"Here is some very obvious criticism of Kanye West as an artist. This is a dead horse, but whatever. I find it interesting.

On Monday Mr. West, who is 33, will release his fifth album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam), and it’s terrific — of course it’s terrific — a startlingly maximalist take on East Coast rap traditionalism. And yet that doesn’t matter nearly as much as it should, at least partly because of Mr. West’s insistence on his own greatness. By not allowing for responses to his work other than awe, the value of the work itself is diminished; it becomes an object of admiration, not of study. Instead the focus is on the whole of Mr. West’s persona and character, which is more fractured, and subject to a far wider range of responses. The result is that Mr. West becomes a polarizing public figure who happens to be the most artful pop musician of the day, not the other way around

Ed: The writer kills his credibility by both comparing Kanye's rapping ability to Jay-Z's and then suggesting, in more than one place, that Kanye has trumped Jay-Z on a verse or a turn of phrase. Such suggestions are completely absurd.