What Did Yeezus Do?

By Deborah Sprague and Kara Tucker

It’s been a few months since the self-promotional machine that is Kanye West began to emerge from a cocoon of secrecy.
He stood amidst a hype machine that included a performance of two new songs on the season finale of “Saturday Night Live” and a New York Times interview that amply displayed an ego so large and vast it could apply for statehood.
But while the ever-so-modest West was busy comparing himself to Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and Anna Wintour, among others) or backpedaling further from his fauxpology for crashing the stage to interrupt Taylor Swift’s acceptance at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and turn himself into an “Imma Let You Finish” instant-meme punchline, there was the matter of one thing..the product.
West was looking to continue a run of five straight No. 1 albums (his debut, “College Dropout” peaked at No. 2). He’d come back from the artistically awkward “808’s and Heartbreak” (full of wretched Autotuned “singing” and a mostly bleak backdrop which still sold very well) with the more expansive “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” and semi-placeholder “Watch the Throne” (an album shared with Jay-Z and various other guest stars) that held up better as art while holding up commercially.
There was much secrecy  for a long time surrounding the album (which would be released with the potential eye-rolling title of “Yeezus”). There were reports claiming that West and producer Rick Rubin were still finalizing work on the album a week before its release.
Was the work worth it? Would West have another hit on his hands? Reviews tended to run heavily in the positive camp.
The album leaked four days prior to its release, but the album still debuted at No. 1 with solid numbers for a hip-hop release, although sales were less than projected. More ominous was the sharp drop (80 percent) in sales in the albums second week, the fourth-largest drop for an album to debut at No. 1 in the SoundScan era.
To date, the album has sold less than half of what its immediate processor. Was this a case where the majority of critics missed the boat or was this a case of a fickle fanbase not able to appreciate a quality effort.
First, let’s look at the album itself.

DEBORAH'S TAKE


Kanye West has never come across as bolder, louder or more aggressive than he does on Yeezus, the most in-your-face album of his career. But as the disc’s final notes resonate their last, it’s hard to escape the thought that the whole endeavor is merely, to borrow one of Shakespeare’s most enduring lines, a tale…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Not that West is, as the skipped part of that quotation would put it, an idiot. Far from it. He’s sharp enough to orchestrate the press as dexterously as he does the samples that he’s woven together over the course of his career, brilliant at marketing and yes, an on-again, off-again master of that amorphous entity known as flow.

 Kanye’s problem, however, is that he’s really only capable of writing about one topic – Kanye. When he first came onto the scene, he was a middle-class kid with a chip on his shoulder about the same sorts of things most indie-rock middle class kids had chips on their shoulders about – all delivered while wearing the ugliest sweaters since Bill Cosby’s heyday.

These days, things are a lot better for West – in terms of bank account and fashion sense – but you wouldn’t know it by listening to Yeezus. To his credit, he’s taken his bitterness and poured it – like some sort of alternate-universe honey – over some of the most sustained sonic anger hip-hop has seen in years. While there’s nothing particularly new about an MC incorporating elements from the world of hard rock and metal, most have divined their inspiration from guitar tunes that cleave closely to the tenet that it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Yeezus ain’t got that swing. It’s got unrelenting thump, screech and discord, a mix that, at its best – the neo-horrorcore “I Am a God” and the hung-over sounding room-spinner “Guilt Trip” – leaves the listener roiled and flailing, without a center to hold onto. It’s a pretty impressive trick to pull off, the beckoning of the sound waves outweighing the sense of doom, luring the listener like a siren.

At times, West and his synth-slinging compatriots channel the spirit of confronto pioneers Suicide to the point that he seems almost willing to see Alan Vega and Martin Rev as co-equals in terms of musical divinity – a holy (smokes) trinity of sorts. That legitimate grittiness transcends studio boundaries, mixing the vibe of a Spanish Harlem street corner, a Crenshaw soul food joint and a tenement rooftop slaked with summer breezes, replacing ‘Ye’s usual constricted coldness with a genuine humanity that plays nicely off the minimal futurism of the backdrop.

But just when you think he can pull you in, West pushes you away violently – well, if you’re female, gay, Asian or (most ironically) wealthy. His misanthropy pokes through the surface of a half-dozen of the pieces here, sometimes in cartoonishly frat-boy fashion (the eye-roll worthy yellow-fever segment of “I’m In It”), but more often in a way that’s more infected than infectious.

When he gives in to his id, the old-enough-to-know better rapper allows himself the “luxury” of wading into a fetid pool of violent sexual imagery, where he wallows with meat-headed glee. His tin ear clangs especially atonally when the aforementioned “I’m In It” reaches its vortex, threatening to “put his fist in [a woman] like a civil rights sign” (a metaphor that no doubt has Malcolm X, not to mention West’s activist mom, spinning in the crypt).

 He hits similar bum notes with “New Slaves,” on which he seems to conflate his own addiction to luxury cars and trophy women to the problems facing actual addicts in the prison system – on which he can be found lingering acidly on the homophobic he-doth-protest-too-much aside “I’d rather be a dick than a swallower”

He saves his worst, however, for the best-constructed, most sonically gripping track on the disc. “Blood on the Leaves” uses the sparse, mournful tenor of the Billie Holiday popularized hymn “Strange Fruit” – a musing on lynching that painted a hellishly dark picture of “black bodies swinging in the southern breeze” – as a vessel to carry his First World grudges about alimony  (“Gold Digger” redux) and the unwillingness of “bitches” to let him put together a harem.

 Kanye’s musical radicalism is undeniable – and he’s to be commended for not merely pushing, but shredding the envelope on that front. But when you pare away the screaming synthesizers and pounding sequencers, the little man behind the curtain sounds suspiciously like a typical Tea Partier – all too ready to point fingers at those who are out to get him, and kick wildly at those on lower rungs of the ladder in order to make sure they stay in their place.

 In other words, Donald Trump, you may have a new golf buddy.

KARA'S TAKE
“Yeezus” is the latest and perhaps purest distillation of West, as the man can be thought-provoking and infuriating, capable of getting both reactions in the matter of consecutive lines.
The album is often hard and abrasive, recalling more spare electronic music and industrial alternative than anything else. Even at first listen, the challenge was apparent – where were the singles going to come from?
The answer to date is “nowhere.” The lead track, “Black Skinhead” only reached No. 69 on the Billboard chart and thus far, no second single.
“New Slaves” is a perfect example of the getting it right, then derailing it that pops up throughout the album.
It starts off as a critique of consumerism (which might strike some as rich given that West hasn’t exactly been a champion consumer restraint before, but I digress).
He finishes the first verse with “Used to only be niggas, now everybody playing/Spending everything on Alexander Wang/New Slaves.”
Could this be a new Kanye rethinking his..oh wait, there’s the hook line “You see there's leaders and there’s followers/But I'd rather be a dick than a swallower.”
Am I detecting a whiff of homophobia there? More than a whiff?
West makes an even stronger (and justified) statement going after the private prison complex, but instead of raging further at the unjust nature of that complex, he brags about taking the privateers’ women with the line – “I’ll fuck your Hampton spouse. Came on her Hampton blouse and in her Hampton mouth.”
Because, after all, what are women there for but Kanye’s sexual pleasure with a side order of revenge..and apparently derailing what he was trying to say about the prison system. And what better way to show he “ain’t a swallower” by coming in the mouth of some woman in the Hamptons? Yeezus is protesting way too much.
“Black Skinhead” is one of the album’s standout tracks, set to a tribal beat that you could almost drop the “Rock and Roll, Part Two” riff over. It’s full-on braggadocio with shots at racism. It’s a strong moment overall.
But Kanye can’t resist and undercuts later with “Blood on the Leaves,” a low point on the album.
It’s a bold move to start with a sample of Nina Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit,” one of the most heartbreaking songs ever written and one of the strongest about racism.
It’s a bad sign when West chooses to start his Autotuned mewling over Simone’s sample vocals. The effect is unwelcome, but once the words he’s tunelessly warbling sink in, it becomes like smearing the waste product of a hog operation over the most sublime meal.
It’s one of the strongest backing tracks on the album..but West opts to take a song and turn it into invective aimed at those evil women who are just after his money or wanting to crimp his or his buddies’ concubine-accumulating style.
Oh, and there’s the whole uneasy introduction of the woman telling her she loved him while under the influence of ecstasy, creating  blurred lines, if you will.
Even though he takes the drug with her in the next verse, it still comes off as extremely creepy and disturbing that he relies on the woman telling her she loved him when she was drugged up.
While a literal interpretation of the themes of “Strange Fruit” might have been obvious, the decision to use its sample to build a rant at groupies, twodels and gold diggers is a poor choice. Not as poor as Lil Wayne’s execrable “poppin’ pussy like Emmett Till” line from earlier in the year, but poor regardless.
“I Am a God” is another standout – claustrophobic, full of pounding (and not just from Kanye’s fists to his chest). It’s an arresting boast track, cut with a smidge of humor (most gods don’t whine for their croissants).
Then again, “I’m In It”, turns to the cringe-inducing side with its line about oral sex about Asian women that wouldn’t be out of place on THAT Day Above Ground song, not to mention the “put my fist through her like a civil rights sign” line that isn’t as clever or transgressive as West probably thinks it is.
Then there’s the part where he raps “Uh, you know I need that wet mouth/Uh, I know you need that reptile” in a single entendre, dexterity-free couplet that wouldn’t be out of place on an old AC/DC album (or a new AC/DC album, for that matter).
“Yeezus” is a fairly claustrophobic affair with its minimal sonics (reportedly a late-in-production decision by West), electronic and industrial noise and general aggro feel. It manages to be arresting much of the time, but the lyrical fumbles make the album feel less immersive than it should be and more like you’re being cornered at the bar by some guy talking about “all the bitches who’ve done me wrong” and about what a “badass” he is. It makes the album feel longer than its relatively short (for the modern CD era) 40-minute (and pretty much single-free) running time.
The ultimate frustration with West is that he seemingly lacks the self-awareness to truly wrestle with the darker demons of his nature or to edit what he’s trying to say. Rather than confront the challenges his ego presents, rather than look in the mirror at the misogyny, homophobia and other –isms he traffics in too easily, rather than look at anything in the world that doesn’t directly affect Kanye West -- he’s intent to lay it all spread out there and insist that it’s all “awesome truth and awesomeness - beauty, truth, awesomeness.”
No, no it isn’t. Some of it is ugly. Some of it is stagnation. By insisting that it’s all a strong statement, ultimately none of it is.
The “Yeezus” experience can leave one teeming with the frustration that West is so drunk on his sense of self-importance that he can’t always tell the difference between wheat and chaff or, more tellingly, that he doesn’t want to.
The result is that one is left being all too aware of West as one thing above all else – aggressive marketer of the Kanye brand.
A fair amount of the time, West gets out of his own way enough to produce product that succeeds as both product  and art anyway. This time, he couldn’t get out of the way and the result is an album that is frustratingly close to great, but so deeply flawed that it leaves one more exhausted than exhilarated. The album is one that not only is, at its best, easier to admire than enjoy, it is one that failed commercially to a degree that none of West’s albums have before. What could have been a career peak is, at the end of the day, an interesting misfire.