Kanye West Yeezus Album Review
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Kanye West Yeezus Album Tracklist
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Think of the roll-up as a revolutionary blow against the empire or the supernova ego of West in full effect, and while it's probably a little of both, Yeezus the album is a lot of both, with good taste and bad taste both turned up to 11. Share your videos with friends, family, and the world. Kanye West has debuted the album cover for Yeezus. While it's not entirely clear how the package will be presented in its retail form, it looks like a clear CD case with a red piece of tape. Share your videos with friends, family, and the world.

The Book of Yeezus: A Song-by-Song Analysis of Kanye West’s New Album

Courtesy of Def Jam Recordings

On Friday, Kanye West’s seventh album, Yeezus, was revealed to the world. In celebration of this holy event, members of the Grantland staff seized one song each and reflected upon its beauty, truth, and awesomeness. Or made jokes about it.

1. “On Sight”

Chris Ryan: If this is your first time hearing this, you are about to experience something so cold. Yeezus begins with a Daft Punk beat. Or a Daft Punk something. It’s everything but the beat. Music writer Piotr Orlov compared the track’s major lasers to the French duo’s classic “Rollin’ & Scratchin'”, and I hear that, but there’s very little rolling going on here. The prerelease campfire talk is that Kanye brought the basic tracks of this album to Rick Rubin’s Malibu musical monastery and put Yeezus on a cleanse, shedding all the excess fat from the Paris-recorded songs. I have no reason to doubt that version of things, until Kanye West jumps up in my face and raps, “How much do I not give a fuck?” At that point it becomes apparent who is withholding from whom here.

The thing about first songs — and I mean songs, not intros — on Kanye West albums is (1) they are awesome (“We Don’t Care,” “Good Morning,” and “Dark Fantasy” are among his best), and (2) they are often about dreams. Two albums begin with the command “Wake up, Mr. West,” while “Dark Fantasy” is the realization of something West fantasized about back in Chicago. (It also introduces us to Kanye as Ichabod Brain [cue Cat Stark moan].) “Say You Will,” which kicks off 808s & Heartbreak, has a midsong admission that Kanye still fantasizes about the track’s subject. For as real and relatable as Kanye seems, his music is often the stuff that dreams (or nightmares) are made of.
Not Yeezus. Not “On Sight.” Fantasy opened with Bon Iver, Teyana Taylor, and a choir rhetorically asking us if we could get much higher, as if they were parked outside Heaven’s gate. Yeezus finds Hell on Earth. Or, more specifically, in Miami. This is the distant sound of acid house, as heard out in the Chateau Drive entrance of the Fontainebleau Hotel. That’s where the fountain is; that’s when she got kicked out of the hotel. That’s when Kanye got her back in. That’s when [LAAAAAASEERSSSSSS].

There is nothing dreamy going on here. This is a dance-floor anthem made to clear out the dance floor. Its creator compares it to a central nervous system disorder. There is no warmth. The guy we thought we knew is gone. The dream is over. Kanye West is dead. Yeezus has risen.

2. “Black Skinhead”

Alex Pappademas: First thought: Since the beat samples Gary Glitter’s ballpark-standard stomp “Rock ’n’ Roll Pt. 2,” who’ll be the first major league baseball player to bump this fulminating slab of new–General Zod–flow fuck-all-y’allery as at-bat music?

Second thought: I’m writing this on Friday night. Yeezus leaked this morning, so of course I spent all day driving around listening to it at mirror-rattling volume instead of doing what I was actually supposed to be doing today, which was writing about Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s memoir Mo’ Meta Blues, also set to drop on Tuesday the 18th. I was on deadline, but that fuck-up-your-whole-afternoon shit has a way of fucking up your whole afternoon. Much like Yeezus, Questlove’s book is fantastic; also like Yeezus, it’s written by a guy who’s more than a little bit obsessed with Kanye. The two best extended music-critical riffs in the book are the part about J Dilla and the part about Kanye; Questlove describes watching young black kids watching West doing “Jesus Walks” at the Dave Chappelle’s Block Party taping and reacting in a way he’d never seen kids respond to the Roots. He says that in that moment he experienced a premonition of his own “artistic death,” the impending end of his tenure as a cultural leader.

“In some ways we were in awe of Kanye’s pose,” Thompson admits a few pages earlier. “We had spent a decade seeing hip-hop as a division between the haves and have-nots, between artists who didn’t play games with cars and fashion and acts that plays games with cars and fashion but didn’t aspire to making art. Kanye was an artist who took the audacious stance that he could do both, that there was no conflict between them, and audiences just went right along with him.” (As Ye himself put it beautifully to Jon Caramanica in the New York Times last week, “I was able to slip past everything with a pink polo, but I am Dead Prez.”) That near-death experience in Clinton Hill is one of the most honest moments in the book — up there with the part where Ahmir gets friend-zoned by Alicia Keys — and I kept thinking about it as I processed Yeezus in stop-and-go traffic. Both Mo’ Meta Blues and Yeezus (and “Black Skinhead” in particular) are attempts to narrate what it feels like to be just famous enough that the limits of your fame become frustrating. They’re about what it’s like to get inside the VIP room (of your industry, or your country) only to find out that there’s a room behind that room that remains off-limits to people like you. And that there’s always a room like that. And that first-plateau celebrity exists in part to corral you and keep you away from the real levers of power.

The difference is that Questlove is nerdy and humble and aware of the cosmic unlikeliness of his being admitted to that first room at all, whereas Kanye is Kanye. He’s way more famous, which means he sees that much more clearly that there are freedoms his fame can’t buy him, and it pisses him off. On “Black Skinhead” he’s staring at that next locked door and trying to scream it off its hinges. The (kinda fuzzy) analogy about ex-fans burning LeBron’s jersey in Akron got lost somewhere between that SNL performance and the leak, depriving us of a song in which Yeezy, on his I-contain-multitudes, claims common cause with both the second-highest-paid player in the NBA and the child soldiers of Chiraq, Drillinois. But he still draws blood right up front: “Enter the kingdom, but watch who you bring home / You see a black man with a white woman, at the top floor they gone come to kill King Kong.”

Get famous, in other words, and society breaks you off some money and offers you the illusion of autonomy, free agency, even adoration, but you’re perpetually one misstep away from being the Antichrist and having your willingness to accept those same gifts held against you. In that context, every impolitic thing Kanye’s ever done or said at an awards show suddenly makes sense. He just wants to hear what people really think about him, and he knows that censuring celebrities for “ranting” or “bad behavior” is one way this culture throws its real cards on the table with regard to race and class. And yet in spite of all that, this isn’t a song about frustration. It’s angry, but the anger doesn’t eat it up. It’s on some goon shit without actually being goon shit — you don’t rap over what sounds like a Flowers of Romance B side if you’re just trying to make goon shit, for one thing. And you don’t make your goon shit this catchy — those Gary Glitter handclaps, those “Sympathy for the Devil” yow!s — unless you also intend to ram it up pop music’s ass. Kanye wants to be a revolutionary and a rich prick and an auteur and Chief Keef and Steve Jobs and circa-1983 Michael Jackson and a beautiful swan at the same damn time, and chances are he’ll keep getting punished for refusing to choose a lane. But there’s something inspiring about his refusal to settle for anything less than everything.

3. “I Am

Kanye West Yeezus Album