tlop had a lot of cultural impact so maybe

but i didn't really feel Blonde dominate culture. you could say it's the 'best' of the decade if you feel that way but idk if it impacted culture as much as tlop let alone more than any other album

depends what exactly we mean as cultural impact

i think tlop dominated the narrative of music and hip hop for months and months.

i don't mean the controversy i just mean the music (and maybe the merch/tour too tbf).

it wasn't my aoty, but if you look at everything that came out of it, it was at the core of a lot of big moments of 2016.

I know how OP looks based on his opinion.

Mmmm I think it got consistently stunted from what it could’ve been

First the tidal exclusive

Then Views dropped and took away shine

Then he got things back with saint Pablo tour but had the breakdown and got cut short

I still think it was a defining album of 2016 culturally I just don’t know if I’d extend that to the decade
But it easily could have been And could have been his biggest or second biggest era ever if a few things had gone in its favor

Ima take the bait, i know this threads full of trolls but anyone seriously pretending that Blonde/TLOP were more significant than Views are legit f***ing ed

Two of the biggest, DEFINING songs of the decade. Hotline Bling spawned memes still used to this day. Cover is iconic. One Dance is still one of the most popular club hits, Controlla up there as well. Sold a milli first week. Stretches across various genres, theres s*** for everyone. Drake dominated 2016 like no other rapper in history. Views is still heavily bumped to this day, way more than TLOP and Blonde. You guys need to take off the drake hating goggles and stop being delusional, its mad corny.

You know the world is bigger than forums and twitter, right? Go outside and ask people which album they prefer/are most familiar with out of Views, TLOP, and Blonde. I can assure you Views is winning more than half the time.

Oh ofc you do, just not up to that magnitude as I imagine its really hard to pull off

Also, the universal critical acclaim put a TON of ppl from indie rock and other genres into hip hop and everyone came runnin to see what them 10/10 ratings was all about and obviously stuck around

The casual music listener didnt even take hiphop seriously before this album

from a commercial point of view i think you're objectively right.

It definitely f***ed up some of it's potential mainstream recognition and radio reception. But having it as a Tidal exclusive almost made it more culturally important at the time. People were pirating TLOP like it was the late 2000s, not the streaming era and it was probably the most important album with a real Tidal exclusive that lasted. That was the era where there was a battle for streaming exclusives. From memory the Anti exclusive didn't last long, so without it, maybe Tidal isn't even a player in that streaming war.

As for cultural impact, I'm thinking about the hottest tour of the year from a current pop artist, the hottest merch of year (which left a lasting impression on the merch game, way more than Yeezus rightly or wrongly), pushing Panda to #1, being the set up for Chance's year (which feels strange now but was massive) and multiple multi-platinum songs despite not being tracked for 3 months. The rollout itself and it's relationship with streaming felt like a big moment too.

It's musical reach was more than any other Kanye album too in the sense of the different scenes, musical communities and clubs it touched. Pretty crazy having Kirk Franklin, Pt 2, Fade and Madlib all on the same album. Views was the only other mainstream album that year that did this. For 2016, if it's not TLOP, it's Views to me. In the UK probably Konnichiwa, but that's not even a top 3 UK project from that era to me.

That’s reasonable

the early 2010s were a time for an enormously creative influential brand of Hip Hop and is happily concede MBDTF paved that path for it

You right

Agree on everything you said here

Also set up Post Malone’s supeom was the first Frank thing we heard in a minute and set the stage for Blonde put Sampha on etc etc

Frank didn't ship the s*** out like he was supposed to, fine, but we're not gonna rewrite history and pretend like that album wasn't a huge deal in alternative and underground circles. Basically every bedroom pop act was impacted by it.

Meant blake lmaoo

Was it the quality of MBDTF that really did this tho?

Wasn't the consensus on hip hop already going there?

Kanye definitely helped shift the cultural perception of hip hop but i think of that as something he did his whole career leading up to that moment. Without that, no matter how good it was MBDTF wouldn't have got 10/10s.

In a way it was everything people like him and Outkast had been doing up to that point that made that happen. If Kanye had debuted with MBDTF and his fifth album had been TCD (maybe with Home instead of BIBO lol ) then that would have got 10s too in 2010 imo.

People don’t realise how many hip hop, pop and r&b fans blonde got into more alternative production and songwriters. Reminder it had a mixed reaction at first

It is

yeah it's a shame cos of the streaming exclusive and his health, that TLOP didn't get to be the victory lap/celebration it deserved to be.

Ik this sounds very un-kanye but it would have made for a really fun last 5 years of his 'pop' career if ye had used the tlop format for another few cycles and just let people soak in the kanye sound a few more times Looking back, he sounded finally comfortable in a lot of ways. With TLOP he found a way to give everyone what they want and create a space for him to try some new sounds too like ULB or Fade.

💯

Just because artists don't have millions of dollars lying around to copy one of the most lavish albums ever made doesn't mean it lacked influence. Same thing with OK Computer, TPAB, Songs in the Key of Life, etc. Some albums are special and aren't made to be copied. But artists heard them and said "Damn, I've gotta get my s*** together."

It's a classic, it's one of the defining albums of the century, everyone heard it, everyone will remember it.

30 hours

TLOP will be seen as a classic

It’s rollout f***ed it up but mainstream LOVED it and made everyone love Kanye again

it literally single handedly ended album exclusives on Apple Music and Spotify lol, not to mention all the smaller RnB singers that he influenced

The whole op is a mess

nah its ds2

2016 was different