The question of the day is “Why can’t we have nice things?”
A friend of mine blames Madonna. She’s almost right.
Madonna is less a musician - an artist who works by ordering sound, by shaping vibrations in the air - than a performance artist who inhabits a character who sometimes sings, dances, makes recordings and goes on tour when she isn’t making movies or engaging consumers of gossip. The songs that she performs are a small and maybe insignificant part of her larger project, which is the manipulation of global media and the warping of the space-time continuum through the application of her will.
Madonna is no mutant freak like Elvis Presley; she very well understands the implications of her celebrity and the leverage it affords her. Elvis could have believed, even at the end, that all he really wanted to do was make some hot noise, but Madonna has bigger things on her mind. And there are plenty of uglier people with vast skill sets to whom she can outsource the production of the music she needs to sustain her assault on the zeitgeist. (While the artist would no doubt protest any suggestion that she is not completely emotionally invested in the music, those with ears might judge for themselves.)
I’m not hating. I’ve been known to defend Madonna. But her music is sort of irrelevant to her main mission. It doesn’t need to be good to sustain her career, it just needs to be popular. It just needs a certain tension and a certain sweetness coupled with vague allusions to sex and money and love and hope. It needs to suffice as an excuse.
Meanwhile, as T Bone Burnett has pointed out, the corporations learned how to sell music to people who didn’t really care for music (they’d been doing that almost since the beginning of the short history of sound recording, but they got really good at it in the ’80s and ’90s). For the past 30 years or so, we’ve had to deal with a pop music that is largely composed of cynical grabs for ears, content-free material that alternately bounces or purrs and provides a soundtrack for consumers … which you either greet with an amiable shrug or constantly complain about.
Which brings us to Kanye West and his latest provocation, Yeezus (Def Jam).
[Amiable shrug.]
Can I let it go at that?
Guess not, although I suppose the pay would be the same were I to refrain from drinking from this particular cup. The critical consensus is: The old prostitutes at Rolling Stone have deemed Yeezus a four-and-a-half-star album, and the slightly younger taste makers at Pitchfork have given it a 9.5 on their 10-point scale. I can understand this because on one level - perhaps the most important level - Yeezus is a blast, a sonic collage of beats and buzzes and voices that sound nearly human. This is not the sort of easily digestible pop that can be safely condescended to. There’s a level of complexity that signals a deep and profound understanding of the way that sound can force emotion. There’s a cool virtuosity partnered with rapturous edge-walking, moments when you feel like it’s all just about to come undone only to be saved by a swooping, gathering chorus. Yeezus is complicated, textured music, but it’s no Anthony Braxton-style brain ache. You can like it, I can like it and I imagine someone like Herbie Hancock or Joshua Bell might find it deeply interesting as well.
It zips by in 40 minutes, and you might immediately want to climb right back to the top of the slide. Unless you actually listen to the patter of the comedian at the mic.
LYRICS?
I know I’m not supposed to care about the lyrics. And if I do care a little about the lyrics, I have to allow that West is no less a character than Madonna and that we should not necessarily charge him with anything like actual responsibility for the things he says. Pop music has a long tradition of sacrificing coherency on the altar of rhythm and rhyme (and I speak with the pompatus of love) and it’s not necessary for a song to mean anything more than the particular associations it evokes in the individual listener. But still, Yeezus has a moral problem: It’s deeply misogynist and horrifyingly self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing. It is an a historic document that signals its author’s profound indifference to the suffering of others.
Yes, you can take it as a joke, you can grant West license to swagger like a cartoon - all the while condemning those who would dismiss him as an unserious person - or you can simply let lines like “get this b * * * * shaking like Parkinson’s” slide because, you know, you do have a sense of humor.
But Ye has often intimated that he considers himself more than an entertainer (he famously told The New York Times he was an “activist-type artist” in the mode of Gil Scott-Heron), and so it only seems fair that we listen to him as the privileged narcissist to compare his plight to murdered innocents while pirating the earned poignancy of Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit,” which he samples on “Blood on the Leaves.”
Elsewhere in that track, West considers the problem of his wife and mistress showing up for the same basketball game. What to do? “Now you sittin’ courtside, wifey on the other side/Gotta keep ’em separated, I call that apartheid.” Sounds more like Offspring than Nelson Mandela to me, but there you go. West insists on collapsing the historical racial struggles with personal annoyances. He thinks because he’s dating a white woman he’s perceived as King Kong? Yeezy, please.
On the anti-materialistic “New Slaves,” West equates the pressures of having to deal with sales pitches for Maybachs and other luxury goods. Really? On “I’m in It,” he conflates sexual violence with civil rights in a particularly graphic image, albeit in such a desultory manner that he undercuts any irony he may have intended. Elsewhere, the lyrics settle for clever braggadocio and lazy allusions. West probably knows - or could easily Google - that the Battle of Thermopylae was fought by the Greeks (mostly Spartans) rather than the Romans, but let it go, the rubes will never notice.
Now I know how ridiculous it is to actually focus on the lyrics a rapper - even a rapper who insists we take him seriously as he engages social problems - spits on a track. But I’m the sort of dinosaur who persists in believing that words have meanings and bullies deserve to be called out. For all its sonic brilliance, Yeezus is a disturbing and at times thuggish document. While it has some great moments - I’m particularly fond of the (not at all blasphemous) “I Am a God,” in which West allows that while he’s only a “close high” to Jesus, he’s the “only rapper compared to Michael” - and most (though not all) of those moments are intentionally funny, there’s far more button pushing than boundary stretching on this record. I wish West would genuinely engage the world instead of worrying about who gets what on his mink. (On the other hand, “Hurry up with my damn croissants!” is destined to become the summer’s defining catchphrase.)
Elsewhere, everybody is rightfully extolling the production values, and the way everyone from electro-zombies Daft Punk and their fellow Frenchmen to the production team Brodinski and Gesaffelstein to Justin “Bon Iver” Vernon and Frank Ocean to Chicago homie Chief Keef and toasters Capleton and Beenie Man are seamlessly incorporated into the mix. There’s a sensibility behind the fuzzy beeps and disconcerting samples, within the creepy auto-tuned phrases, but West’s facile flow betrays a startling superficiality. Maybe this guy is the best we’ve got - but we deserve better.
Check that. We don’t deserve it - we slaughter truth tellers around these parts. But we can wish for more.
Yeezus is minor Kanye West, it’s got a good beat and (sometimes) you can dance to it. I give it a 78, Mr. Clark.
[Amiable shrug.] E-mail:
Style, Pages 45 on 06/30/2013