Michael, good advice. I'm refreshed by how non-dogmatic you are, as is evidenced here and in your guidelines page. I quite like Kanye. For a while I dismissed pretty much all modern rap out of hand if it wasn't sufficiently indie, but I'm over that. Really, I don't consider myself primarily a fan of hip-hop, or indie rock, or rockabilly, or drum and bass, or thrash, or whatever. I consider myself a fan of good music. Studio, I think you're sorta judging Kanye out of hand without actually listening to much of his work. While he collaborates with some glammy artists, he doesn't really fall into that category himself. He does sometimes veer towards that, or towards self-aggrandizement more generally, but it's not really a defining feature of his work. BTW, it's cool that you like Austrian economics. I do as well, though I was banned from the Mises Institute forums for lashing out at the Institute over Gary North.