2013 Year in Review: Yeezus is Not the Album of the Year

When I first heard Kanye West’s latest album I was marginally underwhelmed.  It wasn’t as catchy, the rhymes weren’t as clever, and he didn’t produce it himself.  Even Kanye himself stated (many times) that music isn’t the main focal point in his career anymore.  But that was before I was told how great it was by every music critic on the planet. 

Everyone seemed to love Yeezus.  Even Noel Gallagher had to talk about how avant-garde it was (he called it “punk rock”).  Yeezus wasn’t just expertly produced and smartly written.  It was daring.

I remained unmoved.  Regardless of what I was reading, what I was hearing from Yeezus simply didn’t draw me in like other albums this year, or even past Kanye tracks.  The laughably bad (possibly trolling) video for Bound 2 didn’t help anything.  To make matter immeasurably worse for Kanye, the experts – aka people I’m friends with who listen to more rap than me – labeled Yeezus as a little tired and lackluster.  Kanye didn’t care as much about this album and it showed.

Still, I couldn’t choose an album of the year in good faith and not give Yeezus a few dedicated listens, so I bit the bullet and downloaded what Spin, Stereogum, EW, The A.V. Club, and Time all were calling the Album of the Year. 

Yeezus is certainly a good album.  The first four songs are about as strong as any opening four from an album this year.  “Black Skinhead” is the strongest all around track, but I have a personal affinity for “I Am a God”.  Kanye gauges his own ego (which has grown to comic proportions) perfectly and lays out his persona with some of the best rhymes on the album.  “New Slaves” has an incredible beat and sets the stage for an interesting commentary but Kanye fails to deliver with the lyrics, instead descending into safer, duller, “diss track” territory.  His intensity saves the track but you wish he could’ve thought of something a little more profound and little less petulant to say, “There’s leaders and there’s followers, but I’d rather be a dick than a swallower”… I hope that goes on your tombstone, Yeezy.

From there the album starts to drop off.  Most of it feels too subdued or uninspired only sparking quality moments, like flashes of good songs hidden within longer uneven ones.  “Bound 2” has a nice throwback feel to it for Kanye, but I fear it may be ruined for me after that ridiculous video.   Then there’s “Blood On the Leaves”.  Kanye samples heavily from the Nina Simone version of the classic song which just might be the most important song dealing with racism in America ever recorded and turns it into a break up song.  Now, I’m not an anthropologist, but I feel pretty strongly that there is many a paper that could be written about how the mere existence of this song demonstrates the differences in mentality of race and civil rights between generations in America (not to mention Kanye’s own messiah complex).

But even on the songs that don’t work you can still find the two things about Yeezus that work the whole way through: Kanye’s visceral intensity and the incredible production.  Kanye approaches the lyrics with a raw energy that most other artists would think unsustainable for an entire album.  It not only works for Yeezus, but it saves the album from sinking into monotony.  Praise of the production is a little more of a complicated affair. 

In the past, Kanye had been the primary producer on his albums.  It was one of the biggest reasons people routinely placed him among the best recording artists today.  In rap, the production credit is nearly as important as the name on the album cover.  So much of each track is shaped and built in studio.  A producer can turn great rhymes into garbage and mediocre rhymes into a great track.

Kanye wasn’t completely absent from the production process, but compared to his past albums it seems like he might as well have been.  Twenty Five.  That is how many producers Yeezus had working on it.  That’s not even accounting for producers billed as a group (Daft Punk, for example, was billed as one producer).  That’s more than two different producers for every track on the album!

Kanye and other producers described the process as something of a workshop setting.  A group of them would meet and go over different ideas they had for a track, many of them would be assigned a certain aspect of the track to focus on by Kanye.  Ironically, much of there work was reportedly undone late in production by Rick Rubin, who stripped down and reworked many of the tracks.

 This image perfectly captures either what Kanye actually sees when he looks in the mirror, or what he wants you to think he sees. But thats a whole 'nother blog post.

Yeezus is an interesting album.  To me it is study in what comes from jamming a room with expert musicians, songwriters, and technicians and forcing them all to make an album together.  The finished product is something that hadn’t really crossed over into mainstream music before.  It took influences from techno, rock, dupstep and hip-hop and assembled them in such a way that was radio friendly while still having an identity.  It wasn't wholly original but it was the first time it had been constructed as pop (which is not and should not be thought of as a dirty word in music).

It’s very impressive what Yeezus was, but I don’t know how daring an album can be when it has more producers than tracks.  It certainly isn’t “punk rock”.

Kanye and his band of producers made a solid album (and it is Kanye’s album) but it’s not his best and it’s not the best of the year.