Kanye West's new 2018 album

"a lot of great art has come from the b hole"

yeah, like Bobbi starr/ Sasha Grey/ Dana Dearmond/ Mike adriano kinds of art!

yeah i know, they're great

haha this album is such trash

good mourning!

My friend kelly enthused about how amazing this record was which felt weird after reading the mixed reviews here. She said it has some deep mental health reflection but I couldn’t help but think I have Kendrick or angel haze records that nail that anyway.

I wonder if it’s possible both to 1) hold that Kanye’s politics suck and 2) not 100% dismiss his mental health stuff ...

and 3) think this album fails on a musical level and also to interestingly engage in either of those things

Oh yeah lol I’m not even talking about the album thereby ceding your point, more just reacting to the idea that the only explanation for his behavior is narcissism and drugs - which obv may play a role too

This album is such a nullity.

i've got kanye muted everywhere but apparently there's an unapproved sample from "Mono No Aware" on the first track

snoop otm re kanye

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H08xgoXkpa8

shit J Prince shut the Pusha beef down

it's crazy the dude I know from talking on Geto Boys records forever ago still runs shit

The rating is decent but the words are just brutal

But I can admit that after ye ended unceremoniously the third or fourth time, I put on “Family Business,” and I thought about the kid from Chicago who wanted to be the biggest rapper in the world, who now lives in an empty-looking concrete mansion in Calabasas, who has stopped trying.

haha wow that's something, good writing

Artist over the hill makes lame record

That's a fantastic, damning review. The author - one of my favorites - likely had little control over the score, which should've dipped below 7.0 to match the review.

That ended graph should be a formal epitaph but it won't be, sadly.

the bits about kanye always racing against the clock made me think that his next album should be called THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD

Since 1985, he’s the #1 writer and producer by songs that charted in the top 5

yes, who can forget those indelible Top 5 hits by It's Alive. six years before they even had an album, too!

wrong thread, shit

the bits about kanye always racing against the clock made me think that his next album should be called THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD

― maura, 4. juni 2018 13:55 (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's not because he is a 'gifted child', that kinda of workaholic mania is textbook bi-polar. That part of the review kinda filled me with anger, it's not important to anything having to do with the quality of the album, it's just shitting on a bi-polar guy for being manic.

I feel like I want to write a longer thing about this, but as I've mentioned bi-polarity runs in my family, I've been to the doctor to see if I'm bi-polar (I'm not) and there's still a danger that my own issues with hypo-mania might someday develop into being bi-polar if I don't take care of myself. And I'm stunned of the lack of insight into and care to learn more about the bi-polar issues that this album is portraying. It's a mental illness, I don't get why non-bi-polar people feel it's okay to make fun of, to attack Kanye for not thinking about his illness the way they want to (thinking it's a superpower is something I've heard over and over and over from manic people (and it freaking IS a superpower, I wrote 31 film reviews in 9 days from the Berlin film festival, and I'm just hypo-manic!)) attacking him personally for all these things that relate to bi-polarity.

Hey I’m not sure it’s just the bipolar. If Kanye still does coke that would explain his work ethic as well.

Tho Fred is right in a way. I just finished a record in 4 weeks 8 hours a day, I’m bipolar as well

Kanye’s new album is a soundtrack to the viscerally agitated atmosphere in America right now. It captures the desperate, unnerved flailing of a nation thrown into a conversation on masculinity it doesnt know how to have.

None of what Ive just written is a compliment.

A thread:

— Chimene Suleyman (@chimenesuleyman) June 3, 2018

imagine all the superpower-produced lyrics Kanye must have had to leave off of this record. You can only fit the gems!

engaging with a person's mental illness often means disregarding or dismissing the content of their words. when i go off on one of my paranoid fantasies people who know me are hurt by it, but also know (hopefully) not to take it seriously because it's my illness talking. pitchfork aren't in a position to do that with kanye. their job is to judge his work, not to diagnose or treat his mental illness.

Garvey's review is dead-on, but that's a way weirder editorial score call than the Monae record was

Making a crap piece of creative work and pissing everybody off during an extremely abbreviated time period during the spring is a classic off-meds move imo

The month of May is infamous among doctors & social workers who deal with bipolar disorder, as it happens

He should have named this album Late Diagnosis.

The month of May is infamous among doctors & social workers who deal with bipolar disorder, as it happens

the advent of spring can bring on manic episodes iirc

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bipolar+springtime

engaging with a person's mental illness often means disregarding or dismissing the content of their words. when i go off on one of my paranoid fantasies people who know me are hurt by it, but also know (hopefully) not to take it seriously because it's my illness talking. pitchfork aren't in a position to do that with kanye. their job is to judge his work, not to diagnose or treat his mental illness.

― Arch Bacon (rushomancy), 4. juni 2018 14:59 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Two things: First of all, I agree that the job is to judge the Work, but the part of the reviews that pisses me off are about Kanye the person rather than ye the album - like shitting on him for making the album in a few months, or not being concerned with how the audience will judge it. Large parts of that album are an attack on the person, without engaging with his mental issues at all, even when they seem central to his behaviour. And secondly, it's not at all about 'diagnosing' him. The diagnose is on the cover of the album! 'ye' is undoubtedly a bi-polar Work, a Work about bi-polarity, and not engaging with the bi-polarity is to not engage with the Work. And it's not about accepting all the grossness - again, it runs in my family, I know how unacceptably gross it can be, how much it can hurt - nor should the sexism for instance be excused by the bi-polarity. But the refusal to engage with bi-polarity is a refusal to engage with the Work on it's own terms, and I'm honestly surprised that people just straight up refuse to engage with it. And it quite honestly hurts.

The whole thing hurts. The album made me cry the first I heard it, and it's also kinda awful that it is pretty indisputably the most high-profile Work about bi-polarity ever (right?) and it's so gross and sexist and right-wing. But the complete refusal to engage with the bi-polar aspects really pains as well. Therefore this is probably the last I'll write about it, because I can just sense that I'm not going to convince anyone. But I just honestly think that in five years, this record will be seen as flawed as fuck but, well, Important and trail-blazing. And we'll look back on that review and wonder how we ever thought that was acceptable. Or perhaps I 'hope' that will be the case rather than I think it. Sigh.

I think your argument is diluted by capitalizing Work and saying “bi-polarity” instead of “bipolar disorder”

I listened to YE for the first and last time today, mostly because I figured I should have a sense of things.

I can see how it will be meaningful to certain audiences. But it's somehow got even less to keep me interested than TLOP had.

on listen #2 now, this is god awful

Thanks, Tomboto. You could seriously not have written a more exasperating dismissal. I'm out.

From a FB chat earlier with a friend, and I feel like I've said (some of) this dozens of times but:

"Thanks to the length and streaming popularity this will get him back on the Billboard charts. And it will become a touchstone for a certain audience. But - yeah. I don’t know whether I’m still part of his audience. TLOP kinda is where that started. Yeezus was a mess but there was something interesting about it but that speaks to my issue with Kanye from post-2010 - he became more of an anthropological fascination than someone I really could admire and whose music I could really enjoy."

not intended as a shot at you, Fred, just how I feel xp

Calm down, Fred.

El - that rings so true for me re may

yeezus was interesting and enjoyable, but the doubling-down on the angry misogyny made no sense

there's this weird kanye thing where the more stable his home life appears -- he's married ! he has kids! he loves his wife! -- the nastier the lyrics get

I can't imagine listening to this deliberately again, it's the kind of bleak, joyless document some folks accused the recent Mount Eerie records of being

Listening to it on Spotify, it goes right into "Lift Yourself" after the last track, and it's definitely the only banger, lyrics aside.

Also into that Chimney Suleyman thread above.

that p4k Garvey review is great, especially this line:

Instead, ye reveals that the past month’s flailing attempts at iconoclasm were building up to exactly nothing: It is an album born from chaos for chaos’ sake, an album that can barely be bothered to refer to that chaos with anything more committal than a Kanye shrug.

Good comparison to the recent Mount Eerie records, Simon, though I'd say that's giving Kanye's record way too much credit. this record is just so so so boring.

i mean it's total feeling vs total absence of feeling

otm

Is this the old chestnut that depression is absence of feeling ?