It’s sweet, I guess, if you don’t think about it too hard. Jekyll returning home to present his wife with a bouquet of roses, or perhaps an Edible Arrangement, to apologize for the things he’s done the previous night. Hyde (“Sometimes I think bad things / Really, really, really bad things”), the final four evoke Dr. The first three songs on Y e are the confessions of Mr. The whole thing has just caved into a sweet, sadly small muck. By the time it’s been presented to us, it’s fallen so completely into itself that it’s become impossible to figure out the shape it once was supposed to have or what has been written on it. Ye is a cake that has been prematurely taken out of the oven and then immediately, hastily decorated with icing. But taken as a whole, the few sublime moments of Y e are a frustrating tease: They suggest that West could have made a good-maybe even great-record, had he taken more time with it, infused it with more feeling, and clarified or deepened exactly what he was trying to say. Music signee 070 Shake is its Chance the Rapper).
Ye is not the disaster that some people may have been expecting given, well … you know, and the record even has moments of brilliance (“Ghost Town” is this record’s “Ultralight Beam,” and the recent G.O.O.D. And yet as brief as it is, there is still some dead air on Y e: West says in seven songs what he easily could have said in four. That same quality, on the comparatively minor seven-song Y e, feels like the result of a drought of them.Īt 23 minutes, it feels generous to call Y e an album at all, especially considering that it is the work of the same artist who once gave us a record as justifiably grand as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The unfinished quality of Pablo felt like it had sprung from an exciting overflow of good ideas. In both of those instances, though, the 11th-hour gambits somehow paid off: The buzzsaw production of Yeezus still feels forward-thinking five years after its release The Life of Pablo was praised as a quintessentially modern “living artwork,” which West continued to tweak even after its initial release to streaming platforms. The days leading up to the release of his previous album, 2016’s The Life of Pablo, were so transparently chaotic that just 10 days before it was released, West’s wife, Kim Kardashian-West, posed a Twitter poll to her millions of followers asking them what they thought the album should be called. Rick Rubin infamously said that vocals for five of the songs on West’s 2013 landmark Yeezus were added just two days before the final deadline (“Don’t worry,” West promised Rubin, “I will score 40 points for you in the fourth quarter”). West had previously suggested that the album’s cover would feature a photograph of his mother’s plastic surgeon, but the chosen image is more fitting: Y e is an album of dualities, splits, and intentional contradictions, and it also has a slapdash, unfinished quality about it, like a 10-page paper written in a shaky hand on the bumpy morning bus ride to school.
As the story goes, Kanye West created the cover of his new album Y e-an iPhone snap of a Wyoming horizon with the message “I hate being Bi-Polar its awesome” Snapchat-caption-scrawled overtop-on the way to the listening session where it debuted, hours before it was made available to the public.