Yeezus - Kanye West

Kanye West made to release his sixth solo album with unconventional promotion – no promo singles pre-release, no album artwork and a projection of his face rapping on buildings across the globe, as an ongoing thing. Yeezus leaked a few days before release and everyone rushed to dissect it, but made their minds up too quickly – this shuts off the potential for ideas, inspirations and realisations to form and develop to fruition. People hadn't given the album enough time. Of course, why should Yeezus warrant greater attention than other releases, when you ignore the artist behind the art? Well, people wouldn't go into other releases with the same mindset – once you know the artist, it's impossible to separate them from their work as you need to understand it and question their motives. Also, perhaps post-internet culture means that we may be too quick to make up our minds on everything else we listen to too.

I think it can be easy to fall into making an album that's an amalgamation of all the influences dominating media, easy to make a slick-sounding album in the vein of the 2010's, losing key individualistic components and becoming lost in the Zeitgeist. Few albums will stick with us through time, and I believe that for good or ill, Yeezus is one of those albums. If being memorable doesn't contribute to an album's worth, then we are fickle, unwise and short-sighted to brush aside longevity and pureness in out considerations to form some sort of rating out of ten.

It's fair to immediately express whether you like an album or not, some things just hit you or repulse you from the offset. Still, much of the actual analysis of Yeezus has been flawed, despite the huge discourse around it. I feel like people haven't understood what Yeezus is yet – including myself. Kanye West has told us what his intentions were with this work, though I don't think many of us get it yet. Understanding is something that requires time to manifest, if it ever does – especially for something so obscure and unclear.

One example is how the album was judged before any real production details surfaced. The extent to which Rick Rubin's reduction work influenced the album, how 'fourth-quarter' West's lyricism and vocal performances were, how much producers contributed, such as Hudson Mohawke, whose fingertips are all over TNGHT's work on Blood On The Leaves, but was later revealed to have worked on every single track in the final release as a general production overseer – none of these things were known to us as we first experienced Yeezus (and how on Earth did Benji B end up joining him?!) It was a pleasure listening to it blindly, just raw, unadulterated art. Then the background comes to light and pus a new spin on everything – it's important to stay open minded and remember thoughts before, and after, and how they've changed.

Some thoughts didn't change – I'd never heard something so utterly, gloriously alienating yet so all-encompassing. The nature of paradox and contradiction is one of the main themes running through Yeezus. Other themes include the ego, aspiration, social commentary of being a rich black man, unapologetic attitudes towards sex, racism towards blacks among other things. The Kanye West treatment is rough – musically, this album is a devastating hurricane through styles, though Kanye uses the same hurricane to express how he truthfully feels on the aforementioned themes with unpolished lyricism. Truth isn't fair, or well-balanced, nor is it necessarily justifiable. Truth is innate, impassioned and yearns to be told – West obliges to his truth and intuition throughout.

West realised the Afro-American Dream, at last. He didn't like what he found there. His previous solo album was a conceptual artistic statement, the one before that a fight through bereavement. Earlier releases saw him trying to reach where he is today – but now where or what does he aspire to? God? Few black men have reached the level of combined influence, fame, power, wealth and freedom of creative expression that Kanye West possesses, so I don't think the concept is completely far-fetched.

West bemoans executives telling him what he can and cannot do, and the rest of the world hooked on paparazzi insists on berating him too, and his art is brushed aside. West is one that finally made it, yet here he is, still hitting glass ceilings. These circumstances are a foundation stone for the album – without them, Yeezus would not be Yeezus. It doesn't matter if local rapper x said the same thing on mixtape y about z years ago, heard by a couple thousand people. Many thought George Bush was a racist but there needed to be a man on live TV going out to millions who could spit in the face of the system and say, “Bush doesn't care about black people.” Similarly, there needs to be a man with such a huge platform, such critical and commercial credibility, to say the things West says on this album with any significant weight. And as genius and madness can be two sides of the same coin, I maintain it's necessary for West to have those 'negative, arrogant' traits to deliver such monumental creativity. Yin and yang coexist, and it's okay, in fact it makes sense for West to have all this celebrity attached to him while still delving into such socially-challenging issues.

For a ten-song album, West manages to say a lot. The quality of things he says varies, as there are some unforgivable lyrics at times, “I'm going 300 like the Romans,” as well as the outrageous ones like, “Put my fist in her like a civil rights sign.” The latter has been criticised as inappropriately juxtaposing aggressive, even misogynistic sexuality with campaigns against racism and fights for freedom. In my opinion, it's a great capture of West's mindset. Social attitudes to black people is something that has been present in every album, as has sex – our heroes are not faultless and truly evil men may have admirable features too. It's a mixed bag, and since he started rapping, West has told us we have to take the good with the bad, and that we ought to take the bad with the good too. It's easy for us to do it with others, but occasionally we don't like to treat those we know and those we don't know with that same attitude. Someone compared Yeezus to Death Grips sonically, and the violent lyrics present in Ex-Military and everything else are treated as belonging to the protagonist of the story. Why must we refuse to even consider that the tales of Yeezus may come from a character extending from Yeezus' personality? It's an interesting observation, that we all assume West would talk to us personally, directly, on the same level with no abstraction at all.

Somewhat contradictory towards the previous consideration, it feels like West leaves himself wide-open on Yeezus. He celebrates and revels in his ego, on I Am A God (which is credited as featuring God), while addressing his issues on Hold My Liquor. On Sight is a bombastic album opener and on that and I'm In It, West is at his most self-indulgent, brash and sex-driven. New Slaves addresses the aftermath of Niggas In Paris-like mentality while Blood On The Leaves is filled with the regrets of previous relationships. I think it's foolish to ignore lyrics, but I think the focus should be on the moods induced by the words' content and their frenetic delivery mixed with many grunts and screams. It seems to be more about the vibe given, that's the most accessible way into West's head – it's all there sonically too.

Yeezus is similar to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in that it's overflowing with ideas, however they don't all manifest themselves as tangibly as they did in the previous solo album. The general tone is anger, most tracks carrying an industrial presence as they mix genres together – the hard electro on Send It Up, put together by West, Daft Punk, Gesaffelstein and Brodinski, ends with a Beenie Man Chorus. Blood On The Leaves turns a rudimentary TNGHT beat – Lunice and Hudson Mohawke's second ever collaborative creation – into a fully-fledged beast with plenty of West's presence. The auto-tune is a more obvious Kanye calling card but the sample of Nina Simone singing Strange Fruit is utilised in a way typically West, aside from its thematic relevance. Low-frequency hybrid I'm In It combines characteristic Evian Christ basslines with hair-raising guest vocals from Assassin, whose Caribbean lilts set the track aflame. Hold My Liquor is a blurry, whirring ballad while New Slaves is some sort of brilliant mis-creation of everything West is interested in audibly – essentially a minuscule version of the album, as Bound 2 recalls and transcends things typically West.

I found Yeezus to be ugly, ridiculous and brilliant. The way it goes out of its way to put off listeners is telling of Kanye's intentions – it's time for us to shut up and listen while he does the talking, not that things are usually much different went West's music is involved. The clash of interests in terms of the beats on the album add sub-chapters and anecdotes to the overall monologue, and the all-embracing nature of the sound is delivered in such an un-relatable manner which is probably what I like most about Yeezus. I think it's rare we get an album like the one West has given us, and it lives up to all its out-of-this-world expectations by way of West's latest mantra, “As soon as they like you, make them unlike you.” Yeezus is the fallout of our focal character’s story, a story which led him to world-conquering heights, the lowest of the lows when his mother died, and straight to the top once more with the universally-acclaimed art My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. After our anti-hero with a thousand faces has reached the end of his archetypical fantasy, what happens then? Yeezus serves as an unorthodox, not-so-happy-ending epilogue, as well as what may be a prologue to a whole new narrative.