Kanye heads into the ditch.

Yeezus
by Kanye West
(Def Jam, 2013)

In the liner notes for his 1977 career retrospective Decade, Neil Young wrote of Heart of Gold, his biggest hit single, that “this song put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there."

The three albums that followed – 1973’s Time Fades Away, 1974’s On the Beach, and 1975’s Tonight’s the Night –  were tough going indeed; rough-hewn ruminations on death and dissatisfaction that possessed few of the wistful qualities of the brilliant yet somewhat saccharine Harvest. They would also prove to be the greatest work of an artist dedicated to the encapsulation of raw emotion. Today, Young is revered, but his departure from the foreground of country rock lost him many fans; he was certainly a better songwriter than Harvest guests James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, and if he was to stick with the commercial country sound, not only would it have made great financial sense, but it would have been to the scene’s ultimate credit.

Kanye West’s triumphant victory-lap of the last three years has included three albums, starting with 2010’s grandiose masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, before seeing him touring the world to rapturous responses alongside Jay-Z in support of their collaboration Watch The Throne, and winding down slightly with his label-showcase Cruel Summer. The latter is somewhat of an outlier due to West’s reduced presence on many of the tracks, but thematically it sits well alongside its predecessors as a celebration of excess, and the singles – Mercy, Clique, New God Flow – speak for themselves. It is difficult to classify these projects within any preconceived umbrella-terms for the genre; are they conscious hip-hop? They’re certainly intelligent enough, and have their flirtations with experimentation. Yet they unashamedly pander to the mainstream; filled with famous voices, slamming beats, and inane, zeitgeist-y platitudes that jump out amidst the general lyrical brilliance. I think My Beautiful Dark Fantasy is a truly great album; a fantastically conflicted look at what it means to be a rich black man in America, and Watch The Throne exceeds expectations as its celebratory contraposition. But if Kanye West spent the last few years building an amazingly lucrative musical empire, then  Yeezus is the sound of him rebelling against himself in a blood-soaked artistic coup.

Another quote that the anti-commercial din of Yeezus brings sharply to mind comes early in the pages of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain – “Great heroic Achilles who...isolates himself, positions himself defiantly outside the very society whose glorious protector he is and whose need of him is enormous.” My question is – does Kanye West need mainstream culture, and vice versa?

Judging by the dearth of listenable music amidst the masses of pop singles professing to be hip-hop, I would suggest that Kanye is an extremely positive figure to be sat atop the genre’s Olympus – which, by the way, is a simile he – never one to resist glorifying himself – has embraced in the past. Judging by the quality of Yeezus, I am not sure Kanye needs to cater to the tastes of anybody but his own. Which, indeed, is how an artist should work. On his incandescent verse at the centre of I Am A God, he declares his intentions; “Soon as they like you, make ‘em unlike you/’cause kissing people’s ass is so unlike you.” Any artist with integrity should, he says, pay scant regard to criticism, and keep moving on creatively as the muse dictates. In the same verse, ‘Ye pours scorn on his erstwhile fashion choices of “pink-ass polos with a fucking backpack” – the venom of the expletive is remarkable, and an avid listener of his music knows exactly what he’s getting at; in 2010’s Gorgeous, he said “as long as I’m in polos, smiling, they think they got me” – he is throwing off the fashionista shackles that bonded him to white America.

In the middle of opener On Sight, with its nasty buzz-saw synths, the thrillingly rudimentary beat drops out, and the listener is briefly regaled with a pitch-shifted gospel sample. “Look,” it implores, “this is the Kanye West you used to like.” He could make retro-fitted rap albums like Late Registration and The College Dropout again. But he’s not going to rap over this sample. No sooner has it arrived, it is unceremoniously ripped from the mix, similar sounds resurfacing again only on the great album closer Bound 2. It is interesting (to me) to compare Yeezus sonically to a contemporaneous album by a partnership whose deft production touches are all over On Sight, Black Skinhead, I Am A God and Send It Up; Random Access Memories by Daft Punk. There is a great disparity between Yeezus’ head-fucking production and the lush, organic sounds of Random Access Memories.  If anything, this proves that Daft Punk share his passion for musical exploration, and they fit right into Kanye’s “muthafucking clique” alongside such luminaries as Mike Deen and Hudson Mohawke, whose names may not be so familiar to you, but whose beats will certainly have reverberated through your eardrums at some point.

Blood on the Leaves is a track so potentially divisive that its key detractors and its most avid defenders are more than likely the same person. Anybody who has followed the Yeezus saga will be aware that it has drawn criticism from some for its juxtaposition of Nina Simone’s Strange Fruit, a track that still simmers with political potency, with the rapper-singer’s autotuned lamentations of relationship woes. It is an audacious and possibly insensitive move and at first, I admit, a contrast that made me somewhat uncomfortable. Its ugly synthesized horns, however, drive home a greater truth about this music; that Kanye West has no interest in masking the ugliness of some of his thoughts and desires. Furthermore, it is indicative of a kind of black empowerment rarely seen in mainstream culture; West can take an iconic sample inextricably linked to his race’s social history and make it as personal as any whiney white music. Why should an artist be bound by history? It is wholly in keeping with Yeezus’, and in general with West’s, desire to disregard the past.

Similarly, on one of the album’s more crudely scatological lyrics, Kanye states of an unnamed woman, that he will “put (his) fist in her like a civil rights sign.” Sex is everything on Yeezus; not merely as an enduring provider of pleasure and fascination that informs some part of almost every verse on here, but as a means of revenge. The sharp, hilarious social critique of New Slaves (which, in time, I will address) is eventually brought around to the image of West cruising the Hamptons, having sex with the wives of the white oligarchs who have so wronged his people. This is just one instance of many. Ultimately, the sexual insensitivity of the lyrics makes me remember what I liked so much about the Kanye West of Gorgeous, railing against media sexism like a flip-side of On Sight; compare “she told the director she try’na get into school/he said take them glasses off and get in the pool” to “black Timbs all on your couch again/black dick all in your spouse again.” Both songs positively radiate fury, but the difference is that this time around the anger feels misplaced, which is a conceit at the heart of Yeezus’ schizophrenic outrage. The album – and not just the music therein, but also the no-singles-no-videos-no-artwork-no-press(except for the New York Times)-no-tour(just yet) marketing campaign – is so nakedly antagonistic, it is as if West is defying the listener to like it.

The lyrics’ virtue lies not necessarily in what is being said, but in how it sounds. Consequently, I think that Lou Reed’s dictum that “if you like sound” one should “listen to what he’s giving you” one of the more pertinent statements concerning Yeezus. For all the talk of Kanye’s status as a musical visionary, it would be criminal to overlook that he is a brilliant MC, whose multisyllabic phrasing is seldom less than perfect regardless of lyrical meaning; whilst he does not often speak-rap, Andre 3000-style, there is a consummate musicality to his vocal delivery. In fact, ‘Ye’s delivery is remarkably contained a lot of the time. I hear the behemoth beats, such as Black Skinhead’s raucous glitter stomp, and want to scream what lyrics I’ve memorised. Yet, for all his egomania, he resists imbuing his recorded performances with superfluous force.

Rick Rubin, one of the many producers who worked seemingly tirelessly in order to realise Kanye’s vision, has stated in the press that there was a rush to complete Yeezus  in time for release date, with many of its star’s verses incomplete or completely absent on the eve of their deadline. Consequently, lines that seem to reflect inconsequentiality may actually be displays of spontaneity, which don’t necessarily make a record more refined, but certainly make it more honest; much, in fact, like the one-take aesthetic Neil Young has preferred to employ throughout his career. One feels, however, that some preparation was put into the creation of New Slaves.

To reapply an adjective I used to describe On Sight (and that is, in fact, appropriate for several of the songs on the album), New Slaves is driven by a beat that is so rudimentary, there is no drum track either synthesized or live. At times, the lyrics are penetrative, such as “meanwhile the DEA teamed up with the CCA/They’re try’na lock niggas up – they’re try’na make New Slaves/See that’s that privately-owned prison, get your piece today!” – a very erudite and very funny attack on the US’ barbaric prison-industrial system; a by-effect of the War on Drugs, arguably the single biggest project dedicated to subjugating and criminalising the poor (particularly, incidentally, of black America) since the feudal system. At other times, his bars, if well-intentioned in context, are questionable; “you see, it’s leaders and it’s followers/but I’d rather be a dick than a swallower.”The song as a whole is a terrific indictment of the racist attitudes West sees everywhere, be it the prison system or the world of fashion that he perceives as having mistreated him,  giving birth to the hilariously pointed crack “doing clothes you would’ve thought I had help/but they wasn’t satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself.”

The choice of word, “help”, is very interesting. It suggests that West thought he could win in white, capitalist America on his own terms, perhaps becoming  the oligarch he so despises, a little like his sometime colleague and noted entrepreneur Jay-Z. But once he was almost there, he came to a realisation that a) he will never gain the same respect in high society as his oppressors, simply due to centuries of skewed opportunity and b) that he truly fucking hated these people. His final line is the rhetorical question, “now what the fuck you goin’ say now?” It’s a challenge to his peers in hip-hop as much as it is to the establishment he’s decrying, or the gaping-mouthed listener. Is anybody going to top this album in 2013? In New Slaves, Kanye “see(s) the blood on the leaves,” and this time it is 100% serious with few, comparatively trivial, personal connotations. The track’s beautiful epilogue is a crescendo of histrionic guitars, like the overblown  musical aesthetic of 1980s hard rock being flipped on its ear, with Kanye’s autotuned singing contrasting gorgeously with Frank Ocean’s crystalline vocalisations. Ocean’s presence implies that the “swallower” credo  was firmly tongue-in-cheek, and reminds us that West was one of the first figures in mainstream hip-hop to endorse LGBTQ rights. There is an suggestion that whilst he is incredibly mature as an artist, he still has some way to go as a person. Which is the case for many of us.

Speaking of which, to make an oversight of West’s self-applied apotheosis I Am a God (aside from its masterful centric verse, which I have already mentioned) would be to ignore the delusions-of-grandeur-that-maybe-aren’t-really-delusions that lie at the heart of the Kanye West oeuvre. Initially I read the title as I Am God, in the singular, and was rather disappointed that he chose to not-quite elevate himself over every single other being in the universe. It supposes the interesting conceit that West is a pantheist of sorts, worshipping both the Judeo-Christian God and that messianic figure of white-collar splendour; himself. Often the album’s lyrics are comically awful, and not in the sense that they are badly written, but rather morally repugnant. A promotional video directed by West was a short, near-verbatim parody in which the rapper/director/polymath inserts his own name into American Psycho’s famous Huey Lewis & the News scene. American Psycho concerns a hideously amoral, psychopathic Yuppie whose emotional vacuum is masked by the superficialities of the Reaganite ‘80s, and American God would have been a worthy alternate title for Yeezus. It intrigues me that he associates Godlike stature with wealth, rattling off lines concerning such trappings of corpulence as Porches, ménage-a-trois and, now infamously, croissants. Much like the quantified anguish of Guilt Trip, it drips with dread, descending into guttural screams.

His appearance on Saturday Night Live, on which he premiered New Slaves and Black Skinhead, introduced by a rather unenthused-seeming Ben Affleck, was incredibly exciting to watch, with his on-stage demeanour respectively statuesque and hyperactive, as would befit the divergent styles of both tracks. Nevertheless, it did not prove as prescient to the finished album as it might have seemed, promising something altogether more political, and rather more rooted in EDM than the criss-crossing beats of Yeezus. Yet again, he confounded expectations. I am exhausted from writing about the record; fragments of information that I wished to include somewhere herein keep belated occurring to me. The RZA, who has worked with ‘Ye before on songs including Dark Fantasy and White Dress, and considers him to be upholding the spirit of the Wu-Tang Clan despite their very different approaches to the rap genre, contributes to the production of I’m In It, likely the most radio-friendly track on here (and one of the most sex-crazed, as the title would suggest), which ends with a magnificent drum/vocal breakdown in which West explains that he’s “got the kids and the wife life/but can’t wake up from the nightlife.” Perhaps this is an indication that this is a belated primal roar from Kanye the artist, before Kanye the man settles down to fatherhood, although I doubt he will ever do so in his music. Furthermore, Mike Deen’s cascading guitars on Hold My Liquor are a wonder to behold. And, at 10 tracks, it brings to mind Illmatic in its brevity, if nothing else.

I saw Neil Young (backed by his wonderfully creaky band Crazy Horse) on the day Yeezus came out. He is 67, and attendees were still complaining that he spent too much time exploring the tonal possibilities afforded by his electric guitar, and not enough time playing “the classics.” I don’t imagine that 67-year-old Kanye West will be too dissimilar.