The first time I heard Yeezus I was jarred. Kanye was known for taking drastic turns under intense pressure. According to Pitchfork, after his entire world was crumbling around him—he’d lost both his mother and his longtime girlfriend with whom he was engaged, Alexis Pfifer—Kanye turned his rage into a whirlwind of deep emotional distress called 808s and Heartbreak. The album wasn’t on some revolutionary shit at the time. People didn’t quite know what to make of it. Pitchfork’s review was decidedly mixed and awarded the album a 7.6 with a series of volleyed critiques. “It’s no surprise that 808s is a bit of a grower: The record’s best songs—“Paranoid”, “Street Lights”, “Coldest Winter”, and “RoboCop”—are often its most dismal, with cavernous production giving the Auto-Tune vocals more of an echoing desolation than a pop sheen,” Scott Plagenhoef stated. “By contrast, the more pop aspects of the album are where it relatively stumbles.” Kanye West had declared that he wanted to be the “number one artist in the world” by that time. And in a press conference in New Zealand he seemingly uttered these bizarrely aspirational and prophetic words, “Hip Hop is over for me now.” At least that’s how it was reported by The Observer and, thus, almost everyone else. What did that even mean? West asked reporters that same question after word got out. It means it paved the way for the most divisive album of Mr. West’s career when, faced with another maelstrom of emotional distress, he decided to change the nature of the protest album. Yeezus, then, was a protest directed toward the closing of the corporate mind.
In Ta-nehisi Coates Between The World And Me, there’s a passage in which he describes following a group of officers in Chicago go and evict a man from his home. Here those men are speaking to the man’s wife in the all the words of humiliation and domination afforded them by their place in this machine, and as her children scatter around her she wells up in tears. The man, the husband, there to watch his life’s work wilted under the curtain of a carefully built dome of oppression suddenly erupts in anger. He wails, he screams, but nothing can be done. Yeezus was Kanye West wailing under the spotlight of corporate hegemony. We all heard him scream about “leather jogging pants” and tell Sway he didn’t have the answers and we fretted at his overt arrogance. Could we then not have seen what we see now, which is that corporations and brands are themselves part of the system that Coates referred to as “the killing fields… created by the policy of Dreamers”? Could we not see that his being blocked from those halls of creative privilege were part of the reaction of a larger machinery, which works to separate people for nearly any reason. In this case, as Kanye argued, his celebrity failed to grant him the thing he needed the most: the ability to be taken seriously by the creative establishment. On “Black Skinhead” he nearly tears from the bone of his own career with “Middle America packed in / Came to see me in my black skin / Number one question they’re askin’ / Fuck every question you askin’ / If I don’t get run out by Catholics / Here come some conservative Baptists / Claimin’ I’m overreactin’ / Like them black kids in Chiraq, bitch.”
You feel not only the anger and frustration of being denied access, but you also feel the weight of a struggle he thought he’d already conquered. On Yeezus, he punctures the separation between his world, their world, and ours. He seeks to push the boundary of his celebrity to achieve, well, autonomy. Those two ideas are often mutually exclusive. That may be why, even after superlative production by French superstars Daft Punk and perennial musical partner Mike Dean as well as co-production credits for the likes of 88 Keys, Travis Scott, Lupe Fiasco and so many more, Ye´ visited Rick Rubin to pare down even further his traditional maximalism into what he deemed “aspiration minimalism” as reported by the New York Times. In that same interview with Jon Caramanica he had this to say, “Anytime I’ve had a big thing that’s ever pierced and cut across the Internet, it was a fight for justice. Justice. And when you say justice, it doesn’t have to be war. Justice could just be clearing a path for people to dream properly. It could be clearing a path to make it fair within the arena that I play.” Kanye West thinks all these dreams are important, but he’s often disparaged for fighting for himself the most. I can only ask you if believing in humankind means you have to leave yourself out of it? Does it mean you have to put your own dreams on the backburner for the dreams of others? Ego is a strange thing in these times. And when fighting for Justice, should it be only when you are not at the table at all? Can it also be when you are working for the company, but want to be let into the executive suite? Can it be claiming access for yourself when you’ve felt you deserved it?
After “New Slaves,” it turns down considerably as West explores all the “ceilings” that exist. Past cumming on the blouse of your Hampton spouse, the album takes a turn toward the male on “I’m in It.” In fact, “I’m in It” approaches levels of appall usually reserved for Internet trolls, but then concludes with a sobering up. “Time to take it too far now,” West laments. “Uh, Michael Douglas out the car now / Uh, got the kids and the wife life / Uh, but can’t wake up from the nightlife / Uh, I’m so scared of my demons / Uh, I go to sleep with a night light / Uh, pop a wheelie on the zeitgeist..” And you realize the testosterone-fueled fantasies of the previous verses speak to the perceived effects of that, as well. Then the beautiful Nina Simone sample of “Strange Fruit.” Because of the weight of the song, the argument that it was wasted on a song about past relationships is valid. But it doesn’t change the fact that relationship also reached its ceiling. And is it any wonder that Arca had his hand in some of these stark digital creations along with Hudmo and Mike Dean? That the brilliance of this album’s exploration of classism is often ignored speaks to where we were in 2013 when things just didn’t seem as bleak. Much has changed. And the landscape created by corporate hegemony is now fixing to clasp its hands around the throat of the web, itself, where thoughts are now the currency traded as collateral. As such we’ve all entered into this matrix-of-celebrity and are facing the shadow of the closing of the corporate mind ourselves, first hand. Is it now only perfunctory to conclude that this protest album should end with a love song entitled “Bound 2?” I’ll leave that up to you.
Andre Grant is an NYC native turned L.A. transplant that has contributed to a few different properties on the web and is now the Features Editor for HipHopDX. He’s also trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot. Follow him on Twitter @drejones.
Many is a queer who makes bitch music
Yeezus is Kanye’s worst album. Just because something is “out of the box” does not automatically make it brilliant. That is the problem with so many people when they jump to conclusions. Yes, it is different. But it is bad. 808’s was different but it still had creative and cohesive songs like LL, Heartless, Coldest Winter, Amazing etc. Those songs were great, but very different so many people didn’t appreciate it. However the songs on Yeezus aren’t real songs. They are just sounds randomly thrown together.
“Just because you don’t understand him, it don’t mean that he nice” – Jay-Z
Andre you gonna teach a class at Harvard called Kanye 101? Lol I wonder if Kanye intended for Yeezus to be scrutinized to this degree.
This dude must be on that white powder
Two years later and it’s still a piece of shit. It will also go down in history as the first Kanye record that didn’t sell platinum and officially alienated his hop hop fanbase. All he has left now are hipster Douchebags who think it’s “Groundbreaking” for a rapper to rip off Daft Punk. Yeezus was his biggest mistake, and the significantly large amount of people who hated it are directly responsible for his new songs not generating any buzz. Dude called in the Damn Beatles and couldn’t get anybody to care. He burned so many people with this frisbeee that their not even paying attention anymore.
“Truth serum” huh. You must have meant you swallow sperm and thats the truth. Anyway, Yeezus sold 1.2 milli in an era where people don’t buy music. Black Skinhead, New Slaves, Blood on the Leaves, and Bound 2 are some of his best tracks ever. “You want my old music, buy my old cds” Jay
Kanye’s top 3 selling hits:
1. Stronger (A Daft Punk sample)
2. Gold Digger (A Ray Charles sample)
3. Heartless (a ton of auto tune)
You ain’t gonna get Kanye rappin with Dilated Peoples, Kweli, Common, and Cam no more. Give it up.
word!
Um…Yeezus went platinum in about 6 months…
what the fuck is he talking about?
Yeezus was Kanye’s first real “bigger than Hip-Hop” project, and despite all the dickriding from hipsters, he fell short. Probably first in his career. And he still don’t know how to handle it. He wanted to cement his place as a global superstar (as opposed to “only” as a hip-hop legend), just like his long-time idol MJ. Too bad the public opinion about him as is more controversial / negative than ever, plus everybody’s still treating him only as a rapper. An undeniable masterpiece with no regards to musical boundaries would have helped a lot to Kanye, but as I said above, Yeezus was only a mediocre attempt at best. In the process Ye sacrificed a bulk of his hip-hop fans (who were always the vast majority), as he haven’t dropped any noteworthy for them since MBDTF. That was 5 years ago, or even if I count WtT it’s 4 years. Ye is still a genius, but he reached the borders of his talent and struggling hard to overcome himself.
AM i the only one that liked Yeezus!!! UGH shit bumps in the whip
Name Kanye’s top 3 albums, is this in there ?
That’s what I thought
My argument against this album (as well as many others) is that it’s not what makes hip hop interesting. Starting from Hip Hop or Rap, the fans expect to be spoken to about situation that they themselves are in. The genre is about being in a marginalized group that has finally gained a voice that can be heard and felt. This is what we as fans of the rap genre connect to. While the rappers are generally showing their perspective on the situation, the situation is still something many people can relate to. Take NWA- Fuck the Police, a song about overly aggressive police in Cali. The song can be felt by people in that situation even outside of Cali but to people that may have never had a negative police interaction because of their situation, the song is not nearly as powerful.
Yeezus is not about speaking to fans or anything anyone can relate to besides Kanye and other artist. This is what makes the album so disparaging. People can’t relate to business/ artist constraints that he’s in, or being ultra famous. The main view of this album comes from someone who is an ultra celebrity. The subject matter might be about love or anger but it’s not coming from a place that we know about. Kanye made an album for himself to say he put his life into it. I love most of music of it and most people agree with that but when it becomes about Kanye asking people to be interested in his life beyond your own, I question anyone saying this album is great without being interested in the life of Kanye outside of music.
Breakdown: Yeezus asks the audience to understand Kanye’s situation and life in order to feel any emotional attachment to the album. That is the purpose of this article, to give context to the point of the album. Rap doesn’t need these things. Music doesn’t need it. Art doesn’t need it. If you don’t understand the music then the music isn’t for you. If you don’t understand the art, the art isn’t for you. Example of not being understood but still making good music is Lupe, Doom or Bob Dylan. Regardless of liking their music, they have really complicated lyrics. Often, these lyrics are complicated because they reference a subject that many people might not know about not a subject that only pertains to the artist itself.
That was dope.. I agree a thousand percent… amazing
You tried to make the project sound noble. But looking back it’s still bad. He’s really anti-corporate? We really still believe that tag line?
The man just can’t see the immense irony of complaining about creating a “better” sneaker and comparing that to kids in Chicago. It’s not the same struggle.
We all love “All Falls Down”. The self awareness was ground breaking, simultaneously loving and obsessing over consumerism while being aware of its toxicity. That’s been his first 3 albums in a nutshell. Self awareness of the ego and the products but also aware of its dangers. With Yeezus he throes that all out the window. Like add some comedic levity to your situation. Make a joke letting us know that marrying a Socialite while hating paparazzi is hilarious. That marrying a plastic doll is ironic when your mother passed under the knife. Letting us know your aware of the irony of not being able to make a sneaker meanwhile single mom’s take off from work and stand in line just to buy those shoes. Be aware.
I think 808s was undervalued at the time. But looking back it nearly instantly changed music. I’d say Drake and Future owe there career to it. T-Pain introduced it to the masses but Kanye put a certain safistication on it. Yeezus is not being immulated by anyone and it won’t be.
Well said.
808’s and heartbreaks would not have been an album if it weren’t for kid cudi. He took kid cudi’s style and cudi lent him his vocals and pen for majority of the project
t-pain
I ead somewhere where someone said Kanye could release a blank cd as an album and ask the fans “to imagine the music”….., sad thing is the fans would prolly say call it brilliant and artful, this aint complicated at all, I love me some Kanye beats and verse but the way these music journalists praise the man one would think it was the rebirth of Mozart or Beethoven!!! Unlike some of these deaf dumb and blind, WE SEE THE EMPEROR, AND WE DO NOT LIKE HIS NEW CLOTHES!!!
(Denzel Voice) my nigga
Ish was trash then and trash it remains…FOH!!!
Kanye’s BEST album. Good night.
And now a sober review of Yeezus: It sucks.
Niggas swear there’s something SO PHENOMENAL about this project. Y’all need to leave this shit in the past
Lol there was no division among most hip hop fans….Kanye stans fucking loved it and critics loved it but everyone else recognizes the fact it’s fucking shit
If you think corporations just began having control over America in 2013 you are an ignorant fool
These niggas tryna explain history through artists eyes, while I applaud the effort..these artists pf our generation just dont have that real star Quality that makes their music timeless…why? Because who the fuck Else is tryna change the world through shit lIke fashion…if you make shit that connects all the Common folk…maybe we got a chance…I cant understand how you Think yeezys are gonna do that..I mean shaq did a much better job with his kmart line than you…
And now Kanye has realized his dream of becoming a corporate goon imitating the likeness of Mugatu from Zoolander. Can’t believe he really released the homeless people clothing line just like Mugatu.
Lol but you hiphop fans amaze me… Sure Yeezus wasn’t great.. But that doesn’t negate the fact that Kanye did kind of see that The Corporation would stretch its hands to all areas of life… Thus always having product to push on the public… Yeezus was just a statement album to say, “Fuck you and your corporation y’all niggas cant control me!!” …. But at the end of the day as one commentator noted, the control these companies have over all artists in the industry is to strong for them to be able to really wiggle free to promote their own ideas and values!
Yeezus is classic