Writing About Kanye For Free
It’s possible that the last good Kanye West song was “Real Friends,” an unexpectedly melancholic and honest track from the The Life of Pablo, AKA the last real Kanye West album, AKA the album that might not actually be finished but continues to be fascinating as a sonic exercise that pointed at Kanye squaring the experimental tendencies of Yeezus with emotionally honest (and, yeah, clumsy) lyrics in the vein of College Dropout.
It’s not easy to talk about Kanye West anymore. To do so, we must speculate about his mental health, or about how the perils of fame have gotten to his head and turned him into a MAGA monster who wants to pretend that being contrarian is a high minded exercise, and not the domain of bored rich dudes who think playing devil’s advocate is as important to society as staying hydrated.
Still, I’m going to talk about Kanye West, because the existence of Kanye West means that we will always talk about Kanye West. I’m not really a believer in the idea that because Kanye is bad now we should find something else to talk about. Kanye West has dumb beliefs, makes lazy songs, and is one of the more popular personalities in the world. What he does matters, and just because it should no longer matter doesn’t mean it actually no longer matters. Annnnyyyywayyyyyyy….
Last year’s ye was a total mess, sandwiched in a Kanye-affiliated rollout that was also largely a total mess, with a couple bright spots that also happened to include his focused, nuanced collaborative album with Kid Cudi. Because of all the, uh, Trump Stuff around those releases, talk of the music on these albums was understandably overshadowed by the fact that Kanye was palling around with the worst president in the history of America and acting like that was somehow a good thing.
If you ignore virtually every aspect of ye where Kanye is saying anything, there are some (like one or two) interesting bits: “All Mine” is minimal and catchy, built on blown out bass and a simple hand-clap. It’s a good song that will never get its proper due because…well you know. It’s a spiritual sequel to the jagged edges of Yeezus, paired with the brash confidence of Graduation-era Neon Kanye. It’s worth revisiting for Ant Clemons’ earwormy chorus, if you can get past some of the more toxic elements of that record.
Jesus Is King is short, but not good short. It’s rushed short. And I’m not just saying that because we all know that Kanye pushes up and right past his self-imposed deadlines. It literally sounds too fast. “Every Hour” is played quickly, and is over before you’re able to settle into the vibe it’s supposed to be setting up. By the time you get to “Follow God,” the first (sort of) highlight from the album, everything’s fallen apart. Kanye seems to have spent more time on his lyrics across the board. He’s rapping in a way that he hasn’t since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but none of it is believable. His verses are relatively dense, he’s throwing a lot of ideas out there, it’s just impossible to take him seriously because all of this feels like a phase — a forced redemption narrative that needed to be put into action because Kanye’s boxed himself into a corner. “On God” plays with some interesting ideas, and is reminiscent of the Lloyd Banks Kanye-featuring posse cut “Start It Up” but it never really goes anywhere meaningful, despite some of Kanye’s more interesting writing: “In ’03, they told me not to drive / I bleached my hair for every time I could have died.” (by my count, Kanye has bleached his hair three times: once in 2016, once in 2017, and once in 2019. There’s probably more).
There are good moments here, but they’re not good enough to transcend Kanye’s public statements in recent years, and like ye before it, this is another album that doesn’t bother to ask for much of our attention. Kanye probably could make an uplifting rap album about finding redemption in religion, but this isn’t it. I don’t get the sense that Kanye has thought too much about these records, and maybe that’s just a measure of how we listen to music now: stream it once, and move on to see what else came out today. Kanye is circling a good idea—his advice for Pusha about how to construct a concise album, which resulted in Daytona—is objectively correct. Albums don’t have to be long, but they have to be focused, and Kanye’s two short albums are not focused. They’re tossed off afterthoughts designed to sell an idea more than a collection of songs. They’re not built to stick around and be canonized, but maybe that’s the thing in all this that isn’t his fault. Maybe he’s just making music like the rest of us are consuming it: endlessly, often mindlessly, moving from album to album to check a box and say we listened, while hoping that something, anything stands out enough to last. The Kenny G solo on “Use This Gospel” is not terrible.