Yell At The Clouds : ye v. His Public Image

I think I'm too old for this.

I think I'm too old for most things, really, like existing or being alive, but right now, I feel too old to understand and empathize with Kanye West's public persona.

Let's go back to two years ago, when Kanye West brought back G.O.O.D. Fridays and became basically a mainstay at Twitter with his incoherent tweets like "Ima fix wolves" and his pissy fight with Taylor Swift that no one except the two parties cared about. Was the music we got from that worth it? There's a lot of argument that, for the most part, The Life of Pablo (TLOP) is an incoherent mess that still somehow shows the genius of Kanye West by acting like a snapshot of his thoughts and ambitions at the time; others, a very vocal minority, says that these people are just riding Kanye's dick too hard and TLOP is just a mess.

Personally, I straddle the fence on this: yes, the album is pretty good at points, but the publicity for it is exhausting, and it makes it harder to be a Kanye West fan when his worst impulses are just 280 characters away from being shared. Basically, I was selfish: I wanted my good Kanye music, but none of the baggage that came with it.

It seems like I got the opposite wish now, though, because Kanye is all public image and barely any music.

Bringing this all up nearly two years later, and you see that rather than the globe-conquering artist that has dominated Kanye's imagery for the most part of two decades, we have one dulled out by addiction and fame, with no idea where to progress to, musically or otherwise. He's repeating his publicity beats from Life of Pablo, give or take a Taylor Swift controversy, but much worse. And having seen where a lot of this tends to lead, it makes me wonder if any new music from Kanye,in and of itself, is worth listening

ye (personal grade: 5/10) is his eighth studio album, and after seven genre-defining albums that came before it, this one can feel inessential at times. It's like if 808s were stripped down to the very core of Kanye and the drums, and in the beginning, it feels almost intimate in the way that it ably apes a spoken word performance that elevates expectations from this album to much higher than necessary.

It does try to get personal, but as Kanye warns in the spoken word segment, he gets personal in an unrelatable way, like making jokes about bipolarism or the #MeToo movement that genuinely pissed me off the first time I heard it.

This is pure, uncut Kanye, with as little bells and whistles as possible, and Kanye's mind is as dark as it is petty.

There's an entire song here called "Violent Crimes" where he talks about realizing his daughter might get chased by guys soon (he uses less careful and critical words like "curves under her dress" to describe his daughter in the future). Anyone who dislikes Kanye's crude jokes about women or his blatant sexism is warned: very little of this album is anything but crude jokes about and to women.

Production-wise, the album sounds unfinished, sometimes unpolished, as if Kanye's mind is slipping away. The music sometimes barely exists that I'm amazed it could be called music, but around "Wouldn't Leave," it starts springing back to life to the point where the last three tracks of this seven-track album just comes alive with seeming purpose, even if sometimes the timing seems off.

Now, the point here isn't that Kanye made an iffy album, because even the greatest do that, and should be given the chance to fail every now and then, if ever. But Kanye's toxic public persona that spouts off every worthless thing he heard on the Internet that inflates or rubs his ego right is what's killing Kanye West's albums for me, why I'm thinking I'm too old for this.

I was able to take like four, five mediocre albums from JAY Z to get to 4:44, but it's fucking impossible to do that with Kanye West, I've realized. His publicity cycle makes sure that only he is the one being talked about (very reminiscent of the Donald Trump's strategy with America), and with his illogical and sometimes unbelievable points of views and beliefs, it's impossible for me to enjoy a Kanye West album the way I would around two years ago, when this shit was as prevalent but somewhat less toxic.

ye is a half-hearted effort, but it would probably be less half-hearted if I could connect with Kanye in any way anymore. "Who the kids gon' listen to?" indeed.