Kanye West has plenty of good songs, but the ego has landed once again. To offer up a moldy and cobwebbed phrase, he has made yet another attempt to "
push the envelope". He will surely convince his already fans, that he is edgy, and new. He is fully aware that his lyrics are unacceptable, and he has found a way to market it: in other words, it is calculated.
Life affords us many mistakes, and although none of us are perfect, I'd like to think that as we age, we grow. This adult man, who is now a new father to a baby girl, is spewing lyrics that his young one, will some day hear. Being that our culture is indeed seeped in sexism and racism, you never know, she may actually come to embrace what he has laid down for us.
Although it is simple enough to side-step the fact that if that album is not to our liking, there is a much larger issue that cannot be written off.
Below is an article from
LA Weekly.
Yeezus: Good, Not Great, and Quite Misogynist
By kris ex
Tue., Jun. 18 2013 at 4:00 AM
Once
in a while Kanye West goes ahead and does something that's truly
impressive. You can't always tell this because, for West, there's no
difference between an act of genius and being a genius. For him, genius
doesn't stem from action; genius is an extension of his very state of
being.
His unwavering sense of "complete awesomeness at all times" is
bolstered by a weird feedback loop of celebrities, fans and critics who
hate to love him and love to hate him. Each, however, pumps up his
self-importance to the point where his sixth album,
Yeezus -- a
very good, but not great work and one of the few records in recent
history that can actually live up to the claim of being eagerly
anticipated -- is already being proclaimed as a masterpiece, despite its
lack of focus and center.
Musically,
Yeezus is an enjoyably-adventurous deconstruction of industrial rock, electronic dance,
ragga
and new wave that more than once eschews drums and often pulls in
reggae vocals for ominous effects. (For added measure, there's a snippet
of a chorale on "On Sight" and an outro, provided via sample, by
Hungarian Rock band Omega on "New Slaves.")
The album is short, clocking in at 40 minutes, and only one of its
ten songs is listed as primarily produced by West. Whereas his past
albums have concentrated on radio-friendly melodies, lush production,
arena rap and navel-gazing,
Yeezus is stark and minimal and
seems determined to be the music that comes on in sketchy warehouse
parties at about 3 am when your second wave of drugs is wearing off and
you'll try whatever anyone has, because YOLO.
Much like 2008's
808s & Heartbreak, the rapping on
Yeezus seems to be an afterthought. (Rick Rubin, who executive-produced the album in the 23rd hour,
revealed
that vocals for five songs were laid in two hours before West caught a
flight to Milan.) This is actually a good thing, because as a rapper
West is often silly, sloppy and belabored -- the type of guy that may or
may not be serious when angrily demanding croissants, and doesn't
realize that the 300 were Spartans (not Romans) or that C-Murder came
from the Calliope (not Magnolia) projects. (He also doesn't know who
starred in In
Too Deep [Omar Epps, not Mekhi Phifer]). None of
this stops him from rapping with gusto, because even when he gets bested
by guest rappers on his own songs, as on
Late Registration's "Gone," he claims his superficial raps as super-official.
Yet the glaring deficiency in West's raps on
Yeezus is not
his skillset as much as it is his utter lack of empathy for women as
human beings. So, yeah, the guy with the trophy girlfriend who just gave
birth to his daughter manages to throw a few lines that could be read
as unintentional jabs at Kim Kardashian. On "On Sight," he raps "I know
she like chocolate men/ She got more niggas off than Cochran" which
seems a little too close to home on too many levels.
"I'm In It" manages to spin race and sexism for maximum offensiveness
not once, but twice: "Eating Asian pussy/ All I need was sweet and sour
sauce" and "Black girl sippin' white wine/ Put my fist in her like a
Civil Rights sign." On "Hold My Liquor," he mixes wealth and power with
sex and misogyny proclaiming "One more fuck and I can own ya," after
dismissing that he "smashed your Corolla" while parking his Range
Rover--which is like, whoa dude. No one man should have all that anger.
The two punk-channeling songs he premiered on last month's SNL
performance -- "Black Skinhead" and "New Slaves" -- are the album's most
pointed numbers; they're also the kind of songs crafted to be played
very loudly in order to make white people incredibly uncomfortable.
On the surface that's all bravo because, you know, fuck your
post-racism fallacy. But with Kanye, his rants -- about celebrity, about
art, about race and class -- are always about personal injustices done
to him masquerading as some sort of quest for social reform. He begins
"New Slaves" making allusions to picking cotton and Jim Crow, and if you
imagine listening to "New Slaves" outside of the context of
contemporary Kanye-ism, it sounds like the Last Poets. And the release
of the video -- not through traditional outlets but projected onto
buildings in places like the University of Tucson, Philadelphia's
Franklin Institute, and the heart of Fifth Avenue -- was incredibly
revolutionary. But it was also visual screed against consumerism by the
guy who produces fetish item sneakers and has worshipped at the
storefront of more obscure high-end brands than any rapper ever.
So of course his finger-pointing at the prison industrial complex and
racist attitudes is marred by Kanyecentrism: his response to such harsh
realities is to use his resources to move his family to foreign lands
(because he's fucking rich and fuck the rest of us) and, more tellingly,
to cuckold a powerbroker by taking his wife and ejaculating "on her
Hampton blouse and in her Hampton mouth," because, for Kanye women are
objects and the best way to retaliate against his oppressor is to
violate said oppressor's most prized object. On the one hand, his move
is all about powerlessness exerting power in the face of power; on the
other it's all about his personal sense of satisfaction. Power to the
people? Not so much.
In his attempts to be politically astute, Kanye West falls woefully
short, but music and culture would probably be worse off without him.
The same night that he premiered "New Slaves," Birdman and Rick Ross
dropped a song named "Pop That Pussy" while Plies released a ditty
called "Fucking or What" -- both being the type of lowbrow, ignorant
music that makes you ashamed to say you like rap in mixed company. When
compared to regressive bullshit like that, Yeezus is truly impressive.