Kanye West - Yeezus

Kanye thrives on contentiousness – if he wasn’t as renowned for his arrogance and pigheadedness as he was for his music, he sure as hell wouldn’t be the behemothic superstar we all know and love to hate. On his last album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he took account of his now-legendary dickishness by making his dickishness the album’s central theme. This artistic direction led to Kanye attempting to balance his persona’s unashamed hedonism with a sort of penitent sensitivity towards how this could be perceived as not entirely commendable of him and how he was actually a good-natured and troubled individual underneath all the sickeningly garish displays of wealth. Dark Twisted Fantasy was actually another critical success for Yeezy, though I debated constantly as to whether it was the bona fide magnum opus that Kanye intended as well as a piece of pure devilish entertainment value. Three years on, here comes Yeezus, where the post-Taylor-Swift-incident navel-gazing continues.

However, before we get into the ins-and-outs of Kanye’s infamous delusions of grandeur, let’s talk about the parts of the album which don’t involve Kanye speaking his mind, because let’s face it, it’s the production on Yeezus that’s got everyone talking. The vibe here is similar to his aforementioned previous effort – a big luxurious-sounding mishmash of synths, pianos, horns, as well as the twisting of Kanye’s own voice through juttering self-samples and autotune. But as everyone’s pointed out, the tracks are noisier, harsher, abrasive and just a little unhinged in places where the production on his previous album was softer and had a more dignified feeling of composure, and the album sounds all the fresher because of it. The beats really do sound like the work of a madman – or at least producers on the commission of a madman, considering the V.I.P. list of auxiliary talent that Kanye brought in to assist in giving the ten tremendously demented tracks the stylishly mangled treatment they deserve.

And the variety of expert opinions really shows in the quality of the tracks on this album, with each dark, steely composition pulling you further and further into the madness. And there’s method within the madness. There’s a lot of exciting shit that jumps out at you within the overall production, like the aggravating electronica that manifests itself in numerous zips, squeals and growls. Or the eclectic and strategically placed, as well as comparatively sparse, sampling picked up from all kinds of crazy places - like the jarring breakdown halfway through New Slaves into Hungarian space-rock - but the more notable samples are the dips into Jamaican dancehall every now and then, which I wouldn’t have thought would work well at all, but in fact work really, really, really well. Despite all the leanings towards descriptions like ‘noise’ and ‘industrial’, the whole thing is a very tight ship, bearing all the hallmarks of professionalism that we’ve all come to expect from Kanye – he’s still never made a bad album, and part of that is because he has an excellent ear for what sounds awesome and what can go into a track to make it grab your attention.

Yeezus is brimming with energy, and Kanye makes no effort to restrain himself, leading to hyped-up bouts of insanity like the Black Skinhead. Guilt Trip, especially, feels like what is in my opinion the album’s most resounding success, with its chiptune-and-piano vortex of trap where Kanye’s flow sounds particularly at home. Hold My Liquor also deserves a mention for its unnerving echoing-through-emptiness production and weeping synths, as well as another stirring bit of participation from Justin Vernon, who’s all over this album as he was in Dark Twisted Fantasy. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, the relationship between this album and Kanye’s previous is a fascinating one, as they both work in much the same way and show the same level of invigorating creativity – the most notable difference is that Yeezus lacks the throng of guest appearances that peppered Dark Twisted Fantasy, leading to an album that’s very noticeably more about the man himself – I mean even more so than usual. Which brings me to something that needs to be addressed, even though as you can hopefully tell from my enthusiasm, Yeezus is an excellently constructed album and as indulgent a piece of entertainment as his last effort, which was arguably one of his best, if not the best. But there’s a problem that dwelt within that album that remains with this one, and to really express what that problem is, we need to talk about the man himself.

First of all, Kanye’s not a great rapper; never has been, never will be. He’s had a few decent lines here and there, but it’d be lying to say that his more obvious presence on this album matches the quality of the more technical, musical side that runs alongside it. I never really know where I stand with Kanye – he staggers between toothless social commentary and an incredibly off-putting lack of maturity that clash awkwardly with each other. And a lot of his lyrics are just plain stupid. Here are a few examples:

“Hurry up with my damn croissants!”

“Your titties, let em out, free at last,

Thank God Almighty, they free at last”

“Eatin’ Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce”

“I wanna fuck you hard on the sink,

After that, give you something to drink”

I mean that’s the kind of shit we’re dealing with here, and the problem is that I just can’t run with it, it just seems to display Kanye's inability to write with any sense of tone or feel or anything, and is mostly made up of uninspired rhymes and references. For a rap album, the rapping is noticeably poor. What's worse is Kanye’s poorly-concealed intention for the music he makes, and the lyrics he writes for it, to be interpreted as having serious artistic merit. I mean, I understand that he knew what he was doing naming his songs things like ‘I Am a God’ – for Kanye to lose his wanton arrogance is to strip him of his most effective marketing asset – but there seems to be an attempt at real heart on Yeezus that, to make another comparison with the sister album before it, falls weakly flat.

For a man who’s forever linked by fathering a doomed child with Kim Kardashian – the last person you’d associate with anything other than totally vapid philistinism – he seems to love writing songs that beg to be heard as heartfelt testaments to having a depressing time having meaningless sex with meaningless people with meaningless wealth, and he seems to genuinely believe that this constitutes an evocative critique or some sort of message other than vacuous descriptions of an affluent and hedonistic lifestyle with a depressing slant shallowly built into it. The world he evokes through his songs is surprisingly lifeless, and seems to be mostly built on bland misogyny. Blood on the Leaves, I’m in It, Bound 2 – these are all great beats, but despite all his trying to prove his artistic capability as a deep and complex individual, his lyricism comes across as the best he can possibly manage, which is shallow and directionless. Blood on the Leaves is actually a great song, but the decision to use Nina Simone’s ‘Strange Fruit’ in a song about a rich cokehead going through a divorce sits uncomfortably, and seems to be a good example of Kanye’s lack of any real sensitivity.

Kanye is many things – he’s talented, exciting, charismatic, consistently relevant, and I do honestly believe, good-natured, but it's an uncomfortable truth that he's not as intelligent as he thinks he is. Kanye may be skilled, and musically he has serious clout, but he’s clearly trying to reach greedily above the level of hip-hop beatmaker to be seen as someone with real depth, even though he’s a man to whom the world beyond the superficial universe he inhabits might as well be invisible. Yeezus is gripping on a musical level, but for an album that seems to be making attempts at being strongly personal, it all seems as shallow as ever. However, if you don't care about boring questions of artistic authenticity in regard to someone as preposterous as Kanye West, as I'm sure most people won't, then on a level of solid musical entertainment, Yeezus is bursting with vibrancy and filled with creative flashes, and is another worthy effort in Kanye West's impressive discography.

Kanye West - New Slaves