Album/Track Review

Now that we have just finished a movie on the topic of sampling music and creating new tracks and albums, I'd like to bring up the song, "Dark Fantasy" from Kanye West's newest album, "My Dark Twisted Fantasy". This song is one of my favorites off of the album, but one little bit of the song had me thinking about sampling copyrighted materials, and what portion of that sampled music is "OK" to use. One line of the hook is, "Can we get much higher?", and this line was taken directly from another song. This song is Mike Oldfield's, "In High Places". The line sounds exactly the same in Kanye's song as it does in Oldfield's. I bring up this particular instance because it occurs in a relatively recently released album, which I think should receive recognition as one of the best albums of 2010. This obviously means that I really like this album, but the movie that we just watched had me thinking about the fact that West directly took someone else's idea and sound without actually recognizing that person. I suppose I'd be completely ok with it if Kanye actually included the names of the artists whose works he sampled. I definitely respect Kanye as a producer, but I'm somewhat apprehensive to recognize his genius without recognizing all of those who added to his album.