Kanye West is a child of social networking and hip-hop. And he knows about all kinds of music and popular culture. The guy has a real wide palette to play with. That's all over Yeezus. There are moments of supreme beauty and greatness on this record, and then some of it is the same old shit. But the guy really, really, really is talented. He's really trying to raise the bar. No one's near doing what he's doing, it's not even on the same planet.
People say this album is minimal. And yeah, it's minimal. But the parts are maximal. Take "Blood on the Leaves." There's a lot going on there: horns, piano, bass, drums, electronic effects, all rhythmically matched — towards the end of the track, there's now twice as much sonic material. But Kanye stays unmoved while this mountain of sound grows around him. Such an enormous amount of work went into making this album. Each track is like making a movie.
Actually, the whole album is like a movie, or a novel — each track segues into the next. This is not individual tracks sitting on their own island, all alone.
Very often, he'll have this very monotonous section going and then, suddenly —"BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP!"— he disrupts the whole thing and we're on to something new that's absolutely incredible. That's architecture, that's structure — this guy is seriously smart. He keeps unbalancing you. He'll pile on all this sound and then suddenly pull it away, all the way to complete silence, and then there's a scream or a beautiful melody, right there in your face. That's what I call a sucker punch.
He seems to have insinuated in a recent New York Times interview that My Beautiful Dark, Twisted Fantasy was to make up for stupid shit he'd done. And now, with this album, it's "Now that you like me, I'm going to make you unlike me." It's a dare. It's braggadoccio. Axl Rose has done that too, lots of people have. "I Am a God" — I mean, with a song title like that, he's just begging people to attack him.
But why he starts the album off with that typical synth buzzsaw sound is beyond me, but what a sound it is, all gussied up and processed. I can't figure out why he would do that. It's like farting. It's another dare — I dare you to like this. Very perverse.
Still, I have never thought of music as a challenge — you always figure, the audience is at least as smart as you are. You do this because you like it, you think what you're making is beautiful. And if you think it's beautiful, maybe they'll think it's beautiful. When I did Metal Machine Music, New York Times critic John Rockwell said, "This is really challenging." I never thought of it like that. I thought of it like, "Wow, if you like guitars, this is pure guitar, from beginning to end, in all its variations. And you're not stuck to one beat." That's what I thought. Not, "I'm going to challenge you to listen to something I made." I don't think West means that for a second, either. You make stuff because it's what you do and you love it.
That explains the jump-cuts that are all over this record. Over and over, he sets you up so well — something's just got to happen — and he gives it to you, he hits you with these melodies. (He claims he doesn't have those melodic choruses anymore — that's not true. That melody the strings play at the end of "Guilt Trip," it's so beautiful, it makes me so emotional, it brings tears to my eyes.) But it's real fast cutting — boom, you're in it. Like at the end of "I Am a God," anybody else would have been out, but thenpow, there's that coda with Justin Vernon, "Ain't no way I'm giving up." Un-fucking-believable. It's fantastic. Or that very repetitive part in "Send It Up" that goes on five times as long as it should and then it turns into this amazing thing, a sample of Beenie Man's "Stop Live in a De Pass."
And it works. It works because it's beautiful — you either like it or you don't — there's no reason why it's beautiful. I don't know any musician who sits down and thinks about this. He feels it, and either it moves you too, or it doesn't, and that's that. You can analyze it all you want.
Many lyrics seem like the same old b.s. Maybe because he made up so much of it at the last minute. But it's the energy behind it, the aggression. Usually the Kanye lyrics I like are funny, and he's very funny here. Although he thinks that getting head from nuns and eating Asian pussy with sweet and sour sauce is funny, and it might be, to a 14-year-old — but it has nothing to do with me. Then there's the obligatory endless blowjobs and menages-a-trois.
But it's just ridiculous that people are getting upset about "Put my fist in her like a civil rights sign"? C'mon, he's just having fun. That's no more serious than if he said he's going to drop a bomb on the Vatican. How can you take that seriously?
Yeezus双关是什么，讽刺大众？
