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

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.

album starts & end strong but it kind of loses me in the middle. granted it's been <24 hours since my first listen-through. "New Slaves" is definitely the standout. strangely I thought the dick/swallower line worked better when it was censored to "prick" on SNL even though that doesn't really soften the offensiveness behind the imagery. "prick" seems to put more weight on the idea of being a deliberate irritant/a thorn in society's side. but I guess that's not really what he was going for w/that line.

almost every major pop star i can think of (and several minor ones too) are more interesting than just their singles

oh i have just heard this, have read no commentary and won't get a chance to hear again til tomorrow. much much better than MBDTF on one listen! "hold ya liquor" is easily the worst thing here though, such a tedious endless trudge

the daft punk songs are the best, prob

Why do debates about Kanye always devolve into the sympathetic and intentional fallacies? Why is criticism about him so insistently moralizing? I don't read the lyrical content as something that needs to be endorsed or condemned, and I think it's similarly beside the point to fret about the persona he puts across, as if we need to "approve" of the art and the artist that compels, moves, confuses us. Obviously it repels and attracts at the same time, and Kanye presents us not with a unified character but a series of fragmented selves. It's the very lack of platitudinous generalities, his willingness to go out on batshit and arguably offensive limbs, that make Kanye still fascinating, to me. And yeah, I think he is saying some pretty profound things about what it's like to be alive, right now, in a way that no other artist is brave enough to do right now. And I think everyone can agree that the sonics on this record are amazing. I didn't realize I wanted a version of Blood on the Tracks by the Knife, but it is scratching a really big itch for me. Can't stop listening.

Xpost responding to the popture, jaymc stuff above

if it's the "Important Artist" stuff that gets in the way of you enjoying an album, maybe you should read less criticism/reviews?

"ugh i can't enjoy this album because someone propped my eyes open and forced me to read 100 articles about it"

did you guys not enjoy the daft punk album either?

b/c the hype and self-aggrandizement were at least as pervasive for random access memories, so if you like one but not the other, maybe there's something else going on here

Idg why kanye is supposed to be "batshit" other than it suits (y)our romanticised image of ~the artist~. He's no odder than your average big pop star tbh.

kanye's an egotist but he didn't make kid cudi and bon iver record 10-minute-long videos about what a genius he is (tbh he's probably mad he didn't think of this first)

That's absurd and assumes crit only exists for consumer guide purposes. Albums are not enjoyed in a vacuum. I'm asking for a criticism that champions difficulty rather than falling back on puritanical platitudes. Do you not read reviews of albums you love?

not really

but people are specifically saying that the media coverage is keeping them from enjoying the album. so "read less media coverage" seems like a pretty easy solution to that.

To clarify (speaking for myself, not anyone else): it has nothing to do with reviews/critics--I should have said "received," not "analyzed." The fallacy is the artist's: I do believe that Kayne West (and U2, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, and lots of other artists of the type who get lead reviews in Rolling Stone) work from the assumption that we should care about how they're feeling at any given moment. (A running joke between a friend and I: "Perhaps R.E.M.'s most optimistic album yet," inspired by a review from a publication we used to write for.) If you do care, great.

Albums are not enjoyed in a vacuum.

Fitting, because many albums are best enjoyed while vacuuming.

why would anyone bother creating a piece of art if they didn't think people should care about what they're feeling?