The first time I listened to Yeezus, my iPhone overheated. When the album leaked — a few days before it officially dropped 10 years ago this Sunday — I was on vacation with my wife’s family in Orlando, a scenario that did not lend itself to immersing myself in a transgressive and experimental new Kanye West album. We had theme parks to visit, restaurants to patronize, and neither my in-laws nor my four-year-old nephew seemed like the target audience for “I’m In It.” Despite these obstacles, I managed to obtain the files, transfer them to my phone, and snag an hour beside the pool to take in the most anticipated album of 2013. Before I made it to the end, my phone turned itself off due to extreme temperatures. It was June in Florida, but I like to believe the music caused the meltdown.
The man knew how to put on a show. From the moment Hot 97’s Peter Rosenberg announced that Yeezy season was approaching until the tour supporting the album wrapped up a year and a half later, Yeezus was an all-consuming force that dominated music discourse. The project marked the end of Kanye West the surefire hit-maker and the beginning of an era when his album rollouts became an art form unto themselves. In this case that meant projecting the “New Slaves” video on the side of buildings around the world, debuting “Black Skinhead” in an explosive Saturday Night Live performance, turning his concerts into eerie pageants populated by druid-like characters, and puncturing the aura at those shows with impromptu lectures about everything from global injustice to personal slights (and the perceived connective tissue between them).
This was the start of a phase when Kanye became less present on the radio yet commanded more attention than ever. As his music increasingly took a backseat to his rise through the fashion industry and the reality TV dynasty he married into, that fame supernova continued to build until it swallowed him whole. I don’t claim to know what happened with his inner life or how much mental illness factored in, but at some point Kanye — always a button-pusher, sometimes righteously so — moved beyond provocation into vile hatred. His hard pivot toward antisemitism last year now looms over the catalog he spent decades creating, even after the bizarre non-apology in which he announced that watching Jonah Hill in 21 Jump Street made him “like Jewish people again.”
One effect of that dark turn is that it makes the inflammatory material on Yeezus feel quaint, like Marilyn Manson, the Donda 2 contributor and sexual assault lawsuit collector, going door-to-door trying to shock people. Or maybe it’s just that after countless listens, the audacity has worn off and the album’s pointed attempts to offend are fully internalized as history. Both sonically and lyrically, Yeezus was built to aggravate, to confound, to prove how much its author did not give a fuck. But as with any classic album, some of us spent so much time with this music that what once played as rupture started to feel as familiar as the Mona Lisa.
And yes, obviously, Yeezus is a classic. The music alone would qualify it as such. In New York and Paris and England and Jamaica, Kanye assembled an army of visionaries including Daft Punk, Arca, Hudson Mohawke, Evian Christ, Mike Dean, Gesaffelstein, and so many more. They funneled their inspiration into dark, deconstructed electronic beats, often strewn with audio shrapnel, sometimes scrambled beyond legibility, stripped down to the studs by Rick Rubin in marathon last-minute sessions that foretold Kanye’s future of continuing to tinker with albums even after releasing them.
If the production-via-reduction was a reaction against Kanye’s own excess — the overstuffed grandeur of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Watch The Throne and “Mercy” and “Clique” and, really, everything he’d ever released — the finished product remained loud, violent, and gargantuan. It had to be, in order to convey the anger and anxiety that were boiling over from within. The spartan “New Slaves” and the hollowed-out “Bound 2” exist alongside the jock-jam bombast of “Black Skinhead” and the screaming, hyper-processed guitar overload of “Hold My Liquor,” every one of them confrontational in their own way. Even his attempt at minimalism was a lot.
If these sounds were designed to alienate less adventurous listeners, they were also meant to be exhilarating. Spine-tingling flourishes abound: the aggro synth blips in “On Sight” collapsing in on themselves, the blaring digital trap-rave horns dropped like bombs all over “Blood On The Leaves,” the jump-cut into soulful euphoria at the end of “New Slaves.” The vocal features are expertly chosen, too: a ghostly Justin Vernon segueing into a howling Chief Keef, a mournful Kid Cudi intertwining with a cello before annihilation at the hands of a cyborg Popcaan, Charlie Wilson exulting across a galactic vacuum, Frank Ocean tucked away into splendor. Few emcees have ever sounded as in-command as King Louie on “Send It Up.”
And yet Yeezus is overwhelmingly, excruciatingly about Kanye West — his glory, his neuroses, his axes to grind. He’d bounced back triumphantly from the Taylor Swift incident but still felt his big ideas weren’t being taken seriously. The more obstacles he encountered en route to the top of the fashion industry, the more acutely he felt his old convictions about disregard for Black people within the halls of power. “I’m assuming I have the most Grammys of anyone my age,” he told the New York Times, “but I haven’t won one against a white person.” On top of his frustrations about racism, he was on the brink of becoming a father and freaking the fuck out.
All that internal turmoil spilled over into a torrent of sexual belligerence, a different kind of dark fantasy where even diatribes about consumerism-as-slavery are punctuated by lewd expressions of dominance. Within the album’s first minute Kanye has promised to “get this bitch shakin’ like Parkinson’s” and announced, “Black Timbs all on your couch again/ Black dick all in your spouse again.” By track two our narrator is instructing his listeners to “stop all that coon shit”; by track three he has declared himself a divine being second only to Jesus Christ. It’s an approach even more flagrant than the music, a double dog dare to be outraged, the revisionist revenge of Django Unchained stained by semen instead of blood.
There are times on Yeezus when it’s not clear if Kanye even realizes he’s being distasteful, like when he seems to equate child support payments with lynching by sampling Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” in the “Gold Digger” gritty reboot “Blood On The Leaves.” And there are times when he is overwhelmingly self-aware, when you can’t miss the vicious sense of humor that animates so much of his work. This is the album where a song called “I Am A God” climaxes with a demand to “hurry up with my damn croissants.” When the storm clouds part and the sun shines through on closing track “Bound 2,” Kanye raps tenderly to his ultra-famous girlfriend, then floats the idea of a threesome for Christmas. The mess was the point.
Things have gotten a lot messier since then. It’s easy to draw connections between the volatility on display throughout Yeezus and the edgelord downward spiral that led Ye to such despicable depths. It’s easy to see the last few years of his life as an extreme application of the principle outlined here: “Soon as they like you, make ’em unlike you.” Maybe all that has rendered Yeezus unlistenable for you — fair. Maybe the uncomfortable laughter the album once incited has curdled into something more bitter. Admittedly, “popping wheelies on the zeitgeist” takes on alarming new context when the guy popping the wheelies recently professed his love for Hitler. Anyone who wants to engage with Kanye West’s music must grapple with that reality now. The best I can say is that I’m grateful that wasn’t the case 10 years ago, when this album had the same impact on me that it had on my phone.
