Look, I don’t claim to be a music journalist and I wouldn’t be bold enough to say that every musical opinion I have is correct.
In fact, if I’m honest about it, there are some pretty awful ones that I’ll die on a hill for. Will they be named here? Absolutely not. Because that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.
We’re here to talk about Yeezus — Kanye West’s sixth studio album. Today is the album’s seventh anniversary and, somehow, seven years later, it is still not good. The Internet isn’t going to want to hear that, and that’s fine. But it’s not.
Good music is all about connectivity. It’s about making people feel something. It’s about a shared experience. It’s hard to find any of that in Yeezus.
Instead, what we got was an over the top manifestation of West’s infamous God complex that has continued to evolve over the years. It felt like a continuation of the grandiose concepts used in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. That album was already pretty close to perfect.
Tweak that perfection a bit, and the result you get is West screaming about his greatness at his audience over some twisted, eerie production that would otherwise be perfect if not for the lack of creativity in the content. In other words, Yeezus.
Yes, we did get some good things from this album. Bound 2 is one of the most incredible pieces of production from West. We also got an amazing SNL performance out of it.
But this album felt more like shock tactics than actual music. He was at a stage where he’d become a household name and a TMZ favorite after marrying Kim Kardashian. He wanted people to hate him again.
Everything from the title of Yeezus itself to the only listed feature (God) on I Am a God just feels like a desperate attempt to grab some attention through rebellion. It wasn’t needed.
That feels especially odd considering where he was in his career at that point. West had already broken barriers with production, rapping and excellency in MBDTF and he was coming off of one of the best collaboration albums ever with Jay-Z. He didn’t need to do any of this.
People laud the album as some sort of exploration from West — sort of in the same vein as Lil Wayne putting together a rock album (Rebirth). And maybe that’s fair. Maybe being an all-time great gets boring. Trying new things does keep the mind fresh.
But all experiments don’t go well. Sometimes they fail. In the pantheon of Kanye West albums, this one should be considered that. A failed experiment. Sure, it broke boundaries, but it didn’t move music forward. There was nothing new to really take away from it. No one thought to take this and try and move it forward — it’s still stuck in a time of its own.
Maybe that was the point for West. But if it was, it feels like a wasted moment when you consider his height at the time. No matter how you feel about this album, you know he could’ve done better.
And that’s the most disappointing part.
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