Kanye West, Yeezus, 6/18/13 (TBC because who knows anymore)

i kind of imagine how prominent his name is in the credits for a given song doesn't mean that much, it's obviously all his choices, mixing and matching different producers' contributions like samples.

yeah the Mike Dean thing has always been slightly confusing in that way

i thought he was a fairly generic rap-a-lot studio producer. i've heard so much of what he's produced that i feel like i can tell when he's programmed the drums on a track-- but it's hard to say. the other day i found a blac monks album, obscure mystical paranoia houston group featuring mr 3-2 released by rap-a-lot, bought it at a thrift store ten years ago, weird feeling to see it was all produced by mike dean.

the thing is like, he's ONLY done records for kanye and then houston southside guys and a handful of rap-a-lot west coast division stuff.

yeah i mean, usually Kanye's collaborations, especially with southern rap guys, are kind of transparent -- do a few songs with Toomp after "What You Know" blows up, etc. i mean Kanye did some Scarface stuff but mike dean didn't even work on The Fix, did he?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIS3KouPdgM

the first possible intersection of kanye and mike dean

i think he did everything on the fix, engineered it, recorded everything

DX: Kanye West worked on some projects with you early in his career. With his budgets and stardom, he went you to mix some of his best work. Did he ever tell you what it was about your mixing that appealed to him so much?

Mike Dean: He said they were the best mixes he’d ever had. I mixed “Guess Who’s Back” from The Fix, and he really liked the mix on that, so he hit me up for his first record. He actually came to my house, and we did the first three or four mixes here before he had budgets for a big studio somewhere.

I mixed four or five records from College Dropout, but I think only two of them made it. The rest were mixtapes, like “Keep the Receipt,” the song with [Ol' Dirty Bastard]. I mastered “Through The Wire,” I mixed the “Two Words” song with Mos Def and Freeway. For [Late Registration], I pretty much did all the singles except for “Diamonds From Sierra Leone,” I didn’t do the final mix on that.

see, i had no idea he touched "through the wire."

could def combine like 1/2 of this w/ half of mbtdf and make 1 really killer lp & 1 other straight instrument of torture imo

Pitchfork prediction sweepstake?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/06/Spinal_Tap_-_Up_to_Eleven.jpg

SFJ on the album: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2013/06/24/130624crmu_music_frerejones?currentPage=all

already some pretty ludicrous exaggeration of what the album actually sounds like

West has suggested that he may not release a single from “Yeezus,” and from an artistic standpoint the impulse is not perverse. The album is so tonally unified that it comes across as one very long single—an extended thought, coughed up quickly. There are few steady drumbeats, and West can’t seem to resist pausing the sound and then bringing it back from silence; he never wants you to forget that he is standing over the boards. This is music with a lot of empty space: it consists largely of profane rapping over wildly distorted bass lines, which often serve as the only melodic motifs. When synths do appear, they aren’t pretty.

profane rapping over wildly distorted bass lines

Thanks for the life update Kanye, but you can't dance to this shit.

right. i think my number one criticism is that kanye has set aside the straight ahead dance beats of his previous releases and simultaneously veered into autobiographical lyrics.

well, my #1 criticism is inspiring think pieces requiring writers to do more twisting than a contortionist.

girlfriend made me turn it down so i just went out to the garage. sanding some wood to send it up. life ain't bad

Thanks for the life update Kanye, but you can't sand wood to this shit.

yes you can! i'm also gonna lay down a coat of varnish too. this swing is gonna be the shit

"My swing is the nucleus."

FYI that credits list is completely wrong

oh rly?

lol at this being the album he releases after revealing that his principal motivation for making music is winning grammys

ahaha

i love this so much. new slaves is fire, and i love the outro too. i'm not convinced by all the tracks but i've only listened to this twice all the way through so far

FYI that credits list is completely wrong

― rap steve gadd (D-40), Saturday, June 15, 2013 1:16 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

i've been listening to "send it up" all night trying to hear even a trace of iamsu

Asking the Maître d' in this FRENCH ASS RESTAURANT what happened to my DAMN CROISSANTS.

And since I am enquiring, where is my damn FRENCH ASS ONION SOUP?

What I meant before is, absent of hooks (I love hooks), more than any of his previous, this album rests on how interesting your find Kanye. And I don't. I mean, cool for those who do, but his striving gatsby-level desires to transcend the middlebrow just doesn't speak to me. He's the perennial b-plus student with a rhyming dictionary that is an actual dictionary and he seems to gets a thrill when everything he looks up a word and fine it has a rhyme and you feel awkward for the guy because of the whole swimming in the shallow end thing. Do we need an idiot king? Possibly? Do we need an idiot king that can't piper us toward hooks? Less sure. And unless you're interested in the intersection between whatever and blah, he kinda has nothing to say, am I wrong?

^drunk, phone, spelling, don't care.

he cut the "like black kids in chiraq did" line out of "black skinhead" yeah?

― J0rdan S., Friday, June 14, 2013 5:25 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh no that's definitely in there?

http://25.media.tumblr.com/c8b9b2aefe48ee80ffcae0c159808563/tumblr_moem591NwL1ried3so1_400.png

"Deepak Chopa" is the new "algerba"

"He's the perennial b-plus student with a rhyming dictionary that is an actual dictionary and he seems to gets a thrill when everything he looks up a word and fine it has a rhyme and you feel awkward for the guy because of the whole swimming in the shallow end thing."

― Popture, Saturday, June 15, 2013 6:02 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think the only word I've ever looked up that he used was "disestablishmentarianism". Does he usually stretch your vocabulary?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-yToohKaEOM

lolll "american psycho-inspired short film" aka a shot-for-shot recreation of the scene where patrick bateman murders a dude with an ax in his living room

not nearly up to his lvt-biting runaway short film that most everyone ignored cuz it's ~35 mins

Every Specific Person, Place, and Thing Mentioned on Yeezus
2Pac
300
7-Eleven
Alexander Wang
America
Baptists
Bentley
Benz
Beyoncé
Big Poppa
Blackberry
Bobby Boucher
Brad (Pitt)
Capricorn
Catholics
CCA
Chicago
Chief Rocka
Chiraq
Chi-town
Chewbacca
Cochran
Corolla
Cosa Nostra
The D-League
David Grutman
DEA
Deepak Chopra
Don C.
Elvis
Fight Club
Forever 21
God
The Hamptons
Ibn Diamond
Indiana
Instagram
iPhone
Jay-Z
Jeromey “Romey Rome”
Jesus
Joe Brown
King Kong
Leos
Louboutin
Maybach
“Michael”
Michael Douglas
The New World Order
’Nolia
Porsche
Prince
Pyrex
Range Rover
Rat Pack
Rio
Romans
Shabba
Shaka Zulu
Star Wars
Swaghili
Timbs
Trojans
Tron
Virgil
Yeezus
Yeezy

and Ye

really mixed feelings about this record and they mostly center around me finding "blood on the leaves" kinda awful

Having ignored almost all of the pre-release hype, including this thread, I enjoyed listening to the album last night and catching up with the chatter.

But man, Kanye post-2007 keeps moving away from an aesthetic that interests me. To the point where 808s and MBDTF sound better now than I remember, because there are, hey, songs and hooks! "Black Skinhead" kind of works for me, but otherwise I agree with Popture that this is an album that seems to trade very heavily on whether you think Kanye is an interesting or compelling figure. And I never feel furthest from critical consensus as I do when the subject's stature as an Important Artist (esp. one who Reinvents Himself or has New Things to Say) becomes the primary lens through which the music is discussed.

Yeah, not a fan of the egotistical echo chamber/hall of mirrors approach either. That it's all about him should be implicit, not explicit.

Yeezus

I Am A God

Implicit

Kanye West

Subtle

Kanye West

Subtle

"$2,000 bag / No cash in your purse" -- as a casual Kanye listener, seems like half his songs (Ns in Paris verse, Gold Digger et al) circle around this same kind of thing of bitch-who-do-you-think-you-are.

Not the thread for me, but I just wanted to say how much I agree with jaymc (agreeing with Popture) above. It's the Rolling-Stone-Lead-Review-in-1975 fallacy: that every new album by an important artist should be analyzed as a report on their emotional well-being as of today, and that this should automatically interest us. I haven't heard the album--I had a hard time getting through the last one for the very same reason.

Jaymc very otm.

I'm right there with jaymc, Popture and clemenza. Don't know why Kanye West is considered an Important Artist or a thinker whose thoughts must be wrestled with—he seems pretty dim to me. The music on this album is pretty good in parts—I would happily listen to the instrumental versions of the Daft Punk-produced tracks, at any rate. That's more than I've been able to say for his music before now—I've heard all the major singles without ever liking one, and have never heard an album all the way through until now (precisely because I don't like the singles, and he's a pop artist so presumably his best work is the stuff released as singles, yes?).

Not really!

he's a pop artist so presumably his best work is the stuff released as singles, yes?

not really

LOL xp

Well, clearly the stuff someone (him, his label's marketing department) thinks is the best is the stuff that gets released as singles. That's kinda how it works.