On “Yeezus” the famous egotist grapples with monogomy, worries endlessly, and finally admits he’s not a perfect man
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The first sound on “Yeezus”, Kanye West’s follow up to the hyper acclaimed “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”, is electronic chaos—a mess in the best way. It’s what I imagine an alien abduction sounds like. Kanye announces his presence after 30 seconds of threatening clamor, saying “Yeezy season approaching/Fuck whatever y’all been hearing.” In this first verse, his energy might not match the beat behind him, but his intent certainly does. As he later says, “A monster about to come alive again.” His noted messiah complex is on full display here, these bars the first of numerous lines equating West’s arrival with the Second Coming of Christ. But at the same time, his fascination with the word “monster” hints at the question at the heart of Kanye’s career: Is he a good person? And for the first time in his discography, Kanye doesn’t seem to be offering an emphatic “yes.”
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The majority of the press surrounding the record’s release has little to do with lyrical content at all; it seems like all anyone’s been able to talk about is Kanye’s very public relationship with Kim Kardashian and his impending fatherhood. And it seemed a PR person had made a deal with the stork when the couple welcomed their daughter barely 24 hours after “Yeezus” leaked. But for all the media circus surrounding Kanye’s new responsibilities, at no point does fatherhood directly come up on this album. Kanye addressed the idea of having a son on Watch the Throne’s “New Day,” but he’s silent on the topic here. He reportedly spent much of Kim’s pregnancy in Paris working on the album only to scratch most of it with Rick Rubin in Malibu. He did find time to attend the baby shower though.
Much can, and will be made, of the album’s incessant narcissism. There’s a particularly subtle song titled “I Am a God” after all, and it goes just about how you’d expect it to, coming from Kanye. Spotify, iTunes and Wikipedia even list God as featured on the track. But Kanye has always been an unrepentant egotist, and that’s part of what makes him fascinating. On “Yeezus” though, it’s clear he’s not only aware how people perceive him, and maybe for the first time, he cares. “I know I got a bad reputation/Walking ’round, always mad reputation” he raps on closing track “Bound 2.” In his now infamous New York Times interview, Kanye said he’s estimates 90 percent of the time it looks like he isn’t having a good time, and he does nothing to refute that uncomfortable image on “Yeezus”. It’s a stark confessional LP, with moments like Kid Cudi’s anguished line of “If you love me so much then why’d you let me go?” on “Guilt Trip” building this portrait. It’s not explicit, but there’s the indication in these lyrics that West dislikes the man he’s become, but is too proud to say so.
Kanye’s always been more of a clever lyricist than a great one, a quick quip rather than a thoughtful takedown kind of guy. He lacks the wordplay and flow of his big brother mentor Jay-Z, but he’s made up for these deficiencies by being more brazen and confessional. He’s never shied away from tackling his personal life, from the “Late Registration”’s oedipal stand out “Hey Mama” to “808s and Heartbreaks” covering his failed engagement and the death of his mother. “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” was crafted largely as a reaction to the public’s Kanye derision after the infamous Taylor Swift VMA incident. If Kanye does it in real time, he’ll talk about it in his songs, and offers a “fuck you” for thinking he’s a bad person for doing so.
“808s” in particular is remembered as being Kanye’s most personal album, and while it wasn’t as warmly received as previous endeavors, its impact has grown over the years. Drake, The Weeknd and Frank Ocean are all indebted to the record. “Yeezus” is somehow an even more personal affair, and this is reflected in its lack of guest artists. While MBDTF was crammed with guests, and there was rarely a moment when Kanye was truly alone, Yeezus has numerous scenes where everyone has left the party and West has only himself for company. And now, finally, he’s not sure if he likes what he sees.
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Kanye first premiered the track “New Slaves” by projecting it on buildings around the world, and he eventually gave it and “Black Skinhead” a proper debut on SNL. The two songs seemed to indicate a politically charged album, but in the context of the whole record, they reveal themselves to be just as focused on the issue of failed and messed up relationships, many of which Kanye takes the blame (or credit) for. For example, “my momma was raised in the era when/Clean water was only served to the fairer skin” West raps in “New Slaves” but eventually the lyrics focus return on the topic of sex that permeates the album. It’s adultery in this case as Kanye raps “I’ll fuck your Hampton spouse/Came on her Hampton blouse/And in her Hampton mouth.”
Sex could be considered the dominant topic of this album, with nearly every song containing some reference to Kanye’s sordid affairs and bold claims—bloodless, cliched descriptions that at first glance don’t seem very different than his previous albums. “Eatin’ Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce” he raps on “I’m In It,” “Last night my bitches came in twos/And they both suck like they came to lose,” he says on “Send It Up,” and on “Bound 2” he romantically coos “I wanna fuck you hard on the sink/After that, give you something to drink/Step back, can’t get spunk on the mink.”
These are just some of the more explicit (and sometimes clunky) lyrics Kanye uses. It’s easy even to view the references as misogynistic, with the women often treated as images. And it’s certainly no stretch to say that Kanye has shown a history of misogyny before, but then hip-hop as a whole often equates masculinity with misogyny. It often seems that hip-hop as a whole is of the opinion that a real man is a man who has ‘fucked’ and discarded numerous ‘bitches.’
At first blush, “Yeezus” seems no different. But in the overarching narrative of the Kanye persona, here’s the major difference. These images are unfulfilling and Kanye seemingly expresses displeasure and self-hatred because of these affairs, indicating an underlying discomfort with the opposite sex. His peer and idol Jay-Z has settled down and grown out of this phase, and Kanye’s lyrics seem worried he’s incapable of doing so, and he’s afraid he’s less of a man than Jay because of this. If anything, Kanye is using his misogyny to mask his self-destructive tendencies, and while that doesn’t justify his attitude, it helps to explain it.
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“Blood on the Leaves,” the explosive centerpiece of the album, tackles this mistrust of women while also treading over material Kanye has rapped about before. It’s a story of betrayal and divorce and women who entrap men by getting pregnant and refusing an abortion. “We could’ve been somebody/’stead you had to tell somebody” Kanye cries out over the noisy brass sampled from TNGHT’s “R U Ready,” before later lashing out in anguish by saying “You could’ve been somebody,” indicating the impact of this betrayal. In many ways, it’s a dark reprise of “Gold Digger” but Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles is traded out for Nina Simone covering Billie Holiday’s lynching protest song “Strange Fruit.” The two samples vie for attention, and while Simone’s voice is expertly used to create atmosphere of a failed relationship, it loses some of its original power by equating lynchings with child support. But ignoring that one flaw, the track is still damn near flawless, largely for its true confessional tone.
The final track “Bound 2” is another standout, and features the classic Kanye soul samples that he built his name on. “Bound to fall in love” is repeated numerous times as the hook, and it’s almost a jarring transition from the sentiments expressed elsewhere on the album. “Close your eyes and let the word paint a thousand pictures/One good girl is worth a thousand bitches,” Kanye raps in the bridge, showing that this is exactly what it seems: a love song at the end of an album so concerned with sour relationships. After all of the dense and noisy discussion of betrayal and pain, the discomforting sounds of previous samples, Kanye ends “Yeezus” on a track that wouldn’t sound out of place on 2005’s Late Registration. “After all these long ass verses/ I’m tired, you tired, Jesus wept,” West says to the listener, and while the album is a brisk 40 minutes, they’ve taken a lot out of Kanye, and he’s done with his self-examination of his shortcomings and his own image of his manhood. Instead, “Bound 2” is a respite where he celebrates the life he lives instead of questioning the man he is.
“My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” was Kanye’s most well received album, and though it went platinum, it’s still his worst selling record and didn’t have a top-10 single on it. “Yeezus” doesn’t even come close to the commercial appeal and marketability of MBDTF, but it serves as another masterpiece in the career of an artist who has already made a magnum opus. It’s easy to say that Kanye shows on “Yeezus” that he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him, but the lyrics tell a different story.
Photo: AP, Nousha Salimi