Bully and Better: Is it worth listening to Kanye West's new album

Kanye West sang in Spanish about love, activated AI and sent his son to the boxing ring. The new studio album by the most controversial rapper of our time was released completely suddenly, without any announcement — and in addition accompanied the music with a half-hour black-and-white video art. If it hadn't been for the wild rush of Kanye-related news that preceded this event, his new work would have been seriously discussed as an art statement. However, the artist seems to have done everything possible to negate his own creative efforts. Izvestia tried to listen to the latest recording through the media noise.

Kanye is against everyone

The fact that Kanye West "went off the rails" has been talked about for years. Moreover, in different periods it was presented as a struggle against the "agenda", then as a manifestation of bipolar disorder, or even just as the vagaries of genius. But lately, the situation has completely gotten out of control, and even the artist's fans have begun to reconsider their attitude towards him.

Well, in fact, to produce and sell T-shirts with prohibited symbols on your official website, to define yourself as a follower of Nazi ideology, which is prohibited not only in our country, but also in other countries, to publicly call the children of Jay-Z and Beyonce (or anyone else!) "retarded" — it seems It's obvious to any sane person that this is beyond the pale. Add to this the "naked" outings with his wife Bianca Censori, the support of the accused of pedophilia and sex trafficking P Diddy, harassment of subordinates and other acts of varying degrees of legality and extravagance.

Seeing what was happening to the artist, few people expected a full-fledged playlist. It all looked like an inescapable descent into madness, the disintegration of personality. And how can you create art without a clear mind, especially considering that a modern commercial musical product requires the painstaking work of a large team of people?

Got along with AI

But now Kanye releases the Bully record — and it turns out that in its material it is in no way inferior to his previous works, and in some ways surpasses them. First of all, this is a declaration of love to soul. The material is replete with samples from various representatives of the style, starting from the 1970s. But Kanye mixes them into a completely recognizable, purely "Western" cocktail and complements it with his own vocals. Yes, he sings a lot more in Bully than he reads. According to this parameter, it would be logical to compare the album with the most melodic album of the musician — 808s & Heartbreak. Moreover, the autotune on which the 2008 record was built is also quite a lot here.

The rapper himself claims that almost half of the vocals in Bully were generated by artificial intelligence. It remains a mystery whether this is about Ye's own voice or the backing material. It can be assumed that the AI tried, for example, in the Spanish-language track, Kanye's pronunciation is too smooth. But if it turns out convincingly, then in the end, what's the difference?

By the way, West himself seems to have not decided on his attitude to AI: admitting the importance of the role of his "accomplice," Ye immediately adds: "I hate AI." And he threatens to continue working on the record. The decision to release an unfinished work is quite in his style. We've seen something similar with Vultures and Donda. The nuance is that Kanye still limited himself to public auditions, from where the recording then spread across the Network - as if against the will of the creator (in fact, he was hardly against it). Now, he deliberately, personally throws out the intermediate result on the social network X, deliberately ignoring streaming and all the usual marketing strategies. This, of course, is another manifestation of inadequacy. On the other hand, isn't it interesting to look at a creative product in the process of its formation, especially if there are no obvious signs of haste or carelessness?

An unfinished romance

Almost everything Kanye has done in recent years has been unfinished. He finished Donda literally "live", spending the night in a makeshift studio at the stadium where the presentation was held. Moreover, even the final release, which appeared on streaming, was followed by another version, now for vinyl. Vultures and Vultures 2 didn't reach listeners right away either. And there were so many different fragments of Bully (some of them were originally created for Vultures 2, others were associated with Vultures 3 or even considered independent compositions)...

Here I would like to recall how Mikhail Vrubel wrote "The Defeated Demon." Even when the work was at the Mir Iskusstvo exhibition, the artist came to the hall every day and continued to redo it, eventually radically changing the work compared to the original version. Of course, we are not comparing the achievements of the great Russian classic and the American provocateur, whose contribution has yet to be evaluated, but we are talking about the approach to creativity itself. This parallel is all the more eloquent, since Vrubel, as you know, ended his life with a clouded mind and created a number of graphic things while in a psychiatric hospital.

Is Bully also considered a harbinger of Ye's final surrender to his spiritual demons? Good question. The answer may lie in the video accompanying the songs: for half an hour, the 9-year-old son of an artist in a boxing ring crushes powerful wrestlers with a toy inflatable hammer. The metaphor seems to be obvious: Kanye himself is giving an absurd fight to countless haters-accusers. But can we not see here the struggle of the artist with his own devils attacking the unstable consciousness from all sides? It is possible to fight them off with songs, even good ones, but this victory is illusory.

Ultimately, Bully puts us in a dilemma: is it acceptable to separate the personality of an author from his work? In other words, don't the original, well-made songs bear the stamp of the wildness that the creator allows himself in life? Kanye, however, is not the first and probably not the last person to think about this. But one way or another, with his new work he shows that his song has not been sung yet.