Sunday, July 21, 2013

Blood on the Cash

This summer, Kanye West and Jay-Z came down from the mountain to each offer up quickly hyped releases that jumped on the schedule unexpectedly and blew up the internet. One of them was fucking amazing. The other one was not good.

Still, I can't help but lump the two together - and not just because they made a circle jerk/product together a few years ago called Watch the Throne that had a few great singles and some other stuff people called music at the time but I'm pretty sure was just Tylenol PM in 1s and 0s. (The last few Jay records have been so lazy and unobtrusively mediocre that it wasn't much of a surprise coming from him. But, with the exception of the similarly dull Graduation, Kanye usually puts out pretty good records. Not 10.0 records. But, you know. Good ones.) I think they personify the level of success hip hop has reached in today's culture, both in terms of achievements and limits. They are pretty famous (Jay a bit more so) but they aren't, like, Michael Jackson or Madonna famous (i.e. they don't pass the "do old white people know them?" test) and I don't know that either one of them is going to get there, basically until I'm an old white person. That's just where hip hop kind of stops at this point in time. They both achieved their level of success through immense talents, but really only partially, as both artists are perfectionists when it comes to crafting their personas and reputations. There are real people who think Jay Z is the best rapper ever and Kanye is the most important artist of the 2000s. Neither one of these things is true, but sometimes I'm in a room with someone and I get that vibe from them.

Yeezus and Magna Carta...Holy Grail are wildly different records. Kanye's record is cutting edge, aggressive, absurdly ambitious, but totally focused and tight without feeling overworked (because it really wasn't). Jay's is like sitting in your "cool" dentist's waiting room. I think I fell asleep three or four times while listening to it, but what I got out of it was that Jay Z is the least hungry emcee in the history of emcees and Timbaland can make music for 40-year-olds in his sleep. In the oral history of Yeezus, apparently published to celebrate the heralded record's one week anniversary, producers talk about hearing songs off the record for the first time and literally jumping out of their chair. It's safe to say this never happened with Magna Carta.

But again, Kanye and Jay don't seem that far apart. Like any artist at this point in their career, the bubble has taken over. The life experience that art demands gives way to the fake experience that fame imposes. What do you say when the only thing you can reflect on is how long it's taking this French-ass restaurant to make your croissants?

Jay's records post-Blueprint (his last truly notable full-length) have set him on the inevitable path to where he sits now, the fat and slow king who is too busy spending his money to give a shit (he does still occasionally show up for his friends). Jay's mentor Biggie made the quintessential rags-to-riches track two decades ago - here it's just riches-to-riches and something feels really, really empty. Look, I'm sure Jay loves his life - and the only moments of energy on the record come when Jay talks about his family - but it also seems like he's very uneasy about the position he finds himself in at this point - stuck as some sort of "cultural ambassador" for a life from which he's long been detached. He's not really sure what to do about it, partially because Jay's never been a conscious rapper, per se, but mainly because he's totally blinded by the bright lights that shine only for him. I wish someone had told him to wait on putting out a record until he figured some shit out, because I can't imagine anyone thinking this thing needs to exist.

Kanye is all id. He screams about himself and black people and history and politics but can't quite make any coherent thoughts out of any of it. His jokes are often clever, but more often too clever for their own good. He confirms that the misogyny he's been flirting with on the past few records is now moving in with him. At one point, he samples Nina Simone's cover of "Strange Fruit" for his shitty story about alimony or whatever dumb thing he cares about that has no business being talked about over a story about lynching.

And yet listening to Yeezus is a thrilling and invigorating experience in the way few records this decade have been. There are multiple epiphanies here - screeches and horns that punch the mix and swoop out just as fast as they swoop in, layers so consciously and carefully built up and dropped in that each listen rewards more than the last. Occasionally, as on "Send It Up" and opener "On Sight," Kanye will let the elementary pieces of a beat loop monotonously for a handful of bars, building to a sample or an especially impressive turn. It's a darkly sexual record even without the explicit lyrics, reminiscent of the best late 80s Chicago house and, as Kanye pointed out to the New York Times, the most primal hip hop club anthems of the post-dirty-South era. Even closer "Bound 2," clearly the track most recognizable as a Kanye song, feels like a conscious step forward and the perfect end to a unified whole.

The music is so good that I find myself making excuses for him. My favorite one right now is that he doesn't care how people receive his music and he's not really trying to say anything intentionally, he's just throwing it out there and hoping people feel it (hence my "id" comment above, sorry to put the cart before the horse). His clumsy attempts at political points then become one of those moments you have when someone says some dumb shit like "Trayvon Martin's murder wasn't about race" and you are so mad that you end up saying "But the slaves and then with police the when what the fuck how do you live in America?"

This is not a good enough excuse. Kanye is simply too powerful, both culturally speaking and as a man, to let his shit run downhill. Fucking a white woman is not getting back at their white husband, it's perpetuating the objectification of women that white men perfected. You aren't justified in taking aim at white people for calling you King Kong when you're making a joke about sweet and sour sauce as a condiment for Asian pussy. Your alimony payments aren't anything like lynching. These aren't even arguments worth having, but they're arguments Kanye forces me to make. It doesn't make Yeezus any less of an artistic statement, but it does completely eradicate his credibility as a cultural critic.

I've read a lot on Yeezus because it's a bullshit record that I really, really love and I don't know how to get around that. Most of the problems people seem to have with it boil down to the idea that Kanye keeps elevating his own experiences to Epic Black Problem level - hence the lynching as alimony metaphor. This is the "Kanye has taken the 'personal is political' saying in entirely the wrong way" theory, and it's a pretty good one. But I'm not sure I even want to give Kanye the credit for a concept this complex. The only really thoughtful song he's ever made was "All Falls Down" ten years ago, and since then every attempt at social commentary has felt totally oversimplified or weirdly self-absorbed, so I think he's really just fucking around and seeing what sticks. This makes me feel like Kanye's dad. I'm not angry, son. I'm just disappointed.

It's really hard to love an album as a musical work so strongly when the lyrics are so mediocre, but if Kanye really was speaking "swag-hili" and I had no idea what he was saying (note: this is still possibly the case) I'd probably think he did a pretty good job. This comes back to a theory I've always had about Kanye, which is that he's not really a rapper to begin with. He's always seemed to have more interest in how his flow and delivery sound than with what he's actually saying. He's usually a funny guy (though surprisingly silly for someone with such an asshole persona) and at times he can even be rather insightful about himself. But if you are asking for complex wordplay to go with these things, look elsewhere (might I suggest Kendrick Lamar?). This is kind of why 808s and Heartbreak, which might have turned out to be the most embarrassing record of his career, is kind of sort of everyone's not-so-secret favorite record he's ever made - until this summer, that is.

The irony of loving Kanye's music and hating his rhymes is that he didn't even really make his music on Yeezus. Most of the best beatwork on the new album is done by other people - though clearly with Kanye's strong guidance. You don't make a record this unified without someone at the head of the table. Let's say Kanye is an incredible director who keeps insisting on starring in his own movies, even though he's not that much of an actor. Jay is, of course, nearly the opposite of this - a spectacular actor who has decided he's going to run the studio, which never really worked out. Jay has always been better at picking beats than, say, Nas (obvious point, I know). But his ear for hooks and BANGERS not interesting music but BANGERS has so obviously dissipated that I'm not even sure he could describe the music on his new record. This is what makes every Kanye record an event even when they aren't really that good and why Jay is slowly sliding into old-man irrelevance.

It might seem unfair to lump the vanilla Jay record in with the dangerously offensive Kanye one. But calling your record Magna Carta... Holy Grail isn't that far off from Yeezus. Jay's cover, too, attempts to project an image of high art and minimalism that is not far away from Kanye's packaging. This isn't the first time Jay has overstated his position. He called his signature record The Blueprint and, more absurdly, his comeback record Kingdom Come. Technically speaking, their talents are much more complementary than they are parallel. But their career ambition is nearly identical, and when quality is ignored the completed records project a similar amount of aimlessness and misguided swagger. Here are two cultural giants lost in the game. Kanye's grasping for straws, rejecting black culture because it doesn't sit right with him just as surely as he's embracing it sonically because he knows its his savior, suddenly left a man without a country. Jay's unsure of where hip hop goes when you're at the top and all you see are Basquiats and diapers, trying on his own to pull hip hop into grown-man land, not yet realizing the cultural touchstones are being lost along the journey. "Strange Fruit" refers to "black bodies swinging in the summer breeze" but all Kanye and Jay see are the fruits of their labor. In the bubble, there doesn't seem to be a difference.