Get your soul sanctified on the Kanye West JESUS IS KING thread

Lol I actually like the album cover

That said I can’t tell if the comments from people on twitter that seem to like it are insane or trolling.

i can imagine her artwork speaking to his own feelings of depersonalization, dehumanization etc which he absolutely has experienced and which are more than compatible with overcompensation in the ego department

but what would happen if the album was actually good? not just "not a trainwreck" but also more than just "fine"? i'm not expecting it at all but i am interested hypothetically in what an appropriate response to that might look like at this point

i’d welcome a “fine” effort from him. im sure it’ll have its moments in its production, but there’s no way the lyrical content on this album will be anything but inane garbage

A concept album about scooping poop.

I dgaf about Kanye, but Bourgeois made art about her mother (including this piece) and this new album is named after West's mom. I mean sure, obvs he's not going to pick an unsung artist, but I don't think the thematic connection is hard to figure out guys.

FPing frogs for comparing LB to Gaspar Noe

If that really was the album cover, wouldn't some higher profile music sites have posted stories about it by now?

it hasn't been officially confirmed at all and i haven't been able to track down any sort of source for the claim that it's the cover

This album rollout seems very… tame so far? It’s almost making me optimistic. Almost.

half an hour into the livestream, I count one sorta good song

my fondest wish: not to awaken in a few hours to read a track-by-track analysis of a Kanye album released in 2021.

Alfred, can I write a guest post on your blog

fuck you
pay me

I have a feeling Ye’s verses aren’t done yet and album not coming out today

— scott vener (@brokemogul) July 23, 2021

welp at least he showed up!

welp

https://cdn1.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/768x768/public/images/methode/2018/10/12/c2c40512-cd7c-11e8-9460-2e07e264bd11_1280x720_122011.jpg?itok=wvD4xG2X

grifters gonna grift.

don't you need something to sell if you're a grifter

wasn't he selling $40 hot dogs last night

b-b-but the Twitter stans tell me "Ye is back baby!" and it's an amazing record! could they be wrong?

$80 chicken nuggets, from the screenshot i saw

Lol

A friend went and wrote this:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xgqa/kanye-west-donda-listening-party-atlanta-review

Good piece.

The image of him walking alone on the field, wandering aimlessly and mutely as the crowd watched, is actually kind of interesting. Like, reducing performance down to its most minimal element, the mere presence of the artist. It’s probably also some kind of comment on his celebrity and how his good fortune just leaves him feeling more isolated and confused. Echoes of the Christian idea of pilgrimage, “Jesus Walks,” idk there seem to be layers

He’s embarrassed himself a lot over the years. Seems like a big burden to carry, the fact of much of america thinking you are an asshole

lol, or maybe he just awkwardly wandered around while a crowd listened to his new album in a setting with shitty acoustics. there are no "layers", come the fuck on.

I’m mostly going off his admiration of marina abramovic, her “artist is present” performance. He draws from contemporary art a lot. Sometimes he does this to very stupid ends but this seems ok

Literally the only interesting thing about Kanye West in 2021 is the contortions his remaining fans will put themselves through in a search for meaning in his half-assed flailing.

I'm just tired of having smoke blown up my ass that Kanye is some sort of unique genius that approaches everything from some deep conceptual level that I'm just too dumb to understand instead of just a formerly very talented producer and decent rapper who has clearly suffered from some mental health issues and is surrounded by people who refuse to tell him when his ideas are shitty.

i didn't say it was "genius." my words were "actually kind of interesting."

The bright white light and emptiness reminded me of Roger Waters onstage, wandering outside the wall during "Comfortably Numb".

tbf, treesh, your post wasn't that bad, just the straw that broke the camel's back this morning. though i genuinely don't believe Kanye has done anything even close to "kind of interesting" since Yeezus.

there's some clips of music floating around twitter

hope you like synth pads!

i genuinely don't believe Kanye has done anything even close to "kind of interesting" since Yeezus.

the life of pablo was an incoherent mess of an album but i'd easily give it "kind of interesting" and it still had some pretty good moments. it was very much the beginning of the end with kanye's quality control though

See TLOP was the last Kanye album I actually spent time trying to get a handle on, but I never could do it and thought it was really bad. I listened to Ye once, but basically gave up after that and never heard Jesus is King at all. The MAGA shit just sealed the deal that I don't even have to pretend to be interested in where he is right now, beyond hoping he is getting some level of professional help.

the life of pablo was an incoherent mess of an album but i'd easily give it "kind of interesting" and it still had some pretty good moments. it was very much the beginning of the end with kanye's quality control though

Same here. It's not a great album, but it's interesting with merit, and unless Kanye turns it around, it'll be the last one he's done that I'll play in its entirety.

I like that he's trying to say something. He hasn't found the words yet, though, as evidenced by the many long segments of him repeating the same koan over and over.

Musically, quite dull.

^^

which gets to the heart of my distaste for everything post Yeezus. the lyrics and rapping were always hit or miss, when not being outright cringeworthy. once the production fell off there was nothing worth listening for, ime.

his tracks now, actually Otis was the first time I really noticed, but they don't feel minimal rather undercooked. Everytime you make a song there's that initial germ of an idea - a little riff, or drum pattern, or brief melody, or sample, etc - but they need to be developed into an actual song, his stuff now just seems like he gets that little hint of an idea and says ok it's done that's the track

i think he is trying to separate himself from other hip-hop producers by making tracks that "show the seams" and frustrate listeners' expectations. not saying this is genius -- it could easily be seen as a cheap ploy for an "arty" or modernist effect. but that's why i think his stuff sounds like this now.

have you considered it doesn't mean anything, that he's just unable to finish things properly?

like the album "jesus is king" ends super abruptly in a way that feels insane and almost like a parody of everything that came before it.

i dropped into kanyetothe (always fun on a fake release date) and learned about this collab he did with Teenage Engineering that was supposedly in use last night.

https://lindynews.org/10131/entertainment/new-kanye-west-stem-players-leaked-online/

i think the recent albums actually sound cool from a production standpoint and he attempts to grapple with difficult emotional terrain. the big problem is that many listeners are not going to extend patience and good will to him now for a whole bunch of reasons. i think these are fair and good reasons, honestly -- who cares about the travails of a narcissist with a persecution complex? much less one who supported trump? but these concerns aren't really him falling off as a producer or rapper.

i would never recommend "jesus is king" or "ye" to someone. but i have found them both to be rewarding listening experiences.

honestly I think that line of thinking, an army of writers, hangers on, starfuckers, online stans, insisting each half baked pinch loaf (to borrow a phrase) of an album, every 7-year-old with Photoshop level $300 t-shirt design, every horrid "HR Giger designing $49.99 JC Penney grandpa New Balances" Yeezys is actually profoundly terrible and propping up a very obviously sick man for profit and "content" for the social media gristmill

He can still be a great producer - he's still producing great records, but none for himself.

yeah, i see that too.

i felt like "jesus is king" was an interesting failure. like, it's a turn to christianity, there is an acknowledgement that narcissism has poisoned him, he wants to turn to a higher power. but then all he finds is this very american, i guess i would say degraded form of christianity that is just another way to worship the self. so he just finds the same old path again, the one that leads to despair.

i think of kanye as like robert lowell or something, creating artistic failures that reflect his own personal failures. but maybe he is less self-aware of this process? he skates around the idea that he is unhappy and that he is holding onto illusions. but he always seems to get close, i guess. there is enough hope in there to make the enterprise not totally grim.

xp

Matt consistently otm

but yeah, squint, look at it from another angle, and he is just the hip hop version of trump. america has a long tradition of these kind of sloppy figures, these people who are at once abject and grandiose, who channel the fears and aspirations of the public, but this might just be a sick tradition. he gains nothing by believing himself to be a "genius" or a "prophet" (he's compared himself to st. paul). and like, america is a dumb country to the extent that we encourage people to take up similarly grand and unrealistic ideas about themselves.