Everyone who cares about such matters agrees that Pusha T’s Kanye West-produced album Daytona, which dropped last week, did not break with West’s two-decade-deep greatness as a beat producer. His new album, however, is a completely different story. Released on June 1, and containing two tracks (“I Thought About Killing You” and “Yikes”) with merely passible beats, the entire work is ruined by his pointless and often just downright bad rapping. To give you one among many examples of this wackness: “I love your titties, ’cause they prove/I can focus on two things at once.” One has to wash their hands after hearing that.
But the main problem with West’s raps on Ye, the first solo album of his new pro-MAGA era, is that the anger they’re supposed to express appears to have no real source or target. It’s anger generated in a vacuum, anger for the sake of anger, anger because, like Friedrich Nietzsche’s muddy water, it might make the rapper sound deep.
West goes from news headline to news headline—North Korea, #MeToo, Stormy Daniels, his marriage, his bankruptcy, and so on, and so on—without providing any insights on the state of our times or his mind. As a consequence, the short album (it’s only 23 minutes), feels like it goes on for hours.
I’m not a West hater. I rate his 2010 My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as not only one of the best albums of this decade but also one of the greatest hiphop albums in the genre’s 40-year history. And a part of me actually thought (maybe even hoped) that his genius might be insulated from the turbulence of his bizarre MAGA moment. Ye reveals that his beats might survive this period but not his raps. What is this Chicago-raised MC fighting for these days? What ever it is, it’s certainly much less interesting than even fighting for your right to party.
