Today
Kanye West releases his sixth solo album, Yeezus -- a record with an
improbably terrible pun for a title that does little to describe the
aggressive nature of its contents.
While ostensibly a rap
record, aside from a couple of brief, straightforward appearances by
Chicago rappers Chief Keef and King L, it doesn't sound much like one.
In
a recent uncharacteristically revealing interview with The New York
Times, he described himself as a "black new wave artist" and described
Yeezus as being inspired by the Chicago "drill" scene that produced the
aforementioned guests, as well as the sounds of vintage Chicago house
music, but those could very well be red herrings deployed by an artist
who's careful to not reveal too much about the sources of his
inspiration, because it doesn't sound much like any of those either.
What
Yeezus most closely resembles is the industrial music of the 1990s,
during the phase of the alternative rock boom when the genre had its
greatest pop-cultural influence. Industrial's best remembered for
imbuing electronic music, long considered the domain of effete nerds and
Europeans, with enough aggression to appeal to metalheads and punks.
Yeezus's
most obvious connection with the genre is by its surfeit of noisy
keyboards and distorted drum machines. The album opens with a droning
synthesizer tone modulated until the signal starts throwing off harshly
treble-heavy spikes and begins to clip, as if it were overloading a
digital audio processor, and over the next 40 minutes we're treated to a
broad variety of ways to abuse electronically produced sounds.
But
the connection between Yeezus and industrial music runs considerably
deeper than Kanye's choices in synth patches. While its most memorable
(and most widely mocked) pop-culture moments have to do with its
quintessentially '90s cyberpunk fashion sense, industrial music was also
responsible for exploring existential alienation through our
relationship with technology, an idea that looks especially prescient
through the lens of the Google Glass era, in which we find ourselves
separated from each other and the world around us by a thin but
increasingly resilient gadget-enabled membrane.
One of the ways
industrial musicians most effectively explored their techno-dystopian
worldview was by putting the machines they used up front. Industrial
music is full of oppressively machine-tight drums detoured through
distortion units, synthesizers that sound like they're malfunctioning,
low-resolution samplers that add a pixelated digital aura to the most
analog sounds.
Yeezus is built on these kinds of techniques. "I Am
a God" opens with a sample of the dancehall singer Capleton that
glitches out at the end like a CD skipping or (more likely these days) a
corrupted MP3 downloaded off the Internet. The anxiety-ridden
quasi-ballad "Hold My Liquor" features vocals by Justin Vernon (aka Bon
Iver) run through so much Auto-Tune and modulation that his words are
blurred to a point on the border of incomprehensibility, and Chief
Keef's contribution is blatantly copy-pasted from one chorus to the next
with the same ostentatious exhale to remind you that, yeah, this was
all done in Pro Tools. Even songs like "Blood on the Leaves" and "Bound
2" that don't sound at all industrial put their sampler-based origins
right up in your face.
Like its maker, Yeezus is a messy,
complicated creature, but if there's one essential theme to the album,
it's that we're living in what pop culture promised us was supposed to
be a utopian future, but it's just as rotten as the past. Where a black
man can become rich and famous and still be hated for the color of his
skin. Where prisons are not only still around, but have been transformed
into modes of profit by relentlessly amoral capitalists. Where
relationships unspool on television in quasi-real time. It's a world
propped up by technology that we think of as infallible, when it's just
as likely to break down as a human is.
Is Kanye West truly a modern "God" of music, or -- ???
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