Yes, songs like NWA’s 1988 hit “ Express Yourself” pushed for truth in rap storytelling years before West wrote a rhyme, but “Express Yourself” was couched in a tremendous dose of hypocrisy - a proverbial diss track that committed the same fallacies it attempted to call out. Kanye West began his music career when the concept of New Sincerity had already been present in film, literature and even music for close to 20 years, but the mode had yet to transform hip-hop’s predominately gansta rap trappings of decades prior. As a result, you get film characters like the disheveled, sunglasses-clad Richie Tenenbaum espousing prototypical Kanye West lines like “Sunglasses and Advil / Last night was mad real,” without the image feeling like much of a stretch in either direction. When so many of their peers use the trendy antithetical lenses of detached irony and hollow parody to distance themselves from their material, Anderson and West actively - increasingly so throughout their careers - seek to inhabit their projects, leaving parts of themselves within, making it impossible to remove their identities from their work. Eschewing the cynicism and irony of the previous generation, the two embrace the earnestness of a bygone era - think of the supreme sincerity of Dickensian characters such as Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim. Despite the apparent diametrical stylistic opposition between the two, both musician Kanye West and filmmaker Wes Anderson create their individual works in the post-postmodern mindset of New Sincerity. It’s really no wonder the mash-ups on the Kanye Wes Anderson Tumblr fit together so naturally.
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