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YEEZUS WALKS - A few thoughts on a polarizing piece of art

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YEEZUS WALKS

Yeezus

Kanye West is angry. He’s aggro, he’s anti, he’s frustrated. He’s probably feeling more than a little trapped under the weight of all those impossible expectations. He’s quoting C-Murder and bizarrely repurposing the most hauntingly poignant protest song in the American canon. He’s drawing a straight line from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the prison industrial complex, from the South side of Chicago to Wall Street. He’s developed an affinity–scratch that–a blood lust for visceral, eye-gauging industrial buzz-synth. He’s gasping for air. He’s screaming.

Dicks. Swallowers. Mandatory croissants and Malcolm X. Asian pussy and raspy patois. Ghosts. Blood on the motherfucking leaves. Angular, immediate, supremely abrasive and alternately claustrophobic and colossal. Joyless even. Dark and troubling and spilling over into self-parody until it’s terrifyingly convincing. It’s hard to talk about this thing in actual sentences, because it hits like a fucking sack of doorknobs–and yet, there’s a ruthless focus to it. As many hyperbolic adjectives as people can throw at this thing, it’s still hard to say they’re exaggerating.

The moments that have come to define Kanye’s career are etched into my memory. Remember “Love Lockdown”? Whatever it was you felt when he stood up there, all alone in a blindingly white suit, his voice shaking as he groped for those low notes? I still get nervous for the guy when I watch him on TV sometimes. There are still moments when it seems like the shit coming out his mouth is surprising even to him. In a lot of ways, Yeezus feels like a companion piece to 808s—that brooding mess of autotuned internal conflict. Like that album, it’s laser-focused aesthetically, and yes, it’s a Dylan-goes-electric expectation shatterer too. It’s a similarly messy pile of famous feelings draped across a generous helping of holy shit. But even 808s had aspirations of pop dominance and ultimately, it reached them. It changed radio permanently. “Heartless” still pops up on American Idol every few episodes because it was kinda built to. This is not that Kanye West. In the place of squishy, fluid sadness, and that deflated heart balloon, is anger, sharpened to a point, designed to be jammed directly into to our skulls. We are a captive audience to the greatest entertainer on the planet. His voice is not shaking.


Download: Kanye West – “New Slaves”

Okay, so maybe this thing is kinda fun. Watching the reactions are, at least. A lot has been made of all the explosive id and radical blackness, and it’s there. Like right there, on the table. He likens himself to King Kong. A pair of titties is “free at last”. “I put my fist in her like the civil rights sign”. Up against acid house and strobe light death sirens, we get urgent, contorted dancehall breakdowns, super-screwed monster vocals and sex squeals. Alongside the sonic assault, Ye challenges us to confront every ugly stereotype in the book, and almost always through the prism of his own contradictory impulses. It can be painful watching him tease out the threads connecting all those filthy little manifestations of racism sewn into our collective consciousness. But it feels pretty damn purposeful. Necessary even. In the year that saw a pair of rap Gods stripped of corporate-mega-sponsorship for talking about Emmett Till and date rape, the message is clear: let’s talk about this stuff.

You can’t just sweep 600 caskets under the rug. Not when Keef’s right here next to Bon Iver. You can’t just ignore for-profit-prisons when Ye’s cumming all in your Hampton mouth. Not when the blood’s on the leaves, and not when it’s on his hands too. If, at first glance, “New Slaves” felt unfocused in its commentary, repeated listens reveal just how succinctly, staggeringly effective it is at setting up dots for us all to connect: luxury brands siphoning off dough from people who can’t afford it, dick-measuring rap game decadence, corporate oligarchs greed-orgying our economy to death. Fountains, firehoses, fields. “New Slaves” is not only a scathing indictment of our supposedly post-racial culture, it’s also at the heart of the conflicts that drive this album–Kanye is at war, and not least of all with himself.

Witness the shrieking, and batshit asphyxiation that close out “I Am a God”. Sure, being deified has its perks–pastries and massage therapy, among others. But the portrait of godliness Ye paints here isn’t about the power–that’s a given. This is idoldom as existential crisis. All at once, you start to feel some of that crushing weight.

What’s it like to have a big ass megaphone you can never turn off? To be the face of the black avant-garde in a pop landscape largely devoid of anything challenging? How do you navigate your Gil Scott-Heron responsibilities with a face full of diamonds? Through that lens, you can start to see why someone might want to assert their most hostile, unapproachable artistic impulses, just at the moment when his face is becoming a permanent fixture at grocery store magazine racks. Let’s not forget that that massive platform, and all that power is built on being compelling–and Kanye is compelling, at least in part, because he’s compulsive. Erratic. If you’ve listened to much of his music over the last five years, you’d have to think the space between his ears is a frightening place to be. And nothing in his catalog has ever managed to convey that sense of frantic claustrophobia quite like that scream. You’re instantly in that exact moment after waking up from a nightmare. It’s fucking bananas.

So despite meeting the post-Fantasy expectations with a firm “fuck off”, this is still a Kanye West record. Naturally, there are jaw-drop moments. Take the jarring dancehall drop that launches “I’m In It”. Or the skeletal shuffle of “Black Skinhead”, which recalls nothing quite so much as “Personal Jesus”, simultaneously giving at least a little foundation to Kanye’s newfound discovery that he’s really been new wave all along. Where exactly Rick Rubin stepped in to strip things down is anybody’s guess, but his presence here is undeniable. His revolutionary spirit is pumping through it–from “Rock the Bells” and “Raining Blood” on up through American Music.

And then there’s the outro to “Slaves”. Maybe it’s the Dropout in me talking, but after all that paranoid, minimal tension, the release of that sample is unreal. In the only YouTube version I could find of the source material (a gorgeous piece of late ’60s Hungarian prog), fireworks start bursting as soon as that break starts to bloom. Frank is angelic. I know pretty’s not the point. But god damn, is that thang pretty. And what about when the crinkly soul of “Bound” inexplicably cuts to Charlie Wilson taking us all to church, backed by those giant slabs of synth? It’s almost as if Yeezy’s peeling back the curtains, reminding us for a tantalizing moment that we could’ve been sitting here slappin’ My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy II, if it didn’t feel too much like the easy thing to do.

The benefit of the doubt is a crazy thing though. At its riskiest, Yeezus pushes hard up against it. I mean, how warped does your perspective have to be to think it’s a good idea to scramble up “Strange Fruit” with HudMo’s monster trap–let alone turning it into a canvas to bitch about being too famous, and having too many girlfriends? The whole thing is so patently ridiculous, it couldn’t not be purposeful. Right? That Frankenstein monster has to be there to show us that for Yeezus, nothing is sacred. He’s smashing the glass ceiling. Defacing a masterpiece. And if the trappings of fame feel like Ku Klux Crucifixion to him, well fuck. I guess they do.


Download: Kanye West – “Bound 2″

To be real, I’ve been a little surprised at just how overwhelmingly positive the response has been so far. Critics were practically tripping over each other to get their “I totally get what he’s doing here” vote in first. If nothing else though, it’s proof that Ye’s earned the right to be heard out for everything he’s got to say. My only hope is that, for every fascinating conversation it sparks, its bristly exterior doesn’t keep certain people out. I wondered, after a confounding first listen, if all the revolutionary, populist intentions of Kanye’s radio/YouTube/corporate-compromise boycott might actually hurt the album’s cause in terms of connecting with people. Might it be lost on some of the folks who counted on him to bridge the gap between high art and ClearChannel rap? On the kids stuck in Chiraq? I mean, it would inevitably fall on deaf ears for some folks even if it was shiny and pretty–the folks who routinely miss the point because they’re busy talking about Kim, or because they’re still somehow baffled by a tremendously gifted rapper having an inflated ego. But even I’m sitting here every few songs like what the fuck am I supposed to do with zillionaire Death Grips?

The more I think about it though, the more “fuck it” seems like the only place he could’ve gone with it–really letting everything go–the last frontier after cultural ubiquity and a 10.0 Pitchfork review. Why not kill Kanye West? It’s a beautifully subversive thing to use the spotlight that way–to seize a popportunity and serve up something so grim. The teddy bear mascot burning in effigy. You might even call it a sacrifice. After all, he did it all for us. Or for him. Whatever. I’m not sure if it matters, either way.


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