Notes on 'Vultures Pt. 1' Part 1, by Adam Lehrer

Adam dives in on Kanye's refusal to bow gracefully with the best album he's made since 2013, first of two parts

1. Addictiveness
   
   I will always be a Kanye West defender. I believe that he’s earned the right to be crazy as a loon because his role as one of our lifetime’s most enduringly fascinating artists is undisputed.
   
   That said, I’ll be honest about the fact that for the last decade, I’ve found myself disappointed with Kanye’s various musical output. Not since what I consider to be one of his towering achievements in 2013’s Yeezus have I really been overly impressed with any single Kanye musical project. That’s not to say he hasn’t had his moments. His collaborative EP with Kid Cudi from 2018, Kids See Ghosts, is astonishing and often sublime. 2016’s The Life of Pablo has some unforgettable songs that rank among the artist’s greatest work.
   
   But I was at the listening event for The Life of Pablo. It was the Yeezy Season 3 fashion show at Madison Square Garden. Star studded as fuck, I was sitting next to the actress Shailene Woodley and the Kardashian clan was only several rows ahead of me. I could see all of them. It felt like anyone with an ounce of clout was in the building, and it couldn’t have been more exciting to be there. When the record actually played, however, I found myself somewhat underwhelmed. It’s not that the album didn’t have great songs – “Famous”, “Feedback”, and “30 Hours” all bang — it’s just that the album felt somewhat cluttered and unfinished. I hate to quote Robert Christgau because I mostly hate his guts but his assessment of that record as “too flagrantly unfocused” was true. What separated Kanye from both his peers in the rap industry and, let’s face it, everyone in contemporary music, was his hyper-diligence in the editing and yielding of the final product. No one can edit like this man when he gets going, and that gave his best albums an addictiveness that is utterly difficult to achieve in such a saturated musical landscape. It’s not like it’s 1971 and you just listened to Fun House or The Payback and you want to listen again and again. Now, there’s just so much. You listen to a new record by an artist you like and you’re mostly done with it so you can listen to the other 10 new records by the other 10 artists you like. When Kanye is at his best, he literally disintegrates the competition. You find yourself listening over and over, it just goes down so easy even as the music is undeniably complex and maxxed out.
   
   Vultures Pt. 1 is the first Kanye record to have that addictiveness since Yeezus. I first listened to the album while struck in traffic driving downtown for Chinese New Year. And then I listened again. And again. Very few artists now can demand my repeat listens. Maybe Peste Noire. Sometimes the new Burial EPs get played a lot. But not A LOT A LOT. I’m listening to this new Kanye shit A LOT A LOT.
   
   From tracks “Paid” through “Carnival” is a totally encompassing musical journey, gripping and liberating at once. In all honesty, I thought Kanye was a bit washed up, at least at the musical level. I was more than fine for him to continue on as an entertaining and thought provoking public figure of much controversy. But, Vultures is proof that he’s as good as he’s ever been. Totally refreshed, he sounds free. Perhaps it’s the freedom from the grasp of the Kardashians, perhaps it’s no longer having to answer to executives. Whatever it is, his reign as the god of modern music continues.

2. I recently made the claim that the most interesting artists are those that either strive to be mainstream but can’t seem to shake off the weirdness enough to do so — Lawrence of ‘80s British guitar pop group Felt would be an example of this – or artists who are utterly mainstream but nevertheless have tendencies in their work that are obviously formally experimental, adventurous and avant-garde.
   
   Kanye is of the latter category. His albums are listened to by nearly everyone in the hood — I walked by a Starbucks the other day and couldn’t help but smirk when realizing the staff was blasting “Hoodrat” at maximum volume — but at the same time, I’ve never met any serious musician or artist who doesn’t at the least agree that the man is extremely talented. Lou Reed was asked to write about Yeezus shortly before his death:
   
   “But the guy really, really, really is talented,” wrote Lou. “He's really trying to raise the bar. No one's near doing what he's doing, it's not even on the same planet.” That’s the co-founder of the motherfucking Velvet Underground talking.
   
   Moreover, Kanye makes ALL of his collaborators seem more interesting than they ever would without him. I can’t tell you one thing Kid Cudi has ever done in his solo career. He’s a mediocrity. But with Kanye next to him, his unique baritone can approximate some beautiful and gasp worthy, like a JMW Turner painting. Spacious and grandiose. On tracks like “Gorgeous” or the entirety of the Kids See Ghost record, Kudi’s vocal presence is unforgettable, but he’s unforgettable as an INSTRUMENT of Kanye.
   
   Such is the nature of Ty Dolla $ign on Vultures Pt. 1. Ty is hardly a young man. He’s been around for fucking ever. The man is 41 for fuckssakes! But I have never felt the need to investigate his work or the man himself beyond knowing the clownish way that he styles himself. I fancied him a features artist, which I understand is more or less true. On Vultures, however, he sounds fucking great. Essentially, Ty sits in the weird, smooth singing hypeman position that Nate Dogg once occupied on Aftermath and Death Row releases, but whatever it is that makes Ty unique Kanye seems to excavate. Ty here has this gothic romantic quality that is nevertheless synthetic and digitized — a naturally talented vocalist made disorienting through the glaze of the 808z — he’s totally remade. He’s having tons of fun, of course, but that only lends him a kind of musical seriousness that he would never have outside this context.
   
   Let’s keep zonin let’s keep floatin let’s keep moanin, girl I know that it ain’t ova’ in the morning you’ll be runnin’ back to me’ sings Ty on “Back to Me” against dense, bass heavy and lush production in what is one of the most beautiful romance tracks hip-hop has ever produced.
   
   The horde of collaborators also involved with the project are similarly elevated by Kanyification. On the aforementioned track, the great rapper Freddie Gibbs has a shutdown verse rivaling the career making lyrical showdown of Nicki Minaj on “Monster” way back in 2011. Chris Brown makes a memorable appearance on the absolutely astounding “Beg for Forgiveness”. JpegMafia, who I’d previously written off for his perpetual tendency to almost grasp political truths only to consistently retreat into libbtardery, is back on my good side for his production credits. YG apparently cured himself of Trump Derangement because he’s on “Do It” and he sounds good. After all his controversies, there isn’t a single star in the game who doesn’t blow their fucking loads the second that they get that Kanye West phone call. It is music’s equivalent of the Conor McGregor “red pantie night” in combat sports.
   
   There’s a track on the record called “Carnival” that also features memorable choruses by Rich the Kid and the great Playboy Carti. Not only does the track have some of the most naughty lyrics:
   
   “Now I'm Ye-Kelly, bitch, now I'm Bill Cosby, bitch
   Now, I'm Puff Daddy rich, that's Me Too me rich
   Why she say she sucked my dick? Then she say she ain't sucked my dick?”
   
   The song title also describes the overall feeling of the record. This is a carnival. This is a collective. Kanye has always used tons of collaborators, but on Vultures the aesthetic just has a dadaist openness that is simply unprecedented in rap or popular music. Ye turns the most famous artists of hip-hop into a kind of roving avant-garde performance art collective. His role as leader and producer of the album reminds me of the role that Tom Smith played in his trash-noise collective To Live and Shave in LA; the mouthpiece and leader of chaotic ceremony. Hell, there are even echoes here of something like the Viennese Aktionist Otto Muehl, where the art is not solely the work itself but the pandemoniac process in which all his collaborators are divorcing themselves of their egos and sacrificing themselves at the altar of Kanye’s vision. Thrilling, really.

3. After the release of the original Vultures 1 cover, before it was replaced by a photograph of Kanye and his gorgeous, naked wife Bianca Censori, which used a Caspar David Friedrich landscape and a Burzum style typeface for the album title, I was worried. Rappers getting into black metal is really not that interesting to me. I’ve seen Danny Brown in Emperor t-shirts. Many a soundcloud rapper worships Burzum. Kanye himself recently posted a photo of himself next to Jpeg Mafia where he was himself wearing a Burzum t-shirt. The ever enterprising black metal musician Satanic Warmaster posted meta Burzum t-shirts of Kanye wearing a Burzum t-shirt. Of course, it didn’t take long for leftist former Kanye fans to google what Satanic Warmaster is and resuscitate the “Kanye is Nazi” tagline, but Satanic Warmaster himself has said over and over that he isn’t a Nazi. To argue that he is such by pointing to his lyrics is no different than arguing that Spielberg is a Nazi because he made Schindlers’s List. I digress…
   
   Thankfully, the album itself has few echoes of black metal. While tracks like “Do It” and the “Vultures” single both have samples that evoke the dark landscapes of the dungeon synth genre, it appears the NSBM baiting was just more edgelord marketing by the ultimate edgelord marketer. There’s also Brazillian funk samples. There’s a beat that sounds ripped from the Juvenile single “Back that Ass Up”. There are the kind of fluttering and kaleidoscopic synths of something like Neu or the German industrial artist Werkbund. There’s techno and house and R&B and the music is all over the place but seamlessly edited. It’s Kanye. It's a gorgeous collage.
   
   Kanye puts far more on the line than any NSBM band ever could. Sure, Vothana or Goatmoon might have some hormone deprived Antifas email bombing promoters to get their shows canceled, but are they really risking anything beyond that? Ultimately, these bands make their work within their niche and that niche remains relatively secure from broader mainstream awareness and indictment.
   
   I recently performed a Botched Chadification show at the Bushwick Public House. It was the first time our band performed outside the boundaries of what one could deem an “edgelord safe space.” Indeed, it was a leftist run venue – gangbangers playing pool upstairs while rich white kids oblivious to the obvious criminal activity around them rocked out downstairs. By the time we played one of our pinnacle songs “Tranny Chaser” — a loud, groovy rock n’ roll stomper that I consider to be our “Sister Ray” — we had cleared out half the room. Those who remained in the audience, however, were enthralled to us. This is where things get interesting. Similarly, Elena Velez hosted a Gone with the Wind themed ball this past weekend, putting Jack Mason and Anna K in front of normie fashion editors. Such collisions of both normative ideological thinking and antagonistic thinking make for thrilling propositions. It’s when you step outside your own comfort zone, you see, that art becomes something important.
   
   Kanye is at the absolute pinnacle of fame. You simply cannot be more famous than he is. He is, indeed, a performance artist, and his fame itself is his formal material. He’s constantly manipulating his own image, allowing the mass media to scrutinize and attack and smear him all to make some grandiose conceprtual point: I will not and cannot be controlled.
   
   “Crazy, Bipolar, Antisemite, and I’m still THE KING” he muses on album ender “King” and he’s right. The record is number one everywhere, including — I shit you not — Israel. He quite simply cannot be contained. He puts a billion dollar fortune on the line, sometimes for quite stupid and misguided reasons to be sure, just to show the world that his greatness can’t be impacted by his personal failures. Surely, this is more transgressive than some niche art scene that has no audience outside itself, no?
   
   As I write this, Vultures 1 has once again been ripped off of streaming services. His own distributor is trying to get it permanently removed. Imagine making billions of dollars for these people only for them to STILL fuck you over at every opportunity they get.