He found himself at the heart of a hydra-headed production unit bent on smashing convention, resetting pop culture with Kanye-led global hits such as Mercy and Blood On The Leaves: complex, multi-part songs that brought a conscious artfulness to mainstream hip-hop.
"He was someone who smashed conventions, like Ginsberg, and broke through to what he called a new rhythm, writing the way he talked, using the voices of the street.
The thread that held them together was the impulse to smash the conventions of their country and remake it with revolutionary ardor.
Kate the obedient one, the incurable romantic, and Baba, her alter ego, determined to smash the conventions and defy the strictures of church, priests, nuns and parenthood.
According to a cover feature in Wired, it represents not merely an attempt to "define humanity's relationship with sound and the universe" but also to "pioneer a music format that will smash industry conventions", neither of which are claims anyone was in a hurry to make for, say, Beady Eye's Different Gear, Still Speeding.
The disciplines of solid character and punchy dialogue that were required on EastEnders – allied to the courage to smash the conventions on occasion, such as in Dot's monologue – have guided his solo work, including The Nativity (2010), which applied to the Bible the storytelling lessons of soap.
She is pop music's favourite oddball, famous as much for her avant-garde outfits as her convention smashing musical stylings.
(J. Hoberman, reviewing the movie in the Village Voice, criticized its "timid fidelity to a movie that smashed the commercial conventions of its day").
The first Grand Cherokee, the largest and most luxurious of Jeep's offerings, made its entrance by smashing through the convention-centre windows of the Detroit motor show in 1992.
Which is why I am still amazed that Frank Ocean's newest opus release saga managed to smash through these conventions like some sort of sonic Kool-Aid Man.
