I know I shouldn't write anymore album reviews for the Staff, but I can't help myself.
People have to know about Yeezus. There's something quite magical about the record.
Yes, it's just Yeezy channeling the Death Grips and filtering it through the aesthetic of The College Dropout, but it feels like there's something more. Like, he's trying to say something through his abnormally barbed words and paranoid ramblings. It feels like, in many ways, the darker spiritual successor to that collaboration album he did with Jay-Z a couple of years back - same minimalist beats, same negative depiction of the stereotypical black lifestyle, same distancing-himself-from-the-wide-sound-of-My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, etc.
Look around you - it's in the promotion. Kanye dropped no singles for Yeezus - just performance art-esque video clips of him interspliced with barking dogs and price tags to the tune of "New Slaves" and "I Am a God." He appeared on Saturday Night Live and performed in front of a slideshow of price tags and barking dogs, screaming madly about being ostracized for trying to avoid the stereotype. Hell, there's no front cover to Yeezus - very similar to System of a Down's Steal This Album in concept. A rap album that showcases how bad making rap into a commodity is ends up borrowing ideas from a metal album that showcases how bad making anything into a commodity is.
The musical content on the record is as follows: it basically changes up the guy's style by minimalizing his orchestral art-rap sound he seemingly perfected with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. While his prior albums were bombast and light in a sense, Yeezus is the hangover to the power trip Kanye experiences on MBDTF. The music matches the revelations - discordant beats laid over subtle samples (sometimes, outright using a sample for more than a minute as evidenced on the outro to "New Slaves"); keyboards whirring, playing unnatural sounds in a manner not seen since Pere Ubu's early years; and a ton of bass. And yet, there are tracks that Kanye strips down the beats even further - "Blood on the Leaves" is, for all intents and purposes, a Nina Simone vocal sample played over some bass and quiet keyboards; a majority of "New Slaves" is a synth line that adds tension to Kanye's desperate lyrics about trying to destroy his limelight; and "Black Skinhead" is a a drum beat with the occasional distorted guitar.
Why this minimalism works is similar to why minimalism was created: to make people aware that true music isn't just flowery orchestras devoted to expanding your mind and massive vocal overlays. Music can be a man singing over a bass line - music can be a man rapping over the occasional paradiddle. Music has no universal standard - it's everywhere. Speaking of the omnipresence of music, Kanye channels that with his continuing use of obscure samples, ranging from soul songs nobody's heard of to Chicago house music to Wendy Carlos-era synthesizer experimentation to Hungarian progressive rock. Occasionally, he'll dust out a well-known sample - i.e. Nina Simone's disturbing rendition of "Strange Fruit" - but he'll use the sample in ways nobody will expect. Rather than sampling the backing band on the Simone performance, he instead makes a mantra out of her "blood on the leaves" recitation and creates a nightmarish atmosphere that matches the ones found on other songs.
Regardless of its massive praise, Yeezus is still a flawed album. Kanye's still spitting out clumsy lyrics about how he wants to be rich while criticizing consumer culture and modern rap. Chief Keef ruins the aesthetic of "Hold My Liquor" mainly because of his persona: a party-hard musician that goes against Kanye's manifesto to a T. "Bound 2," while one of Kanye's best tracks, doesn't work as well as a closer. "On Sight" should've been longer. Kanye should've stuck to the concept of the first half - the minimalist beats - before going into the industrial-meets-trap-meets-noise second half. I could go on forever.
However, rather than the mixtape of songs people paint the album as, Yeezus works as a concept album about the pressures of fame and its relentless hypocrisy as one tries to compromise individuality with a public perception of themselves. Kanye confronts you with his ego - he has grown to embrace it. He proves Trey Parker and Matt Stone very right - that he would become something more than just a rapper that thinks about his image too much. And yet, he proves them wrong - they thought he would melt away like all the pop stars they have lampooned. Look at the celebrities that have come and gone - they're just flashes in the pan. They've outgrown their societal usefulness. And yet, Kanye has not jumped in the ocean and tried to hide. He's become even more popular since then. He's more than just a vapid pop star who makes popular rap albums. He's become so controlling that, as mentioned earlier in how he tried to promote the record, he's not pursuing conventional outlets or artists to help him push Yeezus, He shows his hypocrisy quite clearly, as also mentioned earlier, while being proud of it. Kanye is not ashamed.
Kanye wants the listener to confront the ideal with the real thing on Yeezus. It makes the listener uncomfortable - Kanye being comfortable with "being a god" and screaming to a "damn French restaurant" for his "damn croissants" before talking about how he wants to escape fame and its consequences. You have to face the hypocrisy head on - you have to accept that you're a hypocrite in the way Kanye is. You say you aren't - some of your ideals don't mesh with the real thing. You have two faces - public and private. You need to accept yourself as you are.
This is the same thing MC Ride wants listeners of Death Grips to understand. One second, he's praising his own violence. The other, he's decrying other peoples' violence. This double standard is everywhere. It's all over religious discussions. It's in law enforcement. It's in journalism. It's even in fame. Even fame has two sides. Everything has duality - we can be sure of that. However, in the end, who fucking knows? What is real? Which is the ideal? Are we applying the ideal to everybody? Did we create this egomaniac of a monster? Are we responsible for the blossoming of pain within celebrity culture? Did we give rise to tabloid journalism because we want to know everything about celebrities? According to Kanye, yes. And we should learn to accept it as opposed to denying it. If we deny it, history will repeat itself however it wants - and it could be worse the next time.
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