![]() ![]() There are few climaxes on the record, with the duo seeming to prefer a kind of sly, revolving, libidinal motion, a sensibility on full display in the static but unevenly anchoring “Fire,” and the gentle, crooning “Reborn”: “I’m so, I’m so reborn / I’m moving forward / Keep moving forward / Keep moving forward.” “Cudi Montage” is built around a snippet of jangling, unsettling guitar work from Kurt Cobain’s Montage of Heck. The album draws more from Cudi’s aesthetic sensibility, melding arena-rock guitars and slurring, melacholic vocal work with understated percussion and a subtle but ubiquitous layer of overdrive and reverb. (It’s worth noting that the lead-up to each of West’s last three records all featured increasingly-extreme antics, with perhaps the most extreme being 2016’s infamous “BILL COSBY INNOCENT!!!” tweet preceding the release of The Life of Pablo.) Of the two releases under his name, Kids See Ghosts is undoubtedly West’s superior album. West’s hijinks seem to have been leading up to G.O.O.D.’s June release schedule, including Pusha T’s Daytona, his own ye, and a collaboration with Kid Cudi entitled Kids See Ghosts, all three projects executive produced by him with help from a typically messy, lengthy slate of collaborators, including Mike Dean, Francis and the Lights, Nicki Minaj, Charlie Wilson, and Andre 3000, among others. I put my headphones back on and pack up my things and we leave. When I pull my headphones off and turn to look at him, I realize that one of the steers who live in the preserve has wandered up and is peaceably grazing maybe two or three feet away. We reach a vista point and stop for the afternoon putting on my headphones, I start Pablo at “Waves,” but when I get to “ 30 Hours,” I set it to repeat, and lie there, unmoving, for some lengthy but undefined period of time, until Drew pokes me sharply in the arm. I’m hiking with Drew in the hills outside of Berkeley. Why bother explaining the series of tweets that led to him posting an image of himself in a (signed!) Make America Great Again hat, or running through the roster of alt-right cranks West has been spotted palling around with? What purpose would it serve to puzzle through the awful and deeply weird take on slavery he delivered to (of course) the TMZ newsroom? I mean, seriously: why? What would that get me? Where I once would have really enjoyed running down all of the various data points, now I get embarrassed whenever West’s name crops up in conversation or on my Twitter feed. Yet here, today, writing this, the prospect of running through the entire timeline of the very normal and r egular last several months of West’s public shenanigans makes me feel the same visceral, preemptive exhaustion that rushes into my body when I am asked to describe the plot of a David Fincher movie. (And also, to be fair, because as a graduate student, I am free to spend much of my time as I please doing this, so long as I can reasonably describe it as “research.”) ![]() I did all of this because, simply put, there was no one as fun to talk about as Kanye West - no one as talented at scandalizing America’s bourgeois manners, no one whose music is both so immediately magnetic and propulsively conceptual, no one who seems as committed to pushing the envelope of both the normal and the acceptable. Why I was cautiously optimistic when he returned to Twitter to tap out a “ book” and announce a slate of albums for his G.O.O.D. Why I rejoiced at the news of musical gear being delivered to the mental health facility in which he was reportedly staying. Why I Googled photos of him standing next to the former host of the Apprentice in the lobby of a New York skyscraper and argued about his hair color change. Why I read the transcripts of his on-stage meltdown in Sacramento a year and a half ago. I know, in a kind of abstract sense, why I, an adult with a career and hobbies and responsibilities which all require tending, have followed Kanye-related news with an obsessive intensity bordering on full-bore psychosis for the last six months. It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that Kanye West is at it again. ![]() West’s sampled scream seems to skip in my headphones. The second half of “I’ m In It” is blaring in my headphones the indecipherable combination of King Louie’s patois and Justin Vernon’s mumble-setto makes my hair stand on end. I’m in Bushwick, standing on the JMZ platform at Myrtle and Broadway, a block and a half from the dumpy, poorly-ventilated loft I share with four friends. Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of Women. ![]()
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