Ain’t no denying, I am a die-hard Yeezy fan. I love Yeezy, both as a person (kichwa ngumu, I know) and as a wildly talented musician (producer, rapper, influencer etc.). Yeezy is the most influential musician of this millennium. He singlehandedly changed the hip hop soundscape from the Gangsta Rap dominance at the turn of the millennium to the Emo Rap that is the staple nowadays. He made it über cool to be a nerd and a rapper (Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar anybody?) He made it possible for gay or semi-closeted artists like Young Thug, ILoveMakonnen, A$AP Rocky and Frank Ocean to be comfortable in their own skins. Without the influence of his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak, Drake, J. Cole, Kid Cudi, Future, Childish Gambino et al wouldn’t exist today. Yeezy has the best and most consistent discography in all of music in the last 10 years. 2010’s MBDTF is still the most EPIC album this decade. 2013’s Yeezus was way too far ahead of its time sonically. It polarized many when it was released and many casual listeners are still ‘getting it.’ Part of Yeezy’s musical genius has been keeping us guessing as to where he’ll take us next with his magical art. But…
His recent output is a dud. It’s meh. It’s WHACK! What’s going on Yeezy? I shudder at the thought of a bad album from 'Ye. Even the music press is weighing in. And it’s not pretty:
Kanye West Is Going to Drop a Brick and It’s Going to Hurt
Kanye West’s seventh studio album remains a mystery. No one knows if it is finished, if he’s scrapped several versions of it, if he’s still tinkering with it, or if it’s been sitting somewhere, done, for months. Seth Rogen heard a live version of one, rapped to him in a van by Kanye himself, in December. Theophilus London heard one three times back to back, or tweeted that he did before swiftly retracting, a few months before that. The title keeps changing: It was going to be called So Help Me God for a bit, and now, apparently, he’s calling it SWISH, which seems about as likely to stick as Good Ass Job before My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It might come out in a few hours, or tomorrow, or months from now. The only thing that seems clear is that Kanye cares less about this album than any other he’s ever made.
This is not speculation: He said so, more or less, in a Paper Magazine interview. “Right now, over 70 percent of my focus is on apparel,” he declared, a grim calculus for his music. Last week, in an interview with Ebro and Nessa that seemed arranged largely for him to debunk rumors that he’d been thrown out of a Chuck E. Cheese, he stressed that he was working on the project “slowly”, so that he can “deliver the innovation that I know I can.” He also seems to be distancing himself, daily, from Yeezus, the first of his projects to win no Grammys, and the one with his lowest-ever sales—even lower than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. At his Governors Ball performance before Yeezus was released, he boldly declared that he had no interest in the radio, but he seems to have backpedaled a bit on that statement. “That was a joke,” he told the iHeartMedia Music Summit this year. He distanced himself even further last February during an interview with Power 105, calling Yeezus “a protest of music….I didn’t even have no music. I just let y’all have a little music on ‘Bound 2,’ but that was it. But this album is just embracing the music, embracing joy and just being a service to the people.”
As mission statements go, that’s vague, and the music he’s released is even more so. Of the four songs he’s released and performed in this year—“Only One”, “FourFiveSeconds”, “All Day”, and “Wolves”—only “Only One” and “FourFiveSeconds” feel like they came from the same head space. Both songs feature Paul McCartney, and have a relaxed, unforced energy. They feature no rapping, and seem designed to highlight our simplest feelings with simpler chord progressions. The other two feel like they were made in different years, for different iterations of the same project. None of them feel like surefire hits, and they also haven’t done much to spark speculation or enthusiasm for the album they herald.
All of this seems to point to a troubled project, or at least an unfocused one, and the seemingly unthinkable starts to come into focus: Kanye West might be poised, possibly, to drop a brick.
Now, something might happen in the next few hours or weeks that will make this post seem foolish. The first time I recall people wondering aloud if West had painted himself into a corner, it was right after Graduation. If he were to well and truly drop a brick, it would be the first of his career, and it would break, or at least interrupt, the most impressive streak of the millennium. He has proven remarkably, even uniquely, deft at brick-dodging, and part of the thrill of his career has been watching him him defy the predictions as to when it was all going to end.
But for the first time, there seems to be no animating idea behind his next project, no mission statement. He seems in general more focused on the parts of his life—being a father, developing clothes, making motivational speeches—that don’t involve the arduous process of album-making. Tellingly, the material he has released isn’t quality-controlled up to his usual standards.
“Wolves”, which he tipped as his album’s lead track and which he debuted at the unveiling of Yeezy Season 1, sounded disturbingly like Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, or something that might have been a side project like Cruel Summer, than anything that’s ever made its way onto a finished album. We haven’t heard anything about the song in the meantime, indicating that perhaps he’s abandoned it, and continues to tinker with the album’s shape.
There are warts left in all of these songs, spots where vocals are mumbled or left out entirely, indicating that they are probably all demos. This isn’t a new thing; Kanye has often allowed us to hear his mind at work. Tracking the progress of a Kanye demo to a finished album track allows us to learn something about the sound he is chasing in his mind. Consider the leap from the “So Appalled” demo that leaked years ago to the completed “So Appalled” that appeared, a year later, on MBDTF, or the the multiple versions of “Love Lockdown”, some barely distinguishable from each other; in all of this churn, you heard a big idea take shape. But the versions of these new songs we have seem to have simply dropped off the back of some truck, with little clarification or follow up. This is a person who reportedly remixed “Stronger” 72 times before releasing it, and the only extant version of “All Day” we have still has a glaringly botched line in the opening chorus.
To promote these songs, he’s doing many the same things he always does: He’s performing them relentlessly, on awards and morning shows across the world, usually standing alone onstage to telegraph his commitment. But there is an oddly dutiful sense to all of it—which of the six or seven versions of “Only One” he’s performed feels like The Performance? The BRIT Awards performance of “All Day”, flamethrowers and all, bristled with nervy energy, but the song itself feels strangely uninspired, a callback to earlier sounds of his.
It is a disorienting feeling, having this much Kanye West material available generating so little palpable excitement in the universe. Meanwhile, Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Drake, and others push outward in directions specifically influenced by Kanye, and it becomes harder to hear, or imagine, how he might match or lap them. He is responsible for the current zeitgeist, but listening to his slightly confused new material, you get the distinct sense that he’s struggling to find his current footing in it.
Courtesy: pitchfork.com
It May Be Time To Be Worried About Kanye West
Kanye’s own 2015 work has been lukewarm at best. Is there some inspiration out there for Mr. West?
Up there at the Brit Awards Kanye West brought everyone he could out on stage clad in black. “All Day” was set to be premiered, and his gorgeous figurine of a wife introduced him to the London crowd. Then the flames and a bored-as-fuck Ye´ went up there to do God’s work. It was underwhelming. Not because the song wasn’t good. It was. But because he looked like he was reaching for something out there in the void, in the crowd, and it wasn’t there.
Each Kanye album brings us someone new. This has been Kanye’s modus operandi for some time now. Perhaps not a change as radical as his later years would give us with 808’s, MBDTF, WTT and Yeezus showing us vastly different personalities pushing against some boundary. But it is there, bubbling quietly under the cloud of emotion he surrounds himself with. It’s that cloud of emotion that propels him forward. But now that same ion charged mixture of gasses may be sapping Ye´of some of his mojo. We’re not sure what is happening, but we do know that this year has been the most disappointing output of music of Kanye West’s career. Well, save for a few titular highlights.
Every once in a while, now, you’ll see the son of Donda West crack a smile. It’s becoming a rare occurrence these days. It should. Kanye West is scouring the earth for inspiration and he’s coming up empty. At least in music. He’s spent the last decade plus dazzling us with his penchant for soaking up the world around him and transforming it into art. On the College Dropout, he and G.O.O.D Music took the stylings of Tribe, Common, Mos’ and Slum Village – his heroes at the time – and his love of good ole fashioned soul and jerry-rigged it into a classic. But as his flawless catalog becomes older, it must be difficult to find more of the things that inspire you. There is no Taylor Swift incident this time around to spur a jilted Kanye West to dark, twisted greatness. And there isn’t the specter of being on the outside looking in and your very own celebrity use to encase you like there was on the sparse Yeezus. Equally, there isn’t the “I must prove myself at all cost” Kanye of the College Dropout and Late Registration era.
Perhaps humility is to blame. No, not that the world’s most interesting egoist hasn’t used enough, but that this year, maybe, he’s used too much. For Big Sean, he helped out on “All Your Fault” and “I Don’t Fuck With You.” He also hopped on “Blessings,” though he says Drake’s rise to king of the summer propelled him to a last minute verse on that one. But his best work has been on other people’s records. His verse on Tyler, The Creator’s “Smuckers” is easily his best in a few years and one of the best verses of the year. His ridiculous stream-of-consciousness on A$AP Rocky’s “Jukebox Joints” and his strange co-existence with Rihanna and Paul McCartney on “FourFiveSeconds” are two more examples. Then there’re the snippets we’ve heard of his banger with The Weeknd “Tell Your Friends.” And let’s not forget his tweet that implied Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly sent him back to the lab. Compare that to his own work and you may see my point. The lukewarm “All Day” sounds aged and it only dropped months ago. “Wolves” with Vic Mensa and Sia feels like a Kid Cudi single without the quirky magic of Cudster. Then there was a visibly drunk Amber Rose calling out Kanye and alleging that he doesn’t even write his new music, Travis Scott does.
He’s also just plain old preoccupied. His wife is a Venus de Milo jutting out of the sea and his child is beloved. That would put any creative person in a bind, right? Maybe he’s just too happy? Then there’s the fashion. Perhaps Kanye’s comet has gotten too big to move quickly, even for him. And maybe we are seeing the general decline of one of the greatest artists of our generation. Or, maybe, and hopefully, I’m just being too hasty. Either way, I’m worried about this Kanye West album, and you should be, too.
Courtesy: HipHopDX.com
My 2 Cents:
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Yeezy is too focused on fashion nowadays. He is forgetting what exactly made us fall in love with him in the first place. He has too many yes men around him and no one with balls enough to tell him that his fashion ambitions are ill misplaced and that he will never become a fashion icon like Giorgio Armani or Tom Ford.
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Kim Kardashian was never the right chick for Kanye. They have never looked happy together anyways. And she has been a major derailer and a major source of distraction for Kanye all thanks to the Kardashian celebrity lifestyle and vanity.
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Is this what (eventually) happens to you when you “sell your soul to the devil?” (See video below). Track #3 on Yeezus is called “I Am A God (featuring God).” Now, our God is not a petty God and we all know that he is all loving and forgiving. But He does have His limits. Is our God abandoning his prodigal son to fend for himself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxg0tkMXV64
cc @Nefertities