Ye

It’s impossible to talk about a Kanye album without discussing the circumstances of its creation, since those circumstances usually inform the listener with the underlying themes of the ensuing work.

The promotional cycle behind Ye has been a tumultuous one, to say the least: associations with conservative firebrands, assertions of brotherhood with a President supported by Nazis, misogynists, and all sorts of awful people, and even allegations of slavery being a choice are all the highlights from this era. West attempted to clarify his thoughts, but all that came across was West’s inability to apologize or even admit he might have been wrong about something. He never was able shake the fiery allegations lobbed at him by the press and social media: the stream of memes referencing “Get Out”, the allegations that Kanye forgot his activists roots, that he’d been trapped in Calabasas too long to forget what it was like to be black in the real world.  For the faithful, there looked to be a point where it would take nothing short of another Dark Twisted Fantasy for West to be redeemed in their eyes. For those of us less so, the Kanye West we knew looked to have been lost.

Case in point.

Gone was the man who jumped into new situations fearlessly, who ruthlessly called out the invisible barriers imposed by the status quo, who always sought to push the boundary no matter the cost. Instead, we saw a man who seemed more broken than ever. Kanye described his situation as the result of an opioid addiction, but it feels more the inevitable result of the themes Kanye has been dealing with his career, both in and out of music: the cutting edge of celebrity, the burden of genius, the desire to repent, the fears of family, and the constant pressure to live up to the ideals set for you. The opioids may have broken West’s back, but Kanye falling apart was an inevitability.

Kanye’s always been known to push himself, but these past couple of years have demonstrated the cost of that approach. For Yeezus, Kanye adopted the methods of a procrastinator. The way Rick Rubin tells it, Yeezus was the most arduous project he’d ever been a part of, since Kanye had so much unfinished two weeks before the album’s release. There’s the most famous anecdote from those sessions:

Just two days before the album was supposed to be turned in, five songs still needed vocals. "Don't worry, I will score 40 points for you in the fourth quarter," Kanye allegedly told Rubin. "In the two hours before he had to run to catch the plane [to Milan], he did exactly that: finished all lyrics and performed them with gusto," Rubin said.

Yet it all managed to work out for him. Yeezus is considered one of the best albums of the past 5 years, and it’s one of my favorite albums of all time. But, in retrospect, Yeezus may be more of a fluke than I thought.

Post-Yeezus, I was concerned with where Kanye would progress from here: MBDTF verges on excess with the amount of guest vocals and samples utilized, Watch The Throne goes all in on maximalism and opulence, and Yeezus stripped it all back in favor of abrasive “minimal” beats. But, after one goes from one extreme to the other, how does one progress? The Life of Pablo demonstrates Kanye’s difficulty with that idea by eschewing cohesiveness in favor of a crowd-pleasing mish-mash of styles borrowed from all eras of Kanye. Pablo was ostensibly a project built for everyone, and the seams definitely showed in how its mass appeal was constructed. It’s an album that lacks the coherence and the central theme that made Yeezus and prior Kanye albums so great, and I think a large part of that lies in the process. 

For procrastinators like myself, we all recognize that the period where it is coming down to the wire is a period of immense stress. But, you couple that with the birth of your second child, the internet outrage of your support of Donald Trump, and your wife nearly dying in Paris, and the mental stress of that alone would be enough to break people. And this isn’t even mentioning Kanye’s mother dying and his guilt around that event, or the high standards & perfectionism Kanye himself maintains towards his own releases. The creative lifestyle Kanye adheres to is one of continuous mental strain: a strain that adds onto his own worries, fears, guilt, and responsibilities. Kanye cracking under this, in my view, was inevitable. It is this moment that ye tries to capture, but it ultimately doesn’t.

The first thing you will notice when you load up ye on the streaming platform of your choice are the words scrawled upon the album’s cover: “I hate being bi-polar its awesome.” Kanye claims to have been very recently diagnosed with a mental illness, one he doesn’t elaborate upon but is presumably the aforementioned bipolar disorder. We can safely assume, then, that this album will focus on Kanye’s seemingly out of character actions and the larger issue of his mental health. It should, then, surprise you that this album really doesn’t talk about any of that.

The album is Kanye’s most insular album yet, eschewing all tack of Donald Trump, Candace Owens, dragon energy, and signed MAGA hats. an album that, in theory, exposes Kanye the same way 808s & Heartbreak did i.e. it should have treated the listener as someone aware of the Trump-conservative brouhaha and created songs that augment our knowledge of the event & explore the different feelings of Kanye through that period. Instead, what we end up getting is a highly insular album that refuses to do any digging or soul-searching on its subject. It’s scattered, unfocused, emotionally inconsistent, and wildly contradictory in its messages. In one way, that makes it the most honest depiction of Kanye’s emotional state since 808s, but in another, it takes the worst elements from recent Kanye and builds an entire experience around that. 

Kanye writes some of the weakest and just downright awful bars of his career on this project: “None of us would be here without cum” is a particular lowlight of the album. Lyrically, this album is a mish-mash of terribad bars like the one above, pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and your typical rap hedonism. The one track that stands out from this mash is “Violent Crimes”, an encapsulation of Kanye’s worries about his daughter growing up that is done honestly heartfelt. It’s raw and a bit messy, but it’s the closest thing Kanye has to a complete song. It’s just a shame that the track comes after tracks where Kanye mentions “thots”, blaming said thots for Tristan Thompson’s cheating, stealing a dude’s girlfriend because he’s famous, cheating on his wife, and getting high to have sex with another woman. It’s immensely hypocritical to basically state the above for 18 minutes only to turn around and claim “'Cause now I see women as somethin' to nurture / Not somethin' to conquer”. I could go on, but I think my point’s been made.

Production wise, ye is yet another reminder that Kanye’s ear for production is phenomenal. The beat switch on “I Thought About Killing You”, the guitar on “Ghost Town”, and the warmth & soul of “No Mistakes” are some of the absolute highs of the record. But, the album doesn’t maintain the coherence and focus that made Kanye’s emotionally-driven so memorable. It adopts the style of The Life of Pablo, taking elements from all of Kanye’s prior works to create the sound of the record. The sound effects that play during the last part of “All Mine” feel ripped from Yeezus. The use of Francis and The Lights’ Prizmizer reminds me of Kanye’s remix of “Say You Will” with Caroline Shaw and Graduation’s “Good Life”, with both records using a modulated human voice as the backbone for their respective beats. “Wouldn’t Leave” feels like a reject from 808s & Heartbreak, with its prominent drums and stripped back synths. A lot of elements of this record remind me of other Kanye records, but that only reiterates the lack of a clear creative vision for this project. Yes, the beats sound good, but none of them sound inspired. None of them feel as instantly iconic as the “Black Skinhead” drums, the violins on “Flashing Lights”, the sample on “Stronger”, and so on. I don’t want to imply there isn’t a vision for this project, though. When I close my eyes and I listen to the songs, I can feel the warmth and intimacy that Kanye wanted to draw out from Wyoming. There’s a sparseness to the songs, but whatever they do have manages to fill the atmosphere. But, I can’t tell how much of that vision comes from the album and how much comes from my knowledge of the album’s creation. And this takes us to the larger point of this review: narratives and meta-narratives.

I’m going to define a meta-narrative as “a narrative which contains other smaller narratives”, i.e. a larger story that plays out using these smaller narratives. In this case, the narratives are the Kanye canon, the eight solo records created by West, and the meta-narrative is West’s life. Part of what makes Kanye so great is the way he uses his life to enrich the meaning behind his records. There is nothing on 808s & Heartbreak that directly addressed the death of Donda West or the dissolution of his engagement. Similarly, there’s nothing on Yeezus that tells the listener why Kanye is so angry. The meta-narrative of those albums informs the listener what the true message of Kanye’s work is. Ever since Kanye achieved superstar status post-Graduation, he realized his life was no longer his own. His existence was fodder for the masses, something for his diehard fans to follow with bated breath as he made his next move. He’s never needed to tell his fans what his albums have been about because we all already know. Herein lies the paradox of Ye: the meta-narrative of Kanye having a breakdown and building himself back up lends credence to the theory that ye is supposed to be messy, half-baked, and disparate, but do the intentions behind a flaw matter? 

There is no doubt that this album suffers due to its flaws: the lack of cohesion, the inherent contradictions, the weak rapping & writing, and so on. But, this album is supposed to capture those flaws in an attempt to show the real Kanye, right? But, how much of that metanarrative is myth-making and how much of it is truth? 

Personally, there are 4 bars on “Yikes” that I feel encapsulates the Ye-era Kanye.

 

“Russell Simmons wanna pray for me too / I'ma pray for him 'cause he got #MeToo'd / Thinkin' what if that happened to me too / Then I'm on E! News”

There’s an inherent selfishness in these bars. In fact, not only selfishness, but also a lack of thought. Kanye’s biggest fear about potentially being #MeToo’d is that he ends up on E! News, not losing his family, his music career, and more. It is a bar indicative of Kanye’s recent M.O.: jumping into conversations that he is neither prepared for nor truly willing to explore. There’s potential for something meaningful in those bars, maybe something about the hypocrisy and irony of those who’ve done worse deeds praying for Kanye’s salvation. But, that potential is squandered due to a lack of time or just a lack of care. It’s a reference that is supposed to come off as wry, darkly funny even, but instead just feels confusing and unnecessarily inflammatory. And that’s not even to mention the verse’s contrast to “Violent Crimes”, with the marginalization of the female victims’ pain compared to Kanye’s invocations of love, care, and reconciliation with women.

To me, it is a set of lines that demonstrate how shallow and constrained Kanye’s thought process at the moment is, and that brings us to the big question behind Ye.

Is this really Kanye, or is this an ersatz version of him? 

Kanye has stated that the man who made this record is the same man who shouted “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”, who built an entire album over the racial barriers holding him back in fashion, and who poignantly examined his place in America as a black male celebrity. But, that would mean that this album would mark the first genuine misfire in both messaging and music. It would mean the man regarded as a god was fallible and capable of mistakes. It would mean the decimation of Kanye’s apotheosis. It would mean that Kanye isn’t some god basking in his own glory, but rather an overconfident artist whose ego has been stroked one too many times.

Going back to the idea of narratives & metanarratives, I think this album’s meaning will continue to evolve as time goes on. Maybe this album will be the low-point for Kanye, a moment where he realizes he’s not completely whole and takes an extended sabbatical to find himself. Maybe this album’s success will lead to Kanye’s continual indulgence and experimentation, causing him to backslide into the methods that originally pushed him to the brink. Whatever the retroactive additions may be, all I know is that in this moment, ye is the worst project that Kanye has put out. Its 21 minute runtime includes numerous questionable choices, moments that should have been culled, and untapped potential. It’s an album that woefully underdelivers on the idea of “all killer, no filler”. The album’s flaws, no matter the intention behind them, serve to continue the idea of Kanye albums as snapshots of the man’s life. 

To me, ye is a snapshot of a man in freefall. It is a snapshot of a man, trying to find himself in the wake of trauma and stress. It is the snapshot of a man who is in doubt about what made him great. The Kanye captured by ye is a man trying to come back from the abyss the only way he knows how: through music. It’s a shame then that the album only serves to prove how much further Kanye must travel to rediscover what made him great.