The College Dropout is a populist work, and that album and its follow-up, Late Registration, remain to many the ideal of what Kanye should be.
It is a weightier and more serious extension of his previous, more populist work, Affluenza, about a miserable psychological syndrome growing out of conspicuous consumption in a never-ending drive to keep up with neighbours/colleagues/whoever, and cueing mental illness.
I never actively looked for the commercial populist work I've done on film and television.
And why not, he asked, "I'm a songwriter," a signal that in his mind the distinctions between so-called high and low culture had little meaning when tackling Beethoven's most popular and populist work.
"Anything that helps to develop new works, populist works, and speaks to a broad audience is something I want to work on".
Sir Antony Gormley had become the Sir Thomas Brock of the 21st century, his alternately sententious and populist works saying as much about the aspirations of New Labour's optimistic, vacuous culture as Brock's Venuses and Victorias said about the sickness and pomposity of empire.
This mushy sometimes-with-the-bankers, sometimes-with-the-middle-class thing isn't working, and the real swing voters, as opposed to whatever it is the DC centrists are talking about, are the populist working class folks.
There is a supremely confident Citz, which offers reinterpretations of classical plays and populist new work, and brilliant young artists, from all backgrounds, working wherever they can.
Now, as a kicker, Allegra LaViola delivers a group tribute to this filmmaker, artist, poet and radical populist, whose work can be heavenly ("The Gospel According to Matthew") or hellish ("Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom"), but is usually both.
Gladiator may be 10 years ago now, but director Ridley Scott has had his persistent faith in Russell Crowe amply rewarded; Crowe may be puffier of face, hoarser of voice and done rather too much confrontational living in public, but he still has exactly the right kind of leading-man steel to make this ambitious, serious and unashamedly populist epic work.
Stanley Greenberg, a pollster for the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, said populist themes worked for Mr. Clinton in 1992 and helped Mr. Gore go from an 11-point deficit to a 5-point lead (and eventually a slim popular-vote majority) in the 2000 campaign.
