Well, let’s qualify that statement. Kanye and his producers/managers/record execs are brilliant. Kanye’s latest album, 808′s & Heartbreak, is a COMPLETE departure from his previous records. And when I say complete, I may be under-emphasizing the fact that moving from rapper-who-samples-from-everything to pop-singer-with-pitch-correction-effects-and-original-compositions is an incredibly drastic change.

Kanye has sold millions of albums; in fact, he’s sold millions of each of his albums. The College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation were stellar – 10 Grammys from 24 nominations, numerous other awards, and triple platinum certifications all around. However, these records were a trilogy. They had an overarching theme around education, and were all very similar in nature of style, technique, and musicality (some might argue for a lack thereof). They were awesome, sampled, explicit language-ridden rap albums through and through.

808′s & Heartbreak takes a different approach. It’s left the education motif, the rap, and the sampling techniques in the trash. iTunes, amazon.com MP3, and others classify it as a hip-hop or rap album; it is most definitely NOT. If anything, this is one of the better pop albums i’ve picked up in awhile. But this is not without quite a bit of controversy. MTV has a blog article titled “Kanye West Inspires the Question: Should Rappers Sing?.” When I tweeted that the album is great, quite a few of my followers disagreed whole-heartedly. So is this approach good? Is releasing a pop album with all singing, little if any “rapping,” no cursing, and no sampling a good thing for Kanye West?

Hells yeah.

This is why Kanye, his producers, his managers, and others on his team are brilliant. They just opened up a completely new segment – think of how many 8-14 year olds have parents that won’t let them buy explicit albums. Think about how many adults that enjoy popular music detest rap. Or young people in the same category. Kanye has proven he’s diverse in his musical ability, and it’s only going to help him out from a business perspective. Not only is 808′s going to sell like crazy, but his back-catalog is going to be reinvigorated from people who are just discovering Kanye is truly a popular artist.

I smell a (few) Grammy(s).

Too long for Twitter, so it’s going here: stop complaining
about top level executives getting a ton of money, ESPECIALLY CEOs and
CFOs. Even with government bailout money, as far as I know the
government is NOT suspending Sarbanes-Oxley, so the CEO and CFO are
still under great stress to keep their company clean.

Being paid multiples of millions of dollars when managing a
multi-billion dollar company is completely appropriate. The market
respects it, employees respect it, and VCs respect it. When your name
goes on your financial reports as CEO and there’s the possibility that
your CFO is doing unethical things behind your back, it’s over. Do not
pass go, do not collect $200. CEO goes to jail, potentially for doing
nothing, and is unable to provide for his family (which hopefully isn’t
an issue) and keep the social aspect of his/her life together. Taking a risk like this is HUGE, and is another small part of justifying the large sums high level executives are paid.

Go ahead and fight, but I’m staying firm on this. There are
always situations where this won’t hold, and I’m sure they’ll come up.
But overall, I think it’s completely justifiable that the CEO of large,
publicly-traded companies be compensated appropriately.

SpaceX Falcon 1Today, history was made. A privately funded company achieved a successful orbital flight of their original and independently developed two stage, liquid oxygen and rocket grade kerosene powered launch vehicle.

Why does it matter? Because for years many individuals have been saying that this wouldn’t (and couldn’t) happen, that private industry did not have the resources nor means to develop the technology necessary to rival the big budgets of governments. This provides an opportunity for an entire industry to emerge out of nothing, for an industry to come about that will provide a cheap, safe, efficient way of transporting people and cargo into orbit.

More importantly, today’s event will create competition. Other companies will spring up with better, cheaper, faster ways of performing the same feat. They’ll be able to carry more payload, transport humans, and make money. In fact, it’s highly likely that SpaceX will have to work very hard in order to stay competitive.

After speaking with a friend about this today, my friend remained skeptical. So I looked up the following figure, and will leave you with it. In 1954, Sir Roger Bannister broke what was said to be an “impossible-to-beat” world record by running 1 mile in less than 4 minutes, at 3 minutes 59.4 seconds.

That record was broken 6 weeks later.