269. Kanye West, "Yeezus"

 

This album is a fucking pipe bomb.  I remember hearing it when it came out in 2013 and then listening to it straight for a month, trying to puzzle out the words and the beats and the sounds and just the overwhelming sound collage Ye throws at you.

You have to go back to that time, when Kanye was just knocking on the door of being KANYE, or whatever fame-addled cultural iceberg he is now, to kind of begin to get it.  Poised at the precipice of something enormous and beyond his control, Kanye put out this jarring, abrasive, occasionally beautiful album.  The very first thing you hear, in "On Sight" (coproduced with Daft Punk) is synth, followed by drum machine, then Kanye's angry, aggressive, explicitly dirty vocal.  Halfway through the song there's a sample of a chorus that doesn't fit at all but seems natural anyway.  The second song, "Black Skinhead," which can only be described as industrial rap, is an interesting meta-commentary on Kanye's career; it deals with themes of persistent racism in American society, but then showed up in ads for Motorola, Adidas, even Toyota.  Now, I'm not saying that Kanye shouldn't get his money, but the contrast is at least jarring.

This album is problematic, to use a very overused word, in about a hundred ways.  It's openly misogynistic and often vulgar, and not in a good way.  Some of it sounds like Kanye, who was already a multimillionaire at the time it was recorded, complaining about the pressures of fame and money, always a sus look.  Using a chopped up version of Nina Simone's "Strange Fruit" as the basis for "Blood on the Leaves," which, on its face anyway, concerns seating arrangements at an NBA game, mght make you question what exactly is going on here.

But it works.  And just the incredible soundscape; there's so much going on.  It's disorienting, and probably intentionally so.  As it turns out, this album could be seen as kind of a fulcrum between early Kanye, the celebrated studio genius who sampled King Crimson and Can along with Michael Jackson and classic soul, and late Kanye, an inscrutable figure who puts out gospel albums and seems attracted to and repelled by fame at the same time.  Only time will tell, I guess.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yeah, I think so?

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