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

now if you will excuse me, I need to chant "thebeautifulPEOPLE, thebeautifulPEOPLE" over "Black Skinhead"

the coda on new slaves is one of my favorite parts of this album. i love frank ocean taking over the vocals from kanye. don't ask me why. i appreciate the starkness and abrasiveness of most of this album, but i guess listening to it i just keep hoping for some warm relief. maybe the album is purer because it withholds this for the most part.

quite honestly, this album needs more unhinged screaming

Over halfway through the album, and content of the album aside, this is quite possibly the worst mastered album I've heard in a fucking long time.

i think that is deliberate. it's supposed to sound sharp and bright and attack your ears like needles, i feel

As for the content of the album, I'm up to 'I'm In It' and finding it very difficult to listen to this with a straight face.

UH HUH HONEY.

why would you want to listen to music with a straight face

"this sure is good music" :| "I really like it" :|

http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/s-z/todorov_a/neutral.jpg

*startled look*

Hark, I think I hear the sound of a pedantic bastard who knew exactly what I was getting at...

*listens harder*

...nah, must have been the wind or something.

Anyways, just finished my first listen... the overall loudness of this, whether by design or not, does make the album a bit of a slog to get through. Aside from that, it certainly was an amusing listen.

Listening to noise music on the regular does one a world of good when it comes to grappling with albums like this one.

I put 'Shaking The Habitual' on directly after it finished... I'm in just the right mood for it.

When we poll this album it's gonna be a showdown between "on sight" and "bound 2" for me

xp I have done that. Those two and the Clipping album are all in rotation together for me.

This album isn't extreme enough! It's way more normal than than everyone is making it sound.

Kanye can't really be weird, he's really sort of a boring person, despite all the theatrics he's really normal

How likely is it that Greg Tate is right, that another Ye album is just around the corner?

I mean, how many rappers were recording with West who didn't turn up on Yeezus?

Like Nas now there's a fucking weirdo

August Fourteen: Yudas

was nas recording with kanye recently?

or are you just saying nas is a fucked up weirdo? if post-it was written nas ever got this kind of finetooth comb lyrical reading....

i think this album needs a "runaway" -- an almost pornographically confessional song, where the god kanye steps back for a second, and recognizes himself to be just an ordinary sinner. the coked-out, paranoid style is cool but it gets exhausting. which, i mean, might even be the point.

― Treeship, Tuesday, June 18, 2013 9:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

please, kanye saying that he's an asshole to girls and telling one to leave him is not "pornographically confessional." the excess of that song tricks people into thinking there's any poignancy whatsoever. that shit blows.

i don't know about profound, but i think the incoherent autotune solo on runaway is an effective expression of the emotion of remorse, which is a very human emotion that seems alien to the persona kanye seems to have adopted throughout yeezus. the pornographically confessional thing is, idk, i guess that sort of self-pity is kind of embarrassing. i don't really know what it means that runaway is undercut immediately by hell of a life, though.

The loudness/mastering is definitely not one of my issues with this album. Sounds fine on headphones and stereo to me - obv delib loud but not so much I can't stand it

Delighted to see that the comment thread beneath the Guardian review contains several earnest recommendations that people listen to Talib Kweli instead.

Somebody should have introduced Kanye to Kevin Martin during the making of this album. Imagine "Send it up" with one of his bass lines!

I don't think it was what m@tt meant, but there WAS a recent picture of, like, Kanye and Nas and Jay and Beyonce all together. Not at a studio but who knows -- if they were recording I bet it was for Jay's album.

al, do you think it hurts quietly nas to see jay still in love?

quietly hurts, i meant.

I think Nas compares his life to Jay's less than other people do

nas on 'blood on the leaves' would have made so much sense.

i'm going to write a blog post, where i suggest dream features for yeezus.

dylan I basically meant that Nas is an actual fucked up weirdo who's attempts to make what he feels are normal records are kinda weirder to me than all of kanye trying so hard to be challenging when he's just a garden variety dick mostly and his personal isn't really that interesting

skews for skeezus

What's so weird about Nas besides his occasional gross sex lyrics, which honestly are not that much more extreme than the stuff on Yeezus?

Nas seems about as detached & awkward as 'ye. Just more stoned

right. we're on the same page. for bizarre sexual imagery, conflicted personality, political issues and conspiracy theorizing and quotidian family matters and neighborhood politics tangled up in a ball of existential angst... buy a nas record. and no one on ilm will ever compare him to beck.

The way his rhyme style has evolved is strange to me just his phrasing & word choices & also his weird shifts between corny sentiment & gangster shit & weirdo lyrical pseudo philosophical shit is just really odd in a distinctive way to me plus a vibe I get that the dude is not right in the head

still not sure who you're talking about tbh

he's talking about nas

Kanye really raps about alimony and women being horrible a lot for a guy who has never been married, to our knowledge has one kid, is in a relationship, and was raised by a single mom who he really loved

he's not weird. i think nas covers a lot of the same ground as kanye but in a more thoughtful way. he has the skills as a writer to illuminate more of his inner life, i guess. so, instead of just casual strange fruit interpolation into snorting mdma off a range rover dash and it all comes off as sort of thoughtless... with nas, you go from what reads as sincere progressive political sloganeering into ultraviolent superthug 2013 surrealism or you've got heartrending here my dear post-divorce nas and then you're staring into an asshole spread open like a wide mouth bass.

but ye is always looking for the good girl, the one like his moms but he keeps fucking it up because he's a dirtbag that's sending hoodrats pictures of his dick or it gets fucked up for him because desolation of fame and fucked up reality of social relationship or the bitches lie to their lawyers about him.

Kanye really raps about alimony and women being horrible a lot for a guy who has never been married, to our knowledge has one kid, is in a relationship, and was raised by a single mom who he really loved

― mh, Wednesday, June 19, 2013 9:56 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know, right. really jarring after the first album kanye who'd say to his pre-fame girlfriend's dead father "I do plan to marry your daughter, and you know I gotta thank you for the way that she was brought up."

he sounds like an insane person on this album tbh... all over the place and the stuff he says is incoherent, though passionate. i think that is part of the deal with this album?

Kanye really raps about alimony and women being horrible a lot for a guy who has never been married, to our knowledge has one kid, is in a relationship, and was raised by a single mom who he really loved

― mh, Wednesday, June 19, 2013 9:56 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's almost like people overstate how personal and autobiographical kanye's music is

he does sound really coke-y. kanye. not nas.

i obviously have no idea if he does a lot of coke, but he SOUNDS like someone who does.

if the lyrics about that stuff aren't autobiographical, that just further raises the question of why a guy who hasn't had those kinds of experiences with women seems so preoccupied with it in his writing

exactly!

He's not queer?

what's up with kanye? is he into coke? is he on drugs? is he gay?