Over the last twenty days of December (and obviously 2013), I’ll be writing about my favorite twenty albums and songs of the year, one a day. Not best. Not most influential. Not most likely to land on a Complex slideshow. Just my favorite, ranked in order.
1. kanye west – yeezus
While Pitchfork’s reader-base might not be the most authoritative of sources, it’s telling that Kanye West’s Yeezus was voted “Most Overrated,” “Most Underrated,” and “Best” album of the year. While Kanye’s musical ability seems to be increasingly up for debate as his career rolls along, his ability to spark discussion certainly isn’t; Kanye’s name hasn’t really left the headlines all year. Whether it’s been his relationship with Kim Kardashian or his explosions at Jimmy Kimmel (#ALLDISRESPECTTOJIMMYKIMMEL) and Shade 45's Sway (“You ain’t got the answers, Sway!”), Kanye certainly hasn’t lost his knack for retaining the spotlight.
And while it’s not that Kanye has ever been a public figure who’s seemed overly concerned with his public image, but Yeezus is divisive even by his standards. He’s seized the opposite end of the spectrum from the maximalism that ran through the veins of his last few releases, instead employing the legendary bearded presence of Rick Rubin to help strip Yeezus down to its very core. It’s not the same type of minimalism that Pusha T embraced for My Name is My Name, though; Yeezus demonstrates it through restraint, when it submerges its synths underwater to let Kanye rage, or when it draws back everything but the beat’s spine for the majority of a song.
It’s almost a guilty pleasure to watch Kanye drop all pretenses of eloquence. It’s not an approach that’s too surprising given that Kanye never was the most talented of lyricists (he’s always relied on memorable rather than articulate lines) – to be honest, it’s the direction Kanye’s been heading in for years; it was only a matter of time before he decided that crude bluntness was a better approach than subtlety. And while Kanye’s perceived lack of lyricism has been a major gripe surrounding Yeezus (in all fairness, Kanye’s performance as a rapper on this album is amateurish often bordering on pathetic), what Kanye has discarded in his bars he’s more than regained through his emotion and investment.
It’s sharp and primal when it’s there, like when Kanye kicks up into fifth gear in the second half of “New Slaves” or when he breaks out the screams in “I Am a God.” Kanye built up his career as the open antithesis of hip-hop’s hard street thug image and he’s certainly not forgotten that (“Pink-ass polo with a fucking backpack/Everybody knows I brought real rap back,” “I Am a God”), so the shock isn’t Kanye’s openness. It’s the extents to which he’s willing to stretch that approach – but then again, Kanye’s not one known for moderation. He’s efficient, for once in his musical career.
And Yeezus is just ten songs long, and the fact that it only clocks in at forty minutes means that it’s more easily consumed as what it is: a flash of intensity Had Kanye tested the hour-mark as he often does (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy nudged up against seventy minutes) Yeezus might have appeased more fans, but its battering ram quality would be far less compelling. Yeezus’ length means that every verse hits harder and every musical move means more. It’s not just a coincidence buried in an hour of music that Kanye paired up “Strange Fruit” with TNGHT in “Blood on the Leaves,” nor is the unexpected soulfulness of “Bound 2” just a throwaway moment. The album is best absorbed as a powerful in-and-out blast of music, driven forward less by finesse than by brute force and emotion. Fantasy relied heavily on our investment in Kanye’s issues to drive the album forward for full effect, but Yeezus makes it brutally clear that, well, Kanye couldn’t give less of a shit whether we relate to his problems. It’s a musical manifesto, often unclear and misleading but always gripping.
Kanye exists in a musical vacuum of his own, where his primary comparison will always be his last album and his primary competitor is himself. The specters hanging over him aren’t that of Drake and Jay-Z (his utter disregard for public opinion seems to indicate as much), but of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and The College Dropout. He’ll always be compared against his other albums, for better or worse – and even if Yeezus might qualitatively be the worst of his solo efforts, it’s an album that’ll be discussed years from now. Even when the whole point seems to be that Kanye doesn’t care, well, he can’t help but make us care.
