Kanye West's new 2018 album

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 ?

@ Frederik etc. whatever

Bipolarity is a spectrum-- bipolar 1 means manic episodes and severe depression and requires medication, bipolar 2 means hypo-manic episodes and severe depression and there are many different treatments both therapeutic and pharmaceutical, and "bipolar tendencies" (cyclothymic disorder) can mean anything. The very creative act has been neurologically linked to bipolar tendencies-- many, many creative professionals have symptoms of bipolar disorder.

The narrative that I've been reading online ("bipolar man off his meds") doesn't really provide any nuance or understanding to the complexity of the disorder. If Kanye was bipolar 1, he'd probably be medicated, and would probably not be behaving the way he does. If Kanye was bipolar 2, medication would be optional-- many creative professionals who suffer from bipolar 2 (myself possibly included, still working toward a diagnosis) avoid medication, as the medications tend to inhibit creative activity. And if Kanye has cyclothymic disorder, then.. well, who knows.

I am somewhat frustrated that Kanye would choose to so bluntly lead with "I'm bipolar" as the face of this album, without any nuance as to what he might actually be experiencing, or diagnosed with. It feels as if he's clinging to the diagnosis to dissuade any criticality of his bad behaviour, his bad politics, his sub-par product. It feels to me like a misuse of the term. I'm don't feel pressed when people cavalierly describe their behaviour as "depressed" or "OCD" or "borderline" or whatever when they do not actually experience these disorders-- I don't really care. But to lead with the mental illness as if it's a talisman against criticality? very frustrating to me.

I feel Frederik's frustration that people aren't engaging with the "bipolarity" of ye but I don't really think that "an album about bipolarity" is particularly groundbreaking-- there are albums borne out of trauma, out of grief, out of rejection, out of depression-- there are already many songs and albums out there that specifically engage with "bipolarity" (Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Nirvana). In general I think it is far more interesting and useful to view ye through the lens that it is being viewed through, especially by Meghan Garvey, as a document of male fragility and male confusion.

booming post

A comparison upthread to A Crow Looks At Me is apt to me. The only criticism I had about that Mount Eerie record was that the premise of the record made it impossible to listen with a critical ear. Music that so bluntly presents itself as the product of personal turmoil (or personal joy) can be frustrating to listen to, for me, at any rate. I felt the same way about Antlers, or "Maybe I'm Amazed", or Black Tie White Noise. It's music that one cannot listen to with any criticality-- even internally!-- without feeling heartless.

Fgti knocked it out the park

wonderful post fgti

Thanks I'll just keep typing some more thoughts because I'm feeling a little hypo-manic myself right now, it's awesome

I had a really productive and interesting conversation last night with a friend of mine who is a goddamn great musician. She makes political work and she expressed frustration to me, last night, about where to stand in terms of grappling with her own privilege within her creative process. She has an audience, she's gorgeous, she's young, she's signed to a label, she's talented, she has great collaborators, she's white, she's straight, etc. She felt, furthermore, confusion about how to reconcile her own politics (and the politics of her music) with the mechanisms of the music industry, that don't align with her beliefs.

I told her that in my estimation, the best way that an artist can acknowledge their own privilege in their work is to not acknowledge it, or fret about it, as Fleet Foxes or tUnE-yArDs or Katy Perry have done so frustratingly, and instead to work it, to flex it, to be as extremely generous in one's work with that privilege. This is why Kanye was flying so high on MBDTF-- and Beyoncé is now-- and Bjork has oftentimes done: millions and millions of dollars spent on blowing our minds. When all that privilege is turned into generosity, it feels shared and productive and positive.

But Kanye is being parsimonious in his production, obfuscating in his methods. It isolates the audience and makes us resentful. I don't want him to spend 80K on a poorly-decided image for the Pusha-T record. I want him to make a fucking music video and have it be great and cost him lots of money and employ a lot of talented people.

What does this have to do with ye? Fretting about one's maleness or richness is not useful for anybody. You're male, you're rich, work it.

What does this have to do with bipolarity? Just that if Kanye is bipolar, and that bipolarity (a series of manic episodes) was what caused him to spend a zillion dollars on MBDTF and its auxiliary product, then I look forward to a future manic state where he takes such risks again. When MBDTF came out, iirc, he celebrated by flying to Saudi Arabia to test drive Ferraris in the desert. Bipolar can be awesome

Another great post, thanks.

Back when someone called Kanye on his Trump love Kanye acknowledged he knew nothing about Trump's policies and why they (and his endorsement) would make people upset. Considering how much work it takes for someone to totally unplug from current events, let alone at the same time Kanye is trying to plug himself into current events, I came away just thinking he was just profoundly ignorant, which no doubt extends to his (perhaps self) diagnosis of being bi polar. No filter + no knowledge is essentially the same shit formula that Trump epitomizes.

imo he is employing the same device as J*rdan P*terson. Kanye becomes aware of how high he is up on the kyriarchy, feels defensive about it, and in response, decides to formulate polemics about how the kyriarchy doesn't exist.

thank you for your insightful posts fgti - i especially think the link between bipolarity and creativity should be examined, given the way diagnoses of all stripes reflect the mores of the times in which they’re established

But fgti, 'ye' IS generous about his bipolarity. There is no defensiveness about it, he revels in it, calls it his superpower. That's exactly why it means so much to me, that he is being open and honest about it all, even the darkest parts, and not defending or explain away any part of it. He is really thinking about killing Kim.

generous doesn't mean permissive imo

Fgti keeps rolling hard. Great post. Good advice to your friend - certainly adopted that outlook myself

Jeff Weiss:

21 Grammy Awards and 21 million albums sold. These statistics exist as evidence for why West claims “I don’t take advice from people less successful than me.” But “Ye” exists as a reminder that even legitimate genius has limitations and everyone can use real friends to remind you of who you used to be and the out-of-touch caricature that you’ve become. A self-serious 23-minute crayon pamphlet of luxurious emptiness, “Ye” limps along as vacant and inert as the Wyoming skyline on its cover.

I don't think Kanye is currently being honest about his mental health at all.

I think Kanye has, in the past, written incredibly affecting songs about his mental health-- notably "Welcome To Heartbreak"-- and especially "Pinocchio Story", which itself sounds (to me) like a man confessing to having a laundry list of borderline symptoms caused by the loneliness of being too famous for anybody to relate to you on a human-to-human level.

What does frustrate me about this entire album and its roll-out and Kanye-discourse (yescourse?) is this. One of the recurring things that came up both in private and group therapy for me is that "it is terrible for the mind to care too much about what other people think of you". For a person in Kanye's position, where your livelihood is dependent upon what-people-think-of-you, and the livelihood-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-other-people also, the stress of having to always be "on" and always be intelligent and attractive and talented and on the correct side of current race theory suggests to me that you can say bipolar, or borderline, or this or that or the next thing, but it's missing the point. And reviews (just scanning Jeff Weiss now) can say "adolescent", or "fool", or (as Kanye himself has wanted us to) explain away his behaviour as being the result of some kind of bipolar diagnosis

But it's more like this

It is hard to be black in America
There are not a lot of rich black role models for Kanye to be inspired by/look up to (thus his MJ fixation)
It is hard on your mental health to be #1 and have to continue impressing everyone
It is hard on your mental health to be as famous as he is
He is basically worried all the time
Because ultimately musicians are just nerds who are good at a computer program or an instrument

And I try to remind people of these things when they rush in to be expressively "I don't get what the big deal is" about other people who are exceedingly good at being black and rich and talented and in the public eye (Frank, Rihanna, Beyoncé)

Most people don't handle fame and fortune very well.

We need better support systems for rich and famous people.

Not sarcastically, though, and I made this point previously in one of these threads: it seems basically impossible for rich & famous people to get actually good healthcare.

Why?

The armchair psychoanalysis that Ye invites is exactly the kind of shit I can't stand. I understand it's a fine line between discussing mental health in good faith and then fall into stereotyping people, I understand that not everyone is armed with the ability to discuss those complicated personal health issues. It makes the conversation hard and I think some patience is required.

But this is not it. This is mental health issues as capitalist spectacle: tabloids/twitter get to ponder the nitty gritty with I don't know his relationship to Kardashian or the loss of his mother, cultural websites like Complex get their clicks with oohs and aaah of Kanye breakdown, and in the middle of all this Kanye is using the whole thing as a marketing device to collect goodwill post MAGA-baseball cap, paint himself as the genius he think he is ('name one genius that ain't crazy') and most probably making a shit-ton of money out of it. No solutions is given, no help is provided, no discourse can be made, Houston's death and addiction is a suddenly edgy aesthetic, egocentrism is celebrated.

The thing that defeats me the most is that Ye comes on the heel of several great records by black hip-hop artists that engages purposefully with mental health. He can't sit down and check the landscape as to position himself.

On the other hand someone like Fred relates hard to the record in a genuine way so I'm not opposed to be 100% wrong.

I told her that in my estimation, the best way that an artist can acknowledge their own privilege in their work is to not acknowledge it, or fret about it, as Fleet Foxes or tUnE-yArDs or Katy Perry have done so frustratingly, and instead to work it, to flex it, to be as extremely generous in one's work with that privilege. This is why Kanye was flying so high on MBDTF-- and Beyoncé is now-- and Bjork has oftentimes done: millions and millions of dollars spent on blowing our minds. When all that privilege is turned into generosity, it feels shared and productive and positive.

this is besides the bipolar point but a really interesting way of framing this. then again when referring to the privilege of katy perry & tune yards and the privilege of beyonce & kanye, we're talking about entirely different things. it's hard to imagine a katy perry album that uses largesse to address the kind of privilege she was talking about tho in a sense she *did* attempt that... she got her label to pay for her 72 hour streaming therapy session featuring deray and whatever. she wanted to blow our mind, but unfortunately was still katy perry. i do agree tho that fretting about it in the way the artists you mention did leaves everyone unsatisfied, and attempting to thread the needle in some other fashion more along the lines of "use your resources to make dope, highly collaborative music" is more agreeable though also harder.

xp Great post VHS, please list those records, I listen to nothing these days but am interested

@ Tomboto I don't know what you mean by that, rich/famous people have a tonne of support systems but "support systems" don't address the root problem imo, which I still can't really define, but seems to be (loosely) "a toxic relationship between artist and audience"

<3 J0rdan

xpost to self

On a personal level, the spectacle of mental health/Ye is made even more pathetic with it's rollout and cover. For someone who has suffered from heavy depression, I have found hiking and rediscovering nature to be key elements to my recovery. I am not the only one who experienced it, there is something therapeutic about nature. And there goes Kanye, taking a snap of a beautiful Wyoming mountain and plastering his sentence worthy of a I am with stupid t shirt store. There they are all are, in beautiful countryside Wyoming with their expensive clothes and expensive drugs not giving a shit about what's wonderful around them, dancing to the tune how edgy it is to be one of the 'crazies', like being bi-polar is some sort of fashion statement. It's laughable really, if not glauque.

a major component of all this kanye stuff right now imo is that he has no family of his own as far as i can tell aside from the kardashians, who treat everything as content for public consumption as a method of further ingraining themselves into pop culture. it strikes me as a particularly poor environment for someone w/ mental health issues, let alone kanye who is already prone to dealing with things in a very public fashion. i don't think has a great grip on himself right now and prob doesn't have very many ppl giving him good advice about how to be conducting his life at the moment aside from like john legend.

please list those records

Kendrick is the most obvious one

Thanks Goon. Also for the excellent point about including privilege in your art: my motto, as someone who is aiming to be a producer and helping out artists to make the most of their potential, is generally to be outward looking as you can reasonably be.

Why?

This is in the Hall of Fame of vicious P4K review closers:

"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."

please list those records

Kendrick is the most obvious one

― Οὖτις, Monday, June 4, 2018 6:04 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, here is a small list I just compiled, those are mostly famous records and I'm sure one of the hip hop head of ilxor have more to list:
The entirety of Danny Brown's output.
Kendrick - To Pimp A Butterfly.
Chance the Rapper - Acid Rap, not exclusively, but it is there and it is poignant.
Earl Sweatshirt - Doris and I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside
Vince Staples - Summertime '06
Logic - Everybody
Stormzy - Gang Signs and Prayers.

I believe Tyler the Creator's Flower Boy is up there, but I haven't listened to it so someone else could vouch for it.

Also Jay Z included interesting discussions with Trevor Noah, Meek Mill and Michael B. Jordan about therapy, it's part of 4:44 promo cycle iirc, that's pretty great.

I think Kanye is being 100% honest about himself, while still being wrong. Those are two different things. He sounds SO MUCH like my uncle at his worst, and it's just really something I needed to experience expressed artistically, and had no idea I needed.