Kanye West still isn’t in everyone’s good graces -- to say the least.

After The Times revealed that the rapper would be headlining the final night of the 12th Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, you could almost hear the boos and groans emitting from some of the bitter comments that poured in from our readers.

Coachella fans have always closely scrutinized the lineup they await so anxiously  -- and why shouldn’t they? They drop major money to attend the three-day festival (weekend passes are $269, plus surcharges, and camping passes are $75).

But the addition of West to a lineup that also includes Arcade Fire, Kings of Leon, Duran Duran, the Black Keys and the Strokes could be a non-starter for most, judging by the complaints.

“Great lineup this year.....but Kanye West is a definite deal killer for me, so me and my girlfriend won't be going for the first time in 4 years,” reader cabeachguy wrote, while reader oldskool57 thought it was a “real disappointment that loudmouth Kanye West is gonna' be there. What a goof that dude is.”

It’s only the third workday of 2011, but are pop fans already regretting whom they went home with for last year’s consensus pick for album of the year?

Three prominent music writers have recently penned pieces that to one degree or another find some new unsettling or underwhelming notes in Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” that went unremarked upon during the deluge of hyperbole that first greeted it. Each agrees on the album's importance, but implies that “Fantasy’s” ambition and bombast may have covered up some troubling undercurrents in Kanye’s vision, and underlined pop's need to crown consensus heroes.

The most cutting take is from the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who finds that Kanye’s color-coded value system for women in “Fantasy’s” lyrics is “incredibly, almost casually, racist.” Lines such as “Champagne wishes/30 white ....” seem to simultaneously embrace and demean white women as aura-building possessions for West, and Coates also notes that “I'm less amazed, but pretty depressed, that colorism is back -- ‘Rolling with some light-skin chicks and some Kelly Rowlands’  is little more than ‘you're pretty for a dark-skin girl’ in this postracial era.” He closes with one of the most withering criticisms of a rap album in ages: “I'm tired of rappers who deploy slut-shame to smoke-screen their near total fear of (women).”

This appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on Monday night: Josh Groban announced his new album, "Josh Groban: The Best Tweets of Kanye West." Says Groban: "At most, his tweets are 140 characters. But the depth of his passion is immeasurable." (via Urb.com)

-- Randall Roberts

At this point, Kanye West's “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” is on the short list of 2010's most acclaimed albums. But seldom do we credit names other than those on the cover for getting it to the top. For every album created by a pop-music polymath, there are more than a few helpers. Guys like Andrew Dawson.

Though the name of this classical-pianist-turned-hip-hop-engineer may not ring a bell, Dawson is associated with some of the decade’s seminal artists (the Game, John Legend and Common, to name a slim few).

Since the arrival of West's 2004 debut, “The College Dropout,” Dawson's presence has been instrumental in the crafting of the Chi-town rapper’s trademark sounds. In 2005, Dawson was handed a Grammy for his role as a recording and mixing engineer for “Late Registration” at the ripe old age of 24. Not bad for a dropout of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, which he abandoned to pursue a career in recording and engineering. 

Speaking about his interaction with West and his new album, Dawson’s take on the recording process unearths some fresh perspective that you won’t find in the liner notes of "Fantasy." Want to know how a sample of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" ended up in the song “Power”? Ask this guy.

Describe how you started working with Kanye West. And what do think it’s taken for you to be successful working with him prior to his latest album?

When Kanye was halfway through "The College Dropout," he’d fired about six to eight engineers in about a month because they weren’t up to snuff, and it was eventually my turn to be next on the chopping block. I haven’t been fired since, seven or eight years later.

How did you get involved with the "Fantasy" album, and what were some things you talked with Kanye about in terms of engineering and mixing it?

"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" pretty much started New Year’s Eve 2009. He flew everyone out to Hawaii the day before New Year's Eve ... and I remember on New Year’s Eve I was in the studio getting everything ready to go for the next day. And on Jan. 1, we were getting into the recording sessions and worked pretty much 24-7 for six months straight out of Hawaii. I literally would leave to go shower, change clothes and come back to the studio. There weren’t many beach days. But Kanye went through his process and worked on it solid for a good six to seven months.

It wouldn’t be a Kanye West record without at least a dash of ego, and sure enough, midway through the rapper’s holiday single “Christmas in Harlem,” in which West paints an atmospheric portrait of the holiday season in New York, he confesses, “My only question is, ‘Where my presents?’”

Mostly, however, it’s a charming trip through the hood that’s a bit sweet, a bit sexy and largely soaked in seasonal good spirits.

“Though it's 40 below the wind chill / And we wiping snow up off the windshield / It's still, wonderful night to be alive, baby,” West croons.

Rapper Cyhi the Prince also takes a playful verse as the voice of Santa in Harlem (“Thugs think I’m a blood / Cuz I won’t take this red suit off”), although that portion is missing from the iTunes download. The full version, also featuring Cam’ron, Vado, Jim Jones, Musiq Soulchild, Pusha-T and Big Sean, is available for download at West’s website. There's also an audio-only YouTube posting here.

West calls on Teyana Taylor to sing the chorus: “Christmas in Harlem / Right after autumn falls / Soaking it all in / Then we go hit the mall.”

OK, so Irving Berlin it’s not.  But it captures the mood of this time of year in Harlem, where I spent several days visiting friends a couple of years ago, ice skating at an outdoor rink on a frosty afternoon one day, catching the A train to Central Park on New Year’s Day to take a morning stroll as a light snow fell.

That theme also appealed to Louis Armstrong, whose recording of  “Christmas Night in Harlem” often surfaces at this time of year, if not as widely as his Yuletide classic “Zat You, Santa Claus?”
“Christmas Night in Harlem” dates to the early '30s, and was a Top 20 hit for Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra. It was written by composer Raymond Scott and lyricist Mitchell Parish for the Broadway revuew “Blackbirds of 1934,” Parish being the Songwriters Hall of Fame member perhaps best known for his lyrics to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.”

For his recording, Armstrong tweaked a couple of racist lines that were typical of Tin Pan Alley songwriting — lines that were sung by celebrated songwriter-vocalist Johnny Mercer and trombonist Jack Teagarden in Whiteman’s recording. (It also was recorded by Ozzie Nelson and His Orchestra and several other big bands in the '30s and '40s.)

Satchmo, however, transformed the original race-specific references (“black and tans” become “people,” while “the old colored neighborhood” becomes “that good old neighborhood”) into the universal language that made him a beloved musical ambassador to the world.

Here’s a link to a YouTube posting of the Armstrong recording (audio only), paired with Dinah Washington’s “Ol’ Santa.” Armstrong’s song starts at the 2:40 mark.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo (left): Kanye West at 2009 Grammy Awards. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

Photo (right): Louis Armstrong with Johnny Cash in 1970. Credit: Les Leverett / Sony Legacy

The music business doesn't have an overabundance of sure things these days, but a holiday-themed album from Susan Boyle probably comes close. Like a warm cup of cider, Boyle's "The Gift" is all yuletide comfort, and Boyle fans have propelled the album to more than 1.1 million in sales in four weeks, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In the last week alone, the album has sold 272,000 copies.

In its return to the pole position on the U.S. pop chart, Boyle knocks out Kanye West, whose "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" slides to No. 7 in its second full week. A return to hip-hop after the downbeat "808s & Heartbreak," West's "Fantasy" has generated a bounty of media attention and given the artist a solid two-week total of 605,000 copies sold.

Boyle has a lead over Taylor Swift on the Billboard-managed tallies. The country star's "Speak Now" has already sold more than 2.1 million copies, racking up an additional 182,000 copies sold this week. A number of holiday albums infiltrate the charts, including Jackie Evancho's "O Holy Night" and the latest collection of music from the Fox show "Glee." The two sit at Nos. 3 and 4, each selling a little more than 128,000 copies.

A few weeks ago, writer Jon Caramanica wrote a perceptive piece in the New York Times on a remix technique developed in the mid-1990s by the late Houston producer DJ Screw. A storied personality in the history of Southern rap, Screw would "chop and screw" his tracks with the aid of cassette players by slowing down the music to half-speed. The result, released on mixtapes (the real kind: cassettes) and sold on the streets of Houston, was a tripped-out, bugged-out sound that turned real-time 88 bpm boasts into menacing, deep, digital 44 bpm blues. At first, chopped and screwed tracks sound funny. But the more you listen, the stranger and more magnetic the music becomes.

After Screw died in 2000 -- he was addicted to cough syrup, a fact that no doubt played a part in the allure of such slow sounds -- his mixtapes became Texas talismans, underground tokens of a weird moment in rap history. David Banner's 2003 album "Mississippi: The Screwed and Chopped Album," given a reworking by chop and screw master DJ Michael Watts of the Swisha House crew, is one of the darkest, bleakest documents of the '00s.

The remix technique has continued to germinate underground since its peak in the late '90s/early '00s, and its influence has spread to a new generation of music makers -- including the loose affiliation of producers such as Salem and oOoOO creating spooky, syrupy dance tracks that fall under the so-called witch house subgenre. Last year, some joker chopped and screwed Justin Bieber, and nothing sounds more dangerous than this screwed version of "Party in the U.S.A." by Miley Cyrus.

The Grammy Awards went young -- and pop -- in 2010, awarding crossover teen star Taylor Swift the show's top crown -- album of the year. For such a seemingly wholesome and beloved artist, it was seen as a somewhat controversial pick.

The Grammys have typically skewed older -- Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Herbie Hancock, U2, etc. -- and rarely award an artist without a lengthy body of work. Unlike Norah Jones and Lauryn Hill, Swift's detailed tales of teenage life seemed aimed at a direct audience, and when she gave a wobbly vocal performance with Stevie Nicks, Team Swift was on the defensive. 

The Grammys can't win. Even when they gift its top prize to America's pop sweetheart, complaints pour in. But the Swift win did hint that Grammy voters are willing to go more mainstream than ever, and she competed in a field that also included the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, the Dave Matthews Band and Beyoncé.

One could argue that such a field represented the genre-hopping tastes of the iPod generation, or one could note that the choices were almost stubbornly old school. Voters went with all major label artists, all major stars and carefully spread the picks amid pop, rock, country and R&B fields. A year for the unexpected it was not.

Whether the trend continues, or voters throw in a Radiohead, Hancock or White Stripes-like surprise, will be answered soon enough. Grammy ballots are due Nov. 3, and nominations will be revealed in early December. Before voters put down their pencils, here's a look at some of the likely nominations -- and perhaps some deserving ones. 

(This is Part 1. Stay tuned to Pop & Hiss for a continued look at album of the year front-runners.)

Eminem, "Recovery" (Aftermath/Interscope)

Grammy potential: Despite his sometimes penchant for shock-and-awe rap, Eminem has been one of the rare hip-hop artists to graphically explore violence and sex and still earn Grammy recognition in the major categories. Twice Eminem has been nominated for Grammy's top prize. Sales, of course, have helped his cause, and Eminem has a trail of critical accolades behind him. "Recovery" is seen as a more a serious turn than 2009's "Relapse," and little makes an artist more appealing to Grammy voters than getting older.

Grammy deserving: When Eminem released "Relapse," it was his first album of new material in five years, and it captured an artist who had become a cartoon. As rapid and clever as his rhymes were, the drugged-up serial killer shtick was just that, and its appeal was based on whether or not one could see it as humor or some sort of metaphor. "Recovery" is full of anger, but it's largely directed at Eminem himself. It's a moody, lacerating examination, and one that has sold close to 3 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The fact that it's perceived as a more thoughtful album than "Relapse" should make it Grammy bait. 

On Monday, at a Hollywood screening of his short film “Runaway,” Kanye West mused in characteristically magniloquent terms about his creative output. He and pop diva Rihanna are “blue bloods,” West said from the stage, explaining that their “ideas turn red when they hit the air.”

But less than 24 hours later, the firebrand rapper-producer was apparently seeing red after reading an appraisal of “Runaway” written by your humble correspondent.

West took to his well-trafficked Twitter account to vent about a Times reporter’s blog post error concerning his new album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”  Specifically, it was my omission, since corrected, of the word “Beautiful” from that title in two out of three citations on the post that seemed to yank his chain.

Judging from West’s tweet output, though, he took the omission as a deliberate and personal attack.

The performer’s Twitter postings -– with their seemingly deliberate misspelling of this author’s name -- follow in their entirety after the jump:

British pop/electro act La Roux won America over this past summer with their thumping summer anthem "Bulletproof," and now the band has teamed up with Kanye West for its next single.

The rapper breathes new life into a remix for "In for the Kill," which is getting the single treatment in the States -- it was band's second single from its eponymous debut album in the UK early last year, and peaked at No. 2 on the British charts.

"How could you love someone that hurts you, plays you, smokes you, provokes you?" West growls on the revamped track that features heavy drums in lieu of the band's signature '80s synths. "How could you love someone that burns you, turns you into a werewolf?"

La Roux's frontwoman Elly Jackson said in an interview with Pop & Hiss earlier this summer that she always had faith in the single, despite it taking quite some time to catch on with the masses.

“When we wrote ‘In for the Kill’ we were dead certain it would fly. I was very involved in the underground dance scene. When we started making [the music] it wasn’t very trendy. By the time we finished, it was. It was becoming fashionable,” she said. “We knew we had to hit the nail on the head at the right time. If we would have released it a year later, we don’t know if it would have been as popular. So much of that [type of music] has come out since then. I think after that we knew ‘Bulletproof’ was a bigger hit. I totally believed in what we were doing. You’d be pretty stupid to put five years into that and not believe in what you did.”

Jackson has already returned the favor as she is said to be featured on West’s next single -- the recently leaked "All of the Lights" -- alongside an exhaustive list of singers including Elton John, Rihanna, Alicia Keys, Fergie, John Legend, The Dream, Tony Williams, Kid Cudi, Charlie Wilson and Ryan Leslie.

Monday night’s Hollywood screening of “Runaway,” an expressionistic 40-minute movie written, directed by and starring Kanye West, gave a preview peek at the rapper-producer’s buzzy debut film project -– a visual “accompaniment” to his November album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” that will be broadcast simultaneously on MTV and BET on Saturday.

But then, coming on the heels of recent premieres in New York, Paris and London, this latest “Runaway” screening also functioned as a forum for the hip-hop superstar’s grandiose sense of self as well as West’s latest assertion of the increasing insignificance that mainstream media holds in his promotion process.

Describing himself as a “philanthropist of culture,” a “soldier” and a “cultural icon” in remarks after the screening, West admitted there were times he considered taking his own life, presumably at points after his mother’s accidental death in 2007.

“I contemplated suicide,” West told an audience consisting of friends, creative collaborators, radio programmers and media types.

He added: “I will not give up on life,” explaining he takes creative initiative from “people who will never have their voices heard.”

Superstar rapper Kanye West has become a master of all media in creating anticipation for his upcoming release, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," unleashing songs free to the Web, conceiving show-stopping television appearances and prepping his first short film. Sometimes, as appears to be the case today, the artist's unpredictability has even caught his label off-guard, as the outspoken artist took to the Web and declared that the artwork for his upcoming album had been rejected for the U.S. market.

The artist has also been regularly baring his soul on Twitter, offering his thoughts on rugs, women's fashions, last year's MTV Video Music Awards fiasco with Taylor Swift, the overuse of the term "LOL" and plenty, plenty, plenty more.  On Sunday, the artist utilized Twitter once more, declaring that his desired album cover for "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" was "banned in the USA!!!"

Kanye wrote, "They don't want me chilling on the couch with my phoenix!" and revealed a piece of graphic artwork in which a naked representation of the artist was in a sexually suggestive position with the mythological firebird in female form. In a follow-up tweet, West wrote, "In the '70s album covers had actual nudity... It's so funny that people forget that... Everything has been so commercialized now."

A source familiar with West's discussions with Universal Music Group's Island Def Jam on the cover art agreed to speak solely on the condition of anonymity, proclaiming that he did "not want to lose my job over this." The source seemed to indicate that the debate over the artwork was not one that was cut-and-dry. West was strongly urged to use alternate art, the source conceded, but added that West "was told if he wanted to do it, the label would stand behind him."