Let's talk about a few things. First of all, I did get to hear the entire Kanye and T.I. song. I liked it so much that I tweeted about it in glowing terms, so much so that people asked if I was being sarcastic. Hey, I gave such a nice glowing review of the song, which I really like. I like it on lots of levels. I like it inside the song, outside the song. I like how it affects society. I like how the timing is right. I like that the lyrics are beautiful. I like how it shows two competing emotions that matter to us. You know, they're integral to what we're thinking about, what we care about.

You watched Kanye create this situation which was the perfect environment for a song, and then he put a song in it. You know, I don't know how to be. Let me just be frank about this. I don't know how to be an old white guy and like that song as much as I do, because I like it not just musically. I like it in the sense of art with a capital A.

You know, Kanye, it seems to me he doesn't produce art, he lives it. Like he is the art. You know, what he does, what he changes, the people he touches, how he makes you feel, how it changes the world, how it changes your perceptions, how it changes the way you think, who you love, what you can do, what you can't do. That's the art, right? The art is not the song. In his case, in most cases, the artist is the song.

Yeah, that's a great song. I like it. It's catchy. I think I'll hum that song. Maybe I'll download it to my iPod. That's not what's going on here. The song is really great on every level of musicality, at least for the non-musical mind such as myself. He hits all of my notes, so I love it. But it's a much bigger deal than a song. He's just taken the world and put it in real time into a musical focus point.

Have we ever seen anything like this before? You know, I'm thinking of maybe Elton John's song about Princess Di. But even that took a while, right? There was a length of time between Princess Di dying and Elton John writing a song which did in fact do a similar thing. It captured our feelings about it. But here's what's different about that. Elton John didn't kill Lady Di. You know, I don't mean that as a joke. What I mean is that his song was as an observer. He wrote an observer song about a current event that was very important to us. So it was very powerful because we thought about it, et cetera.

Kanye took that to a whole higher level. He didn't just write the song as an observer. He was the situation. He created the change that he sang about, and he included his biggest critic—not biggest, but you know, a good representative critic—to say anything he wanted to say. And in Kanye's song, you've never seen anything like this. This is way bigger than the song.