Kanye's awkward sandwich (2010 - 2016)

Before I begin this discussion ("discussion" in several quotes), let's get this out of the way: Kanye West is a great musician, and who cares what he has said in public. The latter literally has no impact on the strength of his work.

Which has been interesting. I basically grew up with Kanye - besides "808s & Heartbreak", my own adolescent and early adult life accompanied Kanye's "dark" period. Kanye is entirely capable of surprising us still, but I think in retrospect we'll see "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" (2010), "Yeezus" (2013), and "The Life of Pablo" (2016) as encompassing an interesting, dark, and surreal period in his artistic career.

I've listened to all three albums a lot during the time period when they were released, and (wow) almost at the 5th anniversary of "The Life of Pablo" I reflected on each of them. This was my conclusion:

"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" and "Life of Pablo" are really awkward. "Yeezus" is a masterpiece - I'm really confident it'll live. Together, they make an awkward sandwich - the meat is the best anyone could make, but the bread is just...weird. It's like wheat bread. It complements the meat great, but you wouldn't eat the bread by itself.

Well. Analogy falls apart on further inspection. Whatever.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

I haven't had a long career in listening to music, but it's been long enough for me to be aware that one's enjoyment of music - any art, really - is based on a context. When I was a teenager, I enjoyed the drama of "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" - in fact, I thought it was masterful. When you're a kid you focus largely on the content or the obvious ideas rather than the structure and the relationship between ideas. And, of course, if it bangs you like it.

As I listen to it now, I'm struggling to get through the first track. I believe that's Nicki Minaj narrating the intro? The idea of weaving an actual Greek chorus into the song is interesting, and Kanye's verses have a technical finesse, but nothing particularly stands out - it's really the drama that stands out, the precise thing Kanye is analyzing at the moment.

As far as a narrative being established, there's not much besides a downward spiral and a desire to escape it. Listening to "Power", I thought, "This is a good single." As in, it singly stands apart from the rest of the tracks, not really adding on to its adjacent tracks "Gorgeous" or "All of the Lights (Interlude)". (Interludes make no sense in music, by the way. In opera, yes. Just feels like an artificial way to tell a story in music.) Obviously "Runaway" and "Blame Game" stand out because they are not only fascinating tracks on their own but they tell whatever narrative Kanye is attempting in a really powerful, emotional way. The relative use of silence, or quietness, juxtaposed to the violence of his lyrics is a startling combination (which he attempts, and should have employed better, on "Ye").

The album is very ambitious, but it has to let you know it's ambitious - it has to sound epic by having a plethora of voices (clear or blurred) and a liberal use of drums and it has to communicate a great many themes. For the most part, it meets its ambitions but just lacks a cohesion a greater album would have.

That being said, it's very listenable and a pleasant listen from beginning to end - only that it's accompanied by a big "whatever" feeling towards the overall meaning of the lyrics. They're very well-written lyrics, just that I couldn't really care. Maybe it'll sound better when I'm in a different mind in the future.

Yeezus

Basquiat re-introduced me to "Yeezus". I live in Boston; I visit the Museum of Fine Arts frequently. For the second half of 2020 the museum hosted a Basquiat exhibition. For whatever reason I became captivated by Basquiat's art and life and studied it for a bit. On thinking over Basquiat's life, his dealing with fame, and his precise-yet-chaotic artstyle, I somehow thought of "Yeezus" and decided to listen to it again.

I think some time in the middle of "Hold My Liquor" was playing I actually had to sit on the floor and think a little bit, because I learned something new about the album that completely changed my understanding of it. It might have been a moment of the stars aligning and I just happened to have the right context. It occurred to me that "Yeezus" was a confessional album, as much as Joni Mitchell's "Blue" and Sly Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On" were.

"Confessional" is a hated word, but nevertheless it's an important word. Artists have hated the word "confessional" because people constantly compare their personal lives to the lives stated on record. I don't intend to use the word "confessional" in that sense; I'm not saying that "Carey" or "Family Affair" describe anyone's lives. Rather, I mean to use the word in a way that communicates the artist's putting personal emotions, feelings and thoughts into their music in an intense, personal way. I don't know if Joni actually did any of the things mentioned in "California", but her performance is so genuine, and the lyrics have such an intense personal presence in them, that it's hard to believe she didn't inhabit a specific mindset entering the album. Same can be said for "There's a Riot Goin' On" where Sly is almost dead in every track. It's one thing to say something in an album, it's another thing to create a vivid, yet fictional, scenario; it's another thing entirely to make something so wound around the personal "I" that it has to be an intended effect, and not incidental.

That the songs are catchy obfuscate the fact that there is a narrator in "Yeezus" openly embracing self-destruction, hatred, cynicism and just general meanness, and you're intended to empathize with the guy, even undertake the whole journey with him. The brilliance of the album is that it doesn't second-guess itself. Where "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" wandered between knowing what's right and wrong, "Yeezus" literally does not care. At all. It only cares about its perspective and how it conveys its ideas. It doesn't need a story to convey some greater message. Right there in Kanye's proclamation in "On Sight": "Yeezy season approaching / Fuck whatever ya'll been hearing / Fuck it, fuck whatever ya'll been wearing".

"Yeezus" is Kanye's sole katana. (The imagery of Kanye swinging a katana around is a cause for wonderful laughter.) Sharpened and made of refined material, it is obsessed with itself, the feral character it is depicting, accompanying that character to his most fantastized heights. It's best listened to with detachment - yes, "Black Skinhead" bangs, but just watching what is happening, to the scorched earth Kanye is creating, is more thrilling than participating in it.

In hindsight, the Basquiat connection was made by one obvious reason and one subtle reason. The obvious reason is the use of angularity in "Yeezus". Basquiat's art style, in my eyes, is defined by severe, strict lines that encapsulate a thing (typically a person of interest) that stands in sharp contrast to the chaos in the background, whether in the form of text or straying shades. When Kanye's on the war path, he employs music with almost disconcerting shifts in volume and tone; as I listen to "Hold My Liquor", when he's introspective, he instead uses a melancholy, suffusive sound but overlays it with sharp, aggressive synths. The subtle reason is that "Yeezus" is Kanye's contribution to an ongoing black tradition of anger. I'm not going to be dreary-eyed for too long, or say I understand black culture because I listened to a Wu-Tang album or say my best friends are black, but when one feels prejudiced against by a system one would, logically, feel angry about it, and no one really likes angry people (too much negative energy, etc). Black anger music has, with both hands, been praised and condemned; I find the more it directly confronts society (read: government), the more it is praised. "Yeezus" is in the tradition of Basquiat's work and Charles Mingus's "Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" in that it directs its anger more on people and culture (the type of anger that is more frowned upon). Basquiat's "Famous Moon King" depicts an apocalypse, not just of black people, but of people generally, of decay, neuroticism, the disgrace of the human body. That, of course, is what Kanye is really singing about: the deterioration of a person. By focusing on the destructiveness of an individual, he focuses on the world that created and shaped that destructive individual. Focusing on the specific, the art eventually zooms outward into the things tangled up in the individual's life.

The Life of Pablo

"Life of Pablo" is ok.

Funnily enough, 'til only a few days ago, I thought "Yeezus" and "The Life of Pablo" competed with one another as Kanye's magnum opus. On this listen, I struggled to get through "Ultralight Beam" because it was so heavy-handed. I suppose my love was a phase.

The album's lack of focus is not to its detriment, it's actually quite refreshing. Kanye by far is the most interesting part of his albums, so some of the thrill is seeing where he goes. The problem here is that he vacillates just as he did in "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" - he wants to be aggressive and humble at the same time. Luckily most of the tracks are short, which is a huge improvement over "Fantasy".

The tracks that stand out in my eyes are "Highlights", "Waves", "Real Friends", "Facts" and "Fade". There could stand to be less Ty Dolla Sign and Post Malone. If you really analyze those tracks, Kanye is the least in them; he is almost submerged in the instrumentals. I think he should have focused on that - that feeling that life is running away from you and things are kinda just happening, good and bad alike. A better fit is somewhere out there, but I'm thinking, conceptually, of The Stooges' "Funhouse", where Iggy Pop has lyrics, yowls, and then fades into the sludge. (Or Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain". I probably should have just started with "Maggot Brain".) Kanye shouldn't bother with morality - morality as a currency is valuable to the crowd, but it pretty much never makes any good music, in the case it serves as the foundation.

Looking ahead

Well, first and foremost, he's the genius, not me. I'm not really sure what he's going to do. I wouldn't be surprised if the path he is taking now, emphasizing mental health and spirituality, leads him to particularly fertile ground.

I don't think he will make anything like "Yeezus" ever again; his next greatest work may be inspired by "Life of Pablo"; I hope he never makes anything like MBDTF. "Yeezus" really does come off to me as a special moment in an artist's life - I think precisely of Bowie's Berlin Trilogy when I say this. Created in a specific, very emotionally charged period of their lives, Kanye and Bowie made albums that balanced emotion and technical finesse perfectly. And that balance is an incredibly fragile thing - some artists don't push far enough emotionally, most artists don't temper the emotions with finesse, or elegance. Kanye's next work, I bet, will take "Life of Pablo's" structure and some of its ideas, directly confronting themes of family, society and being an individual; if Kanye began his career with soul/R&B music, then moved somewhere to industrial, then it would really be nice if he ended up in Chicago house, which he has in "JESUS IS KING". Finally, he better not go back to "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"; I think it's a betrayal to his artistic development and, in a way, he did revert back to it in "ye". "ye" (which isn't really that bad, but is definitely the weakest record he's made) has the whole personal drama he exhibited in MBDTF, but with less ambition. I think people, in love with MBDTF, were repulsed by "ye" because Kanye didn't really bother stunting in the latter - the music, as awkwardly composed as it is, is honest, it comes from a genuine place, unlike MBDTF. I like it when Kanye is just totally honest, though I also hate it when he gets wrapped up in his personal shit. As an artist, you do have to find a way to unite your personal shit with a greater, more human theme. Such is Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks".

Anyway, here's to another 5 years.