Album Review: “ye” by Kanye West

I have a game I like to play in my head where I compare older musicians to newer artists. The model goes “_______ is the _______ of modern music.” I don’t claim it to be an original exercise, but it helps me contextualize an artist in history. A common example is Eminem as Elvis. I happen to like Nas as Bob Dylan (incredible lyricists, but both share difficulties with listenability be it singing ability or beat selection) and NWA as the Sex Pistols.

One artist I’ve always had a hard time placing was Kanye West. Could he be Kurt Cobain, breaking through early ’00s gangsta rap the way Nirvana broke hair metal? Could he be Axl Rose, with all the public blowups and personal turmoil? By the time My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy came around, I had thought I had settled on David Bowie. Kanye wearing pink polos at a time where 50 Cent and G-Unit were wearing bulletproof vests and NFL jerseys was every bit as radical in hip-hop as David Bowie dressing like an androgynous alien in the early 70’s. They both broke convention, redefining both music and fashion. Their musical output was as close to unimpeachable as it comes. MBDTF and the G.O.O.D. Fridays series was to Kanye what the Berlin Trilogy was to Bowie.

But somewhere after MBDTF, Kanye lost the thread, even more so than before. He had gone on to marry a Kardashian and declare himself a literal God on Yeezus. That album was challenging to listen to but was possibly the most creative Kanye had been to that point. Lou Reed in a review for Yeezus put it best:

“It’s fascinating — it’s very poignant, but there’s nothing warm about it, sonically — it’s really electronic, and after a while, his voice and the synth are virtually the same.  But I don’t think that’s a statement about anything — it’s just something he heard, and then he made it so you could hear it too.

At so many points in this album, the music breaks into this melody, and it’s glorious — I mean, glorious.  He has to know that — why else would you do that?  He’s not just banging his head against the wall, but he acts as though he is.  He doesn’t want to seem precious, he wants to keep his cred.”

From that point on, Kanye’s musical output faltered. The Life of Pablo came out three years after Yeezus, and rather than the quality of the music (which was decidedly meh), media focus was on the feud between Kanye and Taylor Swift over the lyrics in the song “Famous.” Kanye was becoming more famous for being famous than famous for his musical genius.

In short, the Bowie comparison didn’t work anymore. Bowie remained a pleasant person, even through his own turmoil. Bowie’s material didn’t begin to falter until his mid-40’s when he got swept up into power ballads, big hair, and drum reverb like everyone else in the 80’s.

The comparison game left my mind until Kanye showed up at Trump Tower shortly after President Trump’s election in 2016. What precedent in the world was there for that? Kanye’s MAGA fandom arose again in early April this year with Yeezy’s return to Twitter with Kanye tweeting his appreciation for Trump and Trump himself retweeting Kanye (this is the worst timeline). In Twitter parlance, it was “lit.” While refreshing my timeline constantly, I came across this tweet from poet Hanif Abdurraqib:

https://twitter.com/NifMuhammad/status/987888988374601729

Abdurraqib was referencing Morrissey’s gradual but recently accelerating fascination with the far-right and Islamaphobia, but the comparison is apt in more ways. As lead singer of The Smiths in the 80’s, Morrissey helped define what was to become Britpop and all of Indie music. Like how Drake owes his career to the groundwork Kanye laid with 808’s & Heartbreak, allowing rappers to sing and show emotions other than rage and sexual arousal, Oasis and Radiohead owe their careers to the work of Stephen Patrick Morrissey.

The overlap of the Yeezus/Morrissey Venn diagram doesn’t stop there. Both are volatile and emotional figures. British press in the mid-90’s was as over Moz as music media is today of Kanye. Both are often described, to put it kindly, insufferable. Morrissey responds to this sentiment in his autobiography in a way that would resonate with Kanye:  “Well, yes, of course, I’m a bit much — if I weren’t, I would not be lit up by so many lights.”

Both also, deal publicly and in their music with mental health issues. Morrissey has acknowledged suffering depression (if the song “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” weren’t enough of a hint) and Kanye, well, look at the album cover for “ye.” Kanye dives right into his mental state on the album’s opening track, “I Thought About Killing You.” It is a spoken word poem over muted wafting vocoder harmonies. The lyric “And I think about killing myself, and I love myself way more than I love you” could have come from a crumpled up page from Moz’s composition notebook. At the end of the song “Yikes,” Kanye returns to an adlibbing un-rapped style confronting the stigma of his bipolar disorder head-on, referring to it as his superpower and releasing a primal scream. It is a moment where Kanye still surprises, admitting vulnerability and throwing up a middle finger.

Where the Morrissey and Kanye comparison falls apart wholly is on the matter of sexuality; Moz is sexually ambiguous/celibate, Kanye is decidedly not any of those things. The song “All Mine” is about fucking, and how much Kanye likes to do it. I present the following bars without comment:

I love your titties, ’cause they prove
I can focus on two things at once

Let me hit it raw like fuck the outcome
Ayy, none of us would be here without cum
Ayy, if it ain’t all about the income
Ayy, let me go ahead and see you spend some

The album’s low moments are more contextual than a musical issue. Kanye’s difficulty being decent toward women is on display. At the very least there is progress from the days of “Gold Digger,” but it doesn’t make for any less cringe-inducing moments. There is a regrettable lyric about Russell Simmons being “me too’d” on the albums third track. The song “Wouldn’t Leave” is an ode to women who stay with men who do terrible things. It is the only song where Kanye directly addresses his recent fuckery, recalling his wife calling him aghast at his comments about slavery being a choice. In yet another end of track rant, Kanye shouts out women who put up with their man’s nonsense as he closes with the song’s refrain “I knew you wouldn’t leave.” It is easy to interpret this as more sinister than he probably meant it. Like most issues with Kanye, it is a matter of ideas being ill-considered rather than being born of genuine malice. Another such example is the album’s closing track, “Violent Crimes,” which is another entry into hip-hop’s growing subgenre of “new father discovers women are in fact, people.” The ostensibly enlightened lyrics about Ye’s new perspective on women are undercut as the track ends with a voicemail from Nicki Minaj, revealing she had ghostwritten at least some of the lyrics.

That said, this is a good album. At 7 tracks, a trend I can get behind, it is more engaging and concise than the sprawling The Life of Pablo while also being more pleasant to listen to that Yeezus. The album’s highlight is track 6, “Ghost Town.” Musically it recalls My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and the coda of Yeezus‘ “New Slaves,” featuring an old soul sample with muted fuzzy guitars under Kid Cudi’s crooning. However, it is the outro by 070 Shake that captures the essence of the album and of Kanye West the individual at his best.

We’re still the kids we used to be
I put my hand on the stove, to see if I still bleed
and nothing hurts anymore, I feel kinda free

From the very first track on College Dropout to today, when Kanye works, he is able to evoke melancholic defiance which works to uplift. On the album’s opener, he encourages the listener to say the things you know you’re not supposed to say, just to see how it feels. It is a way of putting your hand on the stove. Maybe it won’t hurt, and perhaps you’ll feel free.

But you also might burn the shit out of your hand.

The album is good, almost excellent. It is his best release since 2010, which itself is a gobsmacking realization. Though they have become more infrequent, Kanye has had hit songs in these past eight years. He has never disappeared from the spotlight, but the reason why he is there has undeniably changed. He is now an outrageously famous celebrity who is a famous celebrity because he is outrageous. How this latest release will impact his legacy remains to be seen, but there is a joy to be found in listening to it, and what more can we really ask?