As he is wont to do, Kanye West made plenty of headlines in the weeks leading up to ye<\/i>\u2019s release, some intentional, others unintentional. There was the revelation that he was a Donald Trump supporter, complete with MAGA hat. There was the drop of two singles, one (\u201cYe vs. The People\u201d) a dialogue between him and T.I. about politics, the other (\u201cLift Yourself\u201d) a troll that introduced the words \u201cpoopity scoop\u201d into the pop culture lexicon. And most infamously, there was his impromptu rant in the TMZ newsroom, where he announced that he thought 400 years of black slavery \u201csounds like a choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
So by the time ye<\/i> was released, West\u2019s always-shaky goodwill with fans and the public had almost entirely dissipated. This album, the second and most anticipated of G.O.O.D. Music\u2019s five June releases, was going to have to tear the roof off the joint. Does it?<\/p>\n
Eh. Maybe a few shingles here and there.<\/p>\n
Like all of West\u2019s albums, this one is all about him \u2013 fair, since he continues to fascinate us. As the album artwork (a photo taken and edited with his iPhone on the day of the album release) announces, Kanye has been diagnosed as bipolar, and the music here returns again and again to his struggles with and ultimate acceptance of his condition. Music inspired by mental illness is not exactly new territory, but one could hope that an artist of West\u2019s caliber would do something revolutionary with it. <\/p>\n
Instead, ye <\/i>provides mostly dull, thrown-together tracks that are light on both production and interesting things to say. West has admitted that, following his disastrous appearance at TMZ, he rewrote the entire album in the space of a month, and it shows. While there are moments of gold in \u201cYikes,\u201d \u201cWouldn\u2019t Leave,\u201d and \u201cNo Mistakes\u201d (all of which not-so-subtly address the controversy and aftermath), there isn\u2019t a song among the bunch that I expect to return to five years from now. \u201cAll Mine\u201d is so mediocre that, even after listening to the album a dozen times, I don\u2019t remember a thing about off the top of my head. Even a cameo by Nicki Minaj at the end of \u201cViolent Crimes\u201d isn\u2019t enough to make an impact. One is left to wonder what kind of material West had in the can before he imploded at TMZ, and how it compares with ye<\/i>.<\/p>\n
ye <\/i>isn\u2019t a bad album \u2013 for all his personal and promotional quirks, we have no evidence Kanye West knows how to give us poor music. But where listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy<\/i> is so viscerally powerful it can feel like looking into the sun, this is more like staring at an overcast sky. In the introductory track, the dark \u201cI Thought About Killing You,\u201d West raps \u201cIf I wasn\u2019t shining so hard \/ wouldn\u2019t be no shade.\u201d Alas, the shade will continue \u2013 if anything about Kanye West is consistent, it is that he will infuriate people \u2013 but after ye<\/i> it\u2019s now an open question whether hip-hop\u2019s resident genius still shines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":33533,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7798],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-45354","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-kanye-west","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45354"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45354"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}