“Got
the kids and the wife life/but can’t wake up from the night life”-Kanye West,
“I’m In It”
Kanye
West’s Yeezus is ugly, sparse, pornographic,
abrupt, alienating and scary. To hear it is to take it’s beating. “The monster
about to come alive again,” he says in the first cut, and its a strategically
placed warning, like the bashing of a television set as overture for David
Lynch’s un-Twin Peaks Twin Peaks
movie. “Monster” was the name of the angriest bile-spewing track on West’s last
album, and signifies that that guttural style with hold the most sway in this
new collection.
There’s
no joy here. Boasts of sexual conquests aren’t boasts at all under the mangled
scrim of West’s hoarsely pained vocal delivery and handheld, lost-in-the-club
production (a much chided line about being with Asian women thus “all I need is
sweet and sour sauce” is layered with a demonically dubbed second voice,
rendering the sentiment ominous and tension-fraught). It’s sprinting production
and recent completion only weeks ago gives Yeezus
the emotional moistness of a recently recovered suicide note. The 70s soul
samples that brought so much communal hearth to his beats in the days of
producing for The Blueprint and solo
albums like Graduation are gummed and
distorted beyond repair. Having just begun a family seems to have augmented,
rather than staunched, his demons.
If
anything, the persistence of the demons has brought him to an unprecedented
musical despair. Tracks like “New Slaves” and “Hold My Liquor” rise and fall in
choppy pixilated waves of rough acceleration and heartrending free-fall. He’s
not happy, not with his continued subtle subjugation by the mainstream media
(remember his Good Morning America interview
where Matt Lauer spoke to him like he was 5 years old?), not with the vacant
materialism of his fellow black success stories, and especially not with the
decadence and endless pampering available to him as a God. Mostly, though, he’s
unhappy about the fact that he’ll never be happy. His gross ego is justified
only in his talents, so how would you feel if you were one of the great modern popular
artists and were only known for having a “make a sad girl cry reputation”? On Yeezus he isn’t asking for our sympathy
but, like Trent Reznor (the musician this album most shockingly recalls) he’s invited
the listener into a nightmarish, chaotic headspace.
Screaming
and apocalyptic sirens plague Yeezus.
Techno bass and house acid rain isn’t employed for groove, but rather as the
horror movie soundtrack for catastrophically failed relationships and emotional
terrorism. “Blood On The Leaves” is the album’s most lacerating passage. Layering
high notes of Nina Simone’s voice from the track “Strange Fruit.” (The
callbacks to nature juxtaposed with the machine music of the record’s whole
give the listener a Brechtian image of an artificial tree on an empty stage,
perhaps circled by Dogville chalk.)
Kanye spills out an oblique, traumatic narrative of---we can only presume---a
failed relationship with a groupie who, in the year’s most unnerving lyric,
couldn’t handle her liquor so it “came out of your body.” Unlike many other
hip-hop kiss off tracks, “Leaves”’ violence and misogyny are underlined by a sensation
of total waste, the immolation of talent, connection, intimate potential.
Everyone is guilty, the star fuckers and the stars who have come to see others
as little more than shown-off Instagram photos. In a reference to the glorious
“Runaway”, of which this song is an obvious parallel, Kanye is reduced to
mumbling inaudible noises, static tears, into the Auto-Tune ether.
Yeezus is, like his last two
albums, and despite its intentional aura of tossed-off dirtiness, an architectural
scourge. Lyrics and sonic portents wind and click and compliment each other on
different cuts. The overrated Justin Vernon is vocally isolated in a lonely
lament of pain before the underrated Kid Cudi is similarly displayed singing
“If you loved me so much then why’d you let me go?”, his anguished solo pouring
down like hard rain on the album’s minimalist tarp. Beats and voices are
blasted into strobe echoes, most disturbingly at the instance of a female
orgasm. No joy anywhere. Kanye chants “God” at the close of the bleakly
exhilarating “Black Skinhead” which leads into the next track, “I Am A God.” He
sees blood on the leaves before “Blood On The Leaves.” Ragga and Dancehall
artists like Beenie Man are sampled throughout, partly as a classic West means
of enlightening the listener about the history of black music while
simultaneously seasoning the composition, but also as a hint to this album’s
ultimate aesthetical signpost, which reads “This Way To The Club.”
Simon
Reynolds called electronic dance music and rave culture a “journey into sound,”
and while Kanye’s overwhelming auteurist presence (not to mention Rick Rubin’s)
negates Yeezus as proper house, he’s
chipped enough thematic concrete from that music to make his career-long
concerns pulse with the blood of rave abandon. Yeezus is a journey into dark sound, and as Pitchfork commented it
resembles in the West(ern) canon 808s And
Heartbreak most of all. There’s a personal pain merged to the inherently
impersonal genre of electronica, but the dancefloor can be a breeding ground
for a thousand little tragedies. West can talk about fucking and stacking paper
all he wants, but he knows, and the music
knows, that it can contradict the speaker and tell the real story. The
pumping beat lends both gravity and bodily thrill to the album-wide expression
of dissatisfaction, resentment, loss and exhaustion.
Exhaustion
is a key component to understanding Yeezus,
and the creepy lethargy is articulated in the final song. “Bound 2” samples an
old soul tune but unlike a similar brushstroke on, say, Late Registration, the song is grainy, lost in fuzz, as if we’re
listening to a 3rd generation bootleg or a radio station that’s
going out with the tide the farther we drive from the tower. Kanye’s ferocious
flow diminishes to a halting stop-start speech, where he airs grievances in
regards to a certain relationship (with a certain culturally noxious figure
that all but makes a great work of art disposable gossip fodder for philistine
rags.) It’s good dog day hemp music, until. Until. Amid Kanye’s lightly lobbed
orders about this being “don’t tell your mom shit,” everything-the degraded
sample, his impotent rambling-is stopped dead by an emphatic vocalist who
breaks through the numb to bravely intone “I
know you’re tired of loving, of loving, with nobody to love.” Then we’re
returned to the stoned quotidian, a Nothing To See Here reversal, like the
actors in The Truman Show quickly
repairing a collapse in the immaculate show set. This breakthrough epiphany
comes back in full longing and force, only to be suppressed one more time
before the song pathetically deflates. “Bound 2” is difficult stuff and not
easy to like, especially if you compare it to “Lost In The World.” Don’t,
that’ll get you nowhere. Instead, focus on the sound story “Bound 2” is
dramatizing. Think of how much like life the shifts mirror, your daily mired
routine in waxy perception and circuitous bitching-until, until that one geyser
of passion bursts through your brain, telling you you’re tired, that you can
strive for something better, that you can leave with someone else, a
metaphorical person or a warm passionate body. And yet, since even the dream is
too wretched to consider because you’ve wasted enough time, and striving and
failing would be worse than doing nothing (you tell yourself), that outpour is
bottled again and stopped.
Uh-huh
honey. I’m tired, you’re tired, Yeezus wept. Thank god.
