One of the great tragedies in 21st-century popular music is how the words “new Kanye West album” went from meaning “thrilling expression of pathfinding nowness” to “sad guy saying more gross stuff.” What an undoing. We should be mourning a lost greatness, but grief feels impossible when the fallen maestro won’t stop being hateful and annoying.
Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s ‘Vultures 1’ is slim pickings
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“Vultures 1” is Ye’s new album, released on Saturday under his full name, a co-billing with the sturdy R&B singer Ty Dolla $ign, and probably his most cogent effort in years, which actually means very little considering his past three outings — “Ye,” “Jesus Is King” and “Donda” — seemed to fall apart as you listened to them. Ye’s impulsiveness used to be his great strength, injecting so many era-defining rap hits with megadoses of spontaneity and surprise. But somewhere after the artful snarling of 2013’s “Yeezus,” his brashness devolved into carelessness, and the music got slushy and myopic.
Maybe you already know all this, but if it sounds like I’m scraping the sides of the peanut butter jar right now, you should hear this album. No new sounds, just recycled timbres from across his back catalogue. No new perspectives, just more grievance and joylessness. Sure, Ye is rapping in fuller, more locomotive sentences again, but everything that manages to jump out of the mix does so on whiffed shock value. There’s one particularly dispiriting punchline that puns on the idea of Manhattan traffic jams and morning sex that, while technically clever, will ultimately make your brain feel like it’s just been given a wedgie. Exhaustingly, it happens during a song called “Problematic.”
Speaking of being problematic, did Ye spend the past two years of his life making all of those ugly remarks about Jewish people just so he could rile everyone up and capitalize on the blowback? Sure sounds like it. On the album’s dour title track, he defiantly asks, “How I’m antisemitic?” Then he answers his own question with an unprintable line about sex with a Jewish woman — which, at this point, has become one of his running lyrical tropes. Blech. On the album closer, “King,” he raps about being called “‘crazy, bipolar, antisemite,’” then puffs out his chest: “I’m still the king.”
King of who? Middle-school edgelords? Maybe Ye isn’t even that cynical. The most memorable hook on this album doubles as a flash of honesty and a handy self-exoneration for everyone involved: “I’m just here to get paid.”
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