When you’re a Millennial, it’s almost required by law that you have to have an opinion on Kanye West. For my age group especially, he was a prominent figure in pop culture coming up as this producer prodigy who made Jay-Z’s “The Blueprint” into a masterpiece and was about to strike out on his own. By the time I entered high school in 2004, “The College Dropout” was about to begin a lengthy stretch of success where it was difficult to answer whether he was a genius or a downright idiot, bragging about everything like a vapid narcissist.
Which may be his biggest appeal. On the one hand, he was capable of making these electric hooks that got you moving. If you look at his body of work, you can’t deny that there’s something to the way that he pieces together a melody, recontextualizing other genres into something that emphasizes his strengths. When he had a sincere subtext to his music, he was often capable of some transcendent bliss. Then it happened, where he evolved from an artist commenting on temptation and became someone who continually threw himself into godlike positions, even suggesting multiple times that he was a God. After all, he once appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone dressed as Jesus Christ in a crown of thorns. He was that cocky.
Though to be honest, it’s become increasingly difficult to understand if this is all satire and that he’s playing an act. If it was all real, he’s a bit of a bully who did everything with some grand delusion. Who cared if he kept reinventing music and fashion to his image, temporarily making Stunna shades cool again while performing from atop a stage that hung over fans. He knew how to court attention. With that said, it’s funny if you look at him and think that it’s all a cartoon, of someone who is making fun of wealth.
That is why it’s easier to just believe that somewhere around the mid-2010s, West lost sight of his own image and it’s been going haywire ever since. For me personally, I am able to appreciate his gifts as a musician, but they have been increasingly less obvious as the years have carried on. Everything after “The Life of Pablo” escapes any lasting impact on me (save for “Kids See Ghost”) and his recent turn of events are so awful that I’m refusing to acknowledge them here. West has become what everyone hated him for, and it’s getting harder to have a defense mechanism when talking about his music.
If I had to pick a true breaking point, it has to be “Yeezus.” Following the maximalist accomplishment of “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” West decided to make an album that sounded schizophrenic, ideas suffocating next to each other. It’s the type of album that would use Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as a sample to talk about how he’s one of the “New Slaves.” On the one hand, it all plays like a cry for help. It all has a desperation to it, like someone who doesn’t know what to do with their life anymore. Some have argued that it was his bachelor party album, getting all of his demons out before marriage.
Among this whole picture is something that is brilliant, especially for someone as antagonistic as West. He was off-putting, but you couldn’t deny that even when he was making a total trainwreck, it was a harmonious oddity. It made less sense than anything he made before, and yet it felt like it held more truths on his brain, as if traveling through every thought and observing it like a freak show museum. How could he possibly get so mad about a croissant on the song “I Am a God” (yes, I know)?
This is the turning point because everything after has been about resurrecting and changing career into what it is. This is his mental breakdown before slowing down and finding God. Again, I don’t know if it’s all a ploy, but I’ve given up following him. As he takes to Twitter complaining about record contracts, I’m just wondering when he’s going to release good music again. I don’t need him to espouse any wild opinion anymore. Just give me music that proves to me why you once were able to shape the music industry in your style or a near two decades. I want to have some belief that your next record will influence a new generation of performers like even “808 and Heartbreaks” did (though I still haven’t listened to it because it doesn’t seem interesting).
With all of that said, I am going to suggest that while “Yeezus” may be an uneven, chaotic gem of an album, I doubt any of you can argue that “Black Skinhead” is one of his most brilliant songs.
You can see it as career reinvention or suicide, but what he did was give us the most unexpected turn yet. Whereas you can see him using autotune as hopping on a trend set by T-Pain and Akon, whatever this song is is something that pop music would never be ready for. This was such a brutal thrashing of a reputation. It was the trust game where you were either going to continue to support this madman, or you were going to jump ship, realizing that there was no saving him. It was doubtful that he would go back to just making conventional hip-hop tracks. He was first and foremost an artist, and every artist has their wild period.
One of the things that I found really exciting about this song was that a quick search on YouTube made me realize how many rock covers there were of this song. Two noteworthy ones were Jack White and Courtney Barnett, the latter of which made it into a bluesy pub song that is so wonderfully full of sludge and grime. With exception to certain lyrics, you wouldn’t even think that it was a West song. It’s so designed to be a rock song that you’re impressed with their various adaptations.
If I had to describe it atmospherically, it would be the equivalent of running out into the forest while losing your mind. Maybe it’s how the drums sound tribal, the screams from the distance fermenting at the mouth. You can sense the darkness as these hushed breaths become part of the bridge, leading into guitars that swirl around, sending you into the epicenter of the piece. There is West and a backing vocalist, commenting on every action, trying to understand just what is going on.
In all honesty, I don’t have an answer for that either. I can mostly explain the energy that this song gives you, finding him collaborating once again with Daft Punk on a song that feels like a long diatribe about being judged by others. Given that the instruments sound like they’re ready to attack West, it makes sense that he’s pulling images from everywhere including King Kong and pharaohs. He sees himself as mighty, watching his empire about to collapse. This may be his version of Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” looking at the world he’s created and living in despair.
Given that he’d later admit to being bipolar, it makes sense that this song has such an anxious feel to every section. The music video is a jerky vision of an unrecognizable man running through a forest. Everything is surreal and this is closer to art than Top 40, even if it has the structure of a pop song. It has this tribal quality that fills you with energy. There is not a point where you’re wondering what’s going on. Why is everyone yelling? Why are the notes moving closer together? I can imagine the flames are finally reaching in, ready to eat West and the entire Earth whole.
Then, there is the bridge and chorus that feel like those calms before the storm. It’s here that the song gets most interesting for West lyrically. As the melody slows down, the instruments drop out, turning into a pulsating beat, it feels like he’s slowly catching his breath, reenergizing and returning to his true self. Then, as he feels ready to go, the drums start picking up again with its jerky clashing, making you have paranoid senses left and right. With a simple yell, the chorus picks up, a yell in the background, the feeling of running back into the mix. His confidence is emerging, making this truly a bipolar song, juggling ideas in such a way that you can’t believe what’s going on.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the one portion that has gotten major scrutiny ever since the song was first released. It isn’t the first time that West has gained controversy for misquoting pop culture, but it’s difficult to not recognize because of how obviously wrong it is:
I keep it 300, like the Romans
300 bitches, where's the Trojans?
Now, let’s stop and answer a question: why is this considered a misquote? As the fine people at Genius will have you believe, this is a direct reference to the movie 300 (2006), which focused on The Spartan Army (Greeks) who fought with only 300 soldiers. It would be one thing if this was an old film, but it was still a fairly recognized movie at the time of “Black Skinhead,” and, in one of the more annoying reasons this is an anomaly, it produced a popular catchphrase “This! Is! Sparta!” that idiots use when pretending to kick people into holes.
Those who want nothing but the best for West have argued that 300, in Roman Numerals, is meant to symbolize something deeper. CCC is short for Calm, Cool, Collected. It’s more of a justification than a reason, but hey. I choose to go with Genius who claimed that the best reason was something else entirely. It’s that West was trying to make his own world with his own interior logic. And that, my friends, is how we get the West of 2020.
At the end of the day, this may be a breaking point because “Yeezus” entirely reflects a man who was going through a career shift. It’s an album that starts with “On Sight” where halfway through the song he breaks structure in favor of some electronic nonsense. “Bound 2” ends with the least sexy form of romance imaginable, involving a kitchen sink, “spunk on the mink,” and the confounding mention of what Jeromey Romey Romey Rome thinks. What does any of this have to do with anything? It’s at best a collage of an artist exorcising himself of every leftover idea he still had in his head. For what it’s worth, it’s much more tolerable than “The Life of Pablo,” which notoriously featured him constantly updating the production even after its release.
I suppose the best way of looking at this is that “Yeezus” was West’s farewell. He still would be around, but from here he wasn’t playing to the masses. He was going to forge his own path, for those willing to travel alongside him and accept every crazy idea that he had. He still is doing the same nonsensical stunts, but they’re no longer as accessible as they used to be. It’s hard to tell if he’s even joking anymore. Maybe he really did create his own world, and it’s no longer as fun or bizarre as “Black Skinhead.” It’s much less interesting.
Though, in all honesty, I chose to cover “Black Skinhead” today not out of any anniversary, but because this is my 300th post on The Memory Tourist. I felt that there would be no better way to celebrate than by using the inspirational advice to “keep it 300, like The Romans.” It’s something that probably means nothing, but if it holds any truth, it’s something that I probably should apply going forward, preparing to go 500 and out of control. I can’t wait to see what happens next, and I hope that, unlike West, you’ll want to stick around and find out what that is.
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