of Jay-Z, they have to not write their lyrics. Not only Kanye, but Jay-Z and Lil'Wayne have no direction and talk about a wide variety of topics in their lyrics. All within a couple bars. They almost always NEVER stay on topic. Especially Lil'Wayne. MAYBE, just MAYBE it has to do with drugs and alcohol like Troup was saying. LOL! If you as a rapper have no attention span, why should I as a listener? Of course Kanye wasn't writing down his lyrics. That was Rhymefest's job. Lol! Maybe its a spontaneous, "spur of the moment" thing but this only contributes to the lack of lyricism we now hear today. Eminem is a great writer although his lyrical content (especially his earlier albums) throws me off.
Nonsense.
Jay-Z has tons I mean TONS of verses where he's on topic the entire time, he isn't Wayne where he just strings together
a ton of punchlines (which can be dope) even then Wayne has various songs in his discography with topics and consistency throughout
the verses even before his evolution as a rapper from his hotboy days when he mainly used to write.
I can understand Wayne but as a Jay fan who listens to the dude regularly I gotta say you're pretty off with that comparison.
On topic :
There are benefits to freestyling and punchin in your bars just as there are benefits to simply writing.
Freestyling basically forces you to apply all of the basics of rapping at one time, you develope a natural feel
for flow and riding the beat this way, combine this with punching in, you can spit a couple bars, sit back think
on it then come back and do it again. Basically your recording becomes a scratchpad, you spit, memorize, rewind,
rap over it, get a feel for the beat and develope ideas in a way that's very organic. The downsides are if you haven't
got it all memorized and the file is deleted, the song is pretty much gone forever, it's much harder to do complex rhyme schemes
because if you're punching it in it's harder to hold all of those rhymes in your short term memory ( at least for me it is and I'm a guy
who can come up with some pretty damn complex freestyles)
Writing on the other hand is like being
an actor you have to practice your performance until exhaustion, you can get
a ridiculous level of intricacy, you're able to think and focus on ideas more, but one thing it really requires is understanding the mechanics of
Rhyme Scheme and flow, you can't be a good writer if you don't understand the mechanics behind what you're doing when you freestyle or when you rap and string lines together period.
Once you start recording and having to stay on beat with a bunch of complex rhyme schemes, specific moods you're trying to convey etc.
The difficulty increases A LOT, the pay off is worth it in the end though.
I mean just look at Nas and Eminem, rappers who excel at the craft because of their mastery of the pen.
I personally like to write my verses because the level of control is unmatched, though I have been known to
freestyle whole verses and still blow away cats.
With that said I don't think punching in or freestylin his verses makes him lazy,
he's still a perfectionist and he's still crafted pretty damn amazing albums.
He's also obviously had ghost writers (Cons and Rhymefest being known ones).
