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Annons
Annons
That all changed a couple weeks ago when he released "Real Friends," a plaintive ballad featuring Ty Dolla $ign, followed up by "No More Parties in LA," a six-minute track in which Kanye and Kendrick Lamar rapped uninterrupted over a beat from Madlib, who specializes in the sort of dusty, boom-bap psychedelia that lands just left of hip-hop's center. Both tracks carried with them an undercurrent of confessional urgency, something West's recent music, while great, lacked (many of Yeezus's lyrics were scraps from decade-old unreleased Kanye songs). His last two releases, however, feel "modern and timeless," which is how Nile Rodgers once described the sound Bowie was going for with Let's Dance.And so, West has essentially been barricaded in the studio for the past two or so weeks, evidently creating tracks out of eight hours worth of beats sent to him by Madlib. He's got Swizz Beatz in the studio too, as well as Travis $cott and The-Dream, all of whom share Kanye's knack for crafting pure pop. If, as Kanye has suggested, his new album uses those Madlib beats as their sonic backbone, the result might be something akin to Let's Dance. Not a retreat into the safety of commerciality per se, but instead an attempt at fusing styles in a way that welcomes the listener to the party instead of jarring them from the jump, which is Yeezus did.Perhaps as a way to let off steam while under intense, self-imposed pressure (it seems as if Kanye started work on his album in earnest only a month before its February 11 release date), West has been tweeting at a pace we haven't seen from him since he released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Annons
Shortly thereafter, West deleted the tweets, citing that "it's all about positive energy" and that he now understood that Khalifa was referring to weed and not Kim when he used the term "KK." The entire affair, which I guess caused enough of a shitstorm to warrant me writing this article about it, took up an afternoon of everyone's time, which feels like an appropriate amount of time to think about two famous people arguing on Twitter.Kanye West is one of those rare public figures who fully understands the impact of his every move. That's not to say he's an egomaniac, or some sort of self-reflexive cultural provocateur—though there are certainly elements of both of those cultural archetypes to his persona. I just mean that he knows that people pay attention to everything he says and does, scrutinizing and analyzing it to death, trying to place it on a continuum of his behavior throughout history.When interviewed shortly after the release of Let's Dance, Bowie told a reporter from Time, "It's hard to make people believe you don't have to be a tooth-gnashing, vampiric drug creature of the night to say something important." And it feels like West is facing that same quandary: How, after convincing the world he wasn't anything like them, can he still command the same gravitas without people treating him as if he's some creature from another planet?It's almost like after shooting himself into space with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and threatening to burn the world down with Yeezus, he's shotgunned around the sun and is trying to crash-land back on planet earth. He's locking himself in the studio, he's rapping about his cousin stealing his laptop, he's showing his ass social media because he doesn't know about weed slang. It's all part of his public comedown, a return to normalcy from a guy who made a point of rarely being normal in the first place.Follow Drew on Twitter.