An unconventional album deserves an unconventional review. The views of the world on Yeezus are split like so: The big people love the album, and the small people are hating on it. I guess I’ll end up being the one small person who gives it love. If you want the cliff notes of this, it’s this: Yeezus is the child of the My Dark Twisted Fantasy and 808 & Heartbreaks, you assume that both of those albums are baby boomers and Yeezus is a Gen Z. If you like to sit by yourself in a room, and listen to an album cover to cover, you're going to love Yeezus.
I stopped writing for a while now; I was over it. I was going to quit and stopped really listening to music as much as I did as well. I didn’t see a point to writing reviews; more for the fact that I didn’t want to be compared to all of these idiots on the internet writing review (All GCM peeps excluded). Why am I angry at everyone writing a review? Because they don’t get it. They will just sit in their safe little room and reference the samples, the lyrics and compare it to what’s out today and what they have in their collection. They don’t see the bigger pictures or potential frames of reference. They need to stop looking backwards. This isn’t a rap album. This isn’t a hip hop album. This isn’t even Kanye West in any conventional sense as he has historically been known; this is Yeezus, a rebirth, a new start and a deliverance to the people. The rules don’t really apply anymore now that EDM has been the one wearing the crown in the past few years. How can I explain this to you? This is not an album with any radio hits, so don’t sit in your chair and catalog it and compare it to what’s out today. You can’t compare it to anything because Kanye West’s trying his best to show us the future here. Where are we? Where’s our footing? We’ve lost the ground. Have you heard Top 40 today? This is all music that was developed, collected and collaborated on to make money and deliver minimal lyrics. So if you say the lyrics on the Yeezus album are weak, be sure to look around to what you’re comparing it to.
The words of this album are understood by the people who have lived with all of Kanye’s releases; those who have been through the same hard places in life. This is a soundtrack and words from a true alpha-male and artist. These are the words and lyrics by an artist who is trying to deliver art, not a message. It’s easy to complain about the lyrics or say there are no brilliant lines that we were hoping to hear. There are points in this album with pure silence and then one sound and yelling. The only question that I ask is, where is the version without the record label’s influence? Can’t you get the people of the world both versions? Why can’t I have an untouched album version where it’s pure Kanye Vision? He’s screaming on the album on how the world can’t fuck with Ye’ but, he was still forced to have ten tracks instead of the nine he wanted. I bet we can all guess the track on this album that was added on and, go figure, it’s the one that everyone wants to listen to. It’s also been reported that he delivered almost half of this album in a two-hour session before he had a flight out of Paris, where he recorded this album. Here’s what I have to say on that: a true artist knows everything they are going to do in their head before they do it. When and how he actually recorded it doesn’t matter. It could have taken two months of writing in his head before he pushed it through a microphone.
When it comes to the sound of this album, Kanye West delivered his vision of the future. We’re in a place where we have people like Skrillex and A$AP Rocky make songs like, “Wild for the Night.” This is where music is being made with the next few months in mind. But that’s not in the caliber of music that Kanye West seeks to deliver. The sounds of this album were built to be something that can last a few decades. Am I supposed to hit the dance floor on all of these tracks? Not at all. When you look at the birth of music, it wasn’t either. I don’t see anyone break dancing to classical music. This album was developed with a handful of people. Honestly, there’s more people to list than I’d care to mention. Where does this sound get us? With an artist piece that I simply adore. Why do I love this album? Name one that it mimics. Yeezus is a piece of art that cannot be defined just yet. I thank Kanye for this album. It’s what I’ll be driving to, spending my alone time to and enjoying for years to come.
Artist:
www.kanyewest.com/
www.myspace.com/kanyewest
www.facebook.com/kanyewestorg
www.twitter.com/kanyewest
Album:
Yeezus is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
Kanye West: producer, rapper, blogger, sunglasses model, and much much more. He's proven that he can conquer basically any task he sets himself. With his latest, 808s And Heartbreak, he's crossed over into music criticism; there's no more accurate and concise description of his latest album than its title. It's a record of spare beats and depressive lyrics about myriad failed relationships. It conjures a world where everyone's worst fears about love spool out over simple and impossibly catchy beats: it's 808s and heartbreak.
The album's move that has raised the most eyebrows, of course, is Kanye's foray into singing. In a fairly major departure, the producer/rapper sings every song on the album, as well as the occasional rap; on this album, Kanye is both Ja Rule and Ashanti. Those initially skeptical of how well this would work did not have their fears laid to rest by a pair of successive, decidedly off-key live performances on Late Night With Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live. Utterly underutilizing the vocoder/autotune that is meticulously applied throughout the album, he incongruously jumped around the stage and aggressively shouted about having his heart broken. He might ask Bright Eyes about how to perform pensively.
This record, it's become obvious, is not cut out for Kanye the performer. He's too addicted to spectacle to convincingly perform these intimate songs. 808s And Heartbreak is a triumph, however, for Kanye West the producer. Using the Roland TR-808 drum machine, his own autotuned voice, and not much else, Kanye makes an arresting, funny, spooky and spare record that is more Andre 3000 than Jay-Z.
On track after track, Kanye plumbs the depths of his despair, touching on everything from jealous lovers to the isolating effects of success, and even his dead mother, who is the subject of "Coldest Winter." Kanye goes about this with his usual lack of subtly, which is refreshing—he's not really concerned if you can relate to what he's talking about, which only increases the record's honesty. An artist who was more worried about relating to America's teenagers wouldn't sing "My friend showed me pictures of his kids/And I could show were pictures of my cribs" or "Do you think I sacrificed real life for all the fame?" as Kanye does on "Welcome to the Heartbreak" and "Pinocchio Story," two of the record's most revealing tracks.
The album's best tracks are its most simple—thematically and musically. "Heartless" finds Kanye rap-singing about being mistreated over some hypnotically repetitive Chinese flutes. "Love Lockdown" is nothing but a drum hit cum heartbeat, a piano loop, some stomp-percussion, and Kanye's singing, and yet it's one of the most epic tracks on the record—a riot of misery.
"Tell Everybody You Know," featuring Lil' Wayne, is another unqualified winner. Kanye and Wayne, over some spooky, Castlevania-style synths, tell off a former flame. "Tell everybody that you know/That I don't love you no more," Kanye sings, growling like a juke joint singer a little more on every repetition of "everybody." He may be singing about having his heart broken, but he sounds like he's having a lot of fun.
Kanye West does heartbreak like he does everything else—as big as humanly possible. Towards the end of the record, you wonder if this 30-year-old multi-millionaire and international superstar has anything else depressing to talk about—indeed, "Paranoid" and "Robocop" cover much the same territory, complaining about jealous lovers. In a world where pop music becomes exponentially more generic every day, it's refreshing to hear one of the world's biggest stars experiment a little. It's a success.
Artist:
http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com
http://www.myspace.com/kanyewest
Album:
Kanye West – 808s and Heartbreak is out now. Buy it on Amazon.
