The floodgates of public opinion have split open in the two
weeks since the release of Yeezus, Kanye West’s sixth solo LP. As has
become the norm in recent years, a new Kanye record serves as the siren call
for all music bloggers, professional critics, and fellow artists to awaken and
publish their best reviews as soon as humanly possible. I am now one of them. This is my first
post for Elaine and Shane Review Things. Let’s have fun with it.
Yeezus ventures outside of the comfort zones of the
casual rap listener and doesn't offer the sort of radio play quality that Kanye’s
mastered with his past records. It dropped on June 18th
without a pre-release single and without pre-sales.
Video projections on buildings across the country of Kanye performing “New
Slaves” and a single performance of the same song and “Black Skinheads” on Saturday Night
Live served as the only media indulgences of Kanye for his new LP. Anticipation was extremely high for what seemed a game-changer in the catalog of Kanye West.
When the record leaked four days before the official
release, however, public reaction was extremely mixed. Yeezus offered
almost none of the enjoyable lyrics and smooth, bombastic sound of Kanye’s
prior work, and those who were anticipating it as simply a darker dance-
and house-focused extension of previous Kanye sounds were quickly turned off.
First-week sales were the lowest of any Kanye solo album—partially because of
the leak, of course, but also because Kanye deliberately eschewed mainstream
radio approval in favor of a more intense and ultimately, more meaningful
sound.
Many critics have hailed it as the best record of the year,
setting a clear divide in response between casual listeners and those more invested
in understanding Kanye’s intent. Name your favorite music blog—I can guarantee
that they gave Yeezus a glowing review. Praise fell on Kanye for making a
record specifically crafted to get a strong, divisive reaction. It was hailed as a brand new step for a man
known for his adventurous output.
Even still, I wonder if we’re neglecting to recognize how
important this record can be. I think Yeezus
stands as more than just a vibrant shift from the norm in Kanye’s
sound. The departure from his past moods isn't to tap into a new idea and add another level to his established style. Instead, Yeezus is close to an absolute abandonment of his work in the past in favor of a new minimalism that can flesh out his thematic anger. Kanye’s emphasis on
racism has been noted by many in their praise of the album, but I want to take
that acknowledgement a step further. It’s more than what we’ve been making it out to be. Yeezus is a premier record on the
pervasive racism of America, and one that, in terms of vision and effectiveness,
stands heads and shoulders above the rest of rap music right now.
The most apt way to describe Yeezus is “brutal”. The
minimalist sound developed by Kanye and super-producer Rick Rubin booms over
dead space in each song, and by the diminishing of his album's landscapes (perhaps best illustrated on “News Slaves” or “I Am a God”), Kanye creates massive clashes,
primal screams, and furious lyrics that hit the listener with a sickening emotional
force. That said, this is still classic
Kanye—it’s impossible to listen to most of these songs and not immediately vibe
with them. (If you can listen to “Blood on the Leaves” and not feel the urge to
scream your lungs out after the Hudson Mohawke beat hits, you don’t have a
pulse.)
Yeezus is an emotionally exhausting listen,
especially when one considers what the sounds and lyrics reveal about Kanye’s
psyche. It’s evident from the start that
Kanye is facing a quasi-existential crisis on Yeezus. In the first lines of the album he rejects
the very same fashion-centric lifestyle he’s personally centralized in the rap
world (“Fuck whatever y’all been hearing/fuck what, fuck whatever y’all been
wearing”), a statement heightened by all-black, all-basic fashion choices for
his media appearances on SNL and in his video projections across the country. Kanye isn’t looking to redefine rap fashion
with his understated dress; he wants to ignore it. At the same time, his sexual imagery is as
violent as the beats it flows over, and coupled with his tirades against
historical and contemporary racism, presents the idea of a man who cannot find peace in his personal relationships nor in his relationship with the greater
America. If it wasn’t already clear
from the anti-marketing campaign before Yeezus’ release, Kanye isn’t
trying to be the same man he’s been on his past five LPs.
These three factors of Yeezus—rejecting many
qualities of “past” Kanye, confronting institutionalized racism, and using his
relationships with women as another showcase for the violence of his
mentality—are stirred together to create an album that brings out Kanye’s wrath
in full force. Kanye distances himself from emotional connections with the women in his life, using objectification and dismissal often to make women the victims in his narrative. By paralleling his
unstable sexual relationships with American racism, Kanye seems to use his treatment
of women as a metaphor for the historical treatment of African-Americans by the
white majority. “Blood on the Leaves”
best encapsulates this parallel: Kanye laments the trappings of his relationships
with women in between the high-pitched sampling of Nina Simone’s “Strange
Fruit”, one of the most poignant songs ever written about black suffering in the South. The synthesis of the two concepts both
heightens the grotesqueness of Kanye’s own relationships and brings historical
black suffering into a contemporary context. It seems he wants us to know that
the lynching so tragically described in “Strange Fruit” has a contemporary relation. Whether it’s appropriate for Kanye to relate
his lady problems to “Strange Fruit” in such a manner is a question ignored; on
this album, Kanye has control, and the more uncomfortable he can make us with
the person he has become and the message he represents, the more effective his music
is.
This is why Kanye's abandonment of his past styles is so important for his attack on the racist American narrative. Gone is the 'Louis Vuitton Don' who wove together his own sense of fashion with casual assessments of the
American cultural landscape. On Yeezus,
references to clothing and consumerism are either absent or almost entirely oriented toward the
black experience. Perhaps (and of course, this is guesswork) he sees in his
own status as a wealthy black American rapper too many indicators of the dangerous route
set by institutional racism in the U.S., in which case he may believe the best
way to solidify his hatred of the status quo is to reject the norms of his own
status and of the music industry. By
reveling in his self-abdication, Kanye can create something larger than himself:
an album that speaks not only to the flaws of a single man, but also to the
contemporary system that encourages the exacerbation of those flaws. Money, clothes,
and women are three of the largest pillars of mainstream rap, and rap’s common
prioritization of the three perpetuates the type of racist philosophy that
Kanye finds endemic to America on “New Slaves”: “You see it’s broke n****
racism, that’s that ‘Don’t touch anything in the store’/And it’s rich n****
racism, that’s that ‘Come in and please buy more/What you want, a Bentley, fur
coat, a diamond chain?/All you blacks want all the same things’”. Only by
rejecting much of what has helped define the persona of Kanye West in the past—fashion;
money; smooth, bombastic production—can Kanye enable his album to speak from a
perspective removed from the idea of ‘Kanye West, the individual’. He can speak with a voice louder than his own, one that is better suited to make such an indictment of the current American system. Thus, the
treatment of Yeezus as a powerful critique depends on us hearing the speaker
not as the Kanye West we’ve known before, but as someone different, whose internal perversion
allows him to recognize similar perversions reflected in American culture. Tell me I'm reading too far into this, but I'm seeing the new Kanye a figure unparalleled in his music's message in the current mainstream.
