Idealized blackness is the self, when whole at last, and healed and spun into a fabric that epitomizes ravishing self-possession, giving of that energy indiscriminately, as if wholeness indicates excess, surplus value, and corrupt decadence for the black celebrity, artist or entertainer, if we can still differentiate these roles. And so the world scavenges, withholds, chastens or shames the self-actualized black, the intentionally insane by societal standards black, the blues black, which makes room for all manner of philistines and vampires to vie unsuccessfully for his place. He retaliates with shine so acute and deranged you regret illuminating him with protest. You’ve created a monster of innocence, a being who can travel between dimensions and knowing he’s worth more dead than alive, dare you intercept him; he wins no matter what side or position he plays. He’s triumphant because he ambles slowly and deliberately off of your field and into a herd of vultures, called a wake; I have no rapper friends/I hang with the vultures— he walks himself awake. He’s learned the value of alienation and won’t be lured back to reality TV adjacent. He walks to his own wake, baits it, plays it out in his mind like a movie and preempts it, but also wills it with hubris so unrelenting it feels new every time he expresses it. Ye’s Vultures feels new in that way, as if his elegy for his mother released three years earlier was his swan song to conflating sacred and profane— Vultures is vulgar, often gratuitously, and uses the inventiveness of his production to hide blasé bars that feel more gestural than verbal. He’s embracing the villain he’s made out to be and doing away with some of the melancholy and substance that used to make his rap noteworthy instead of just functional decoration for the rapture of his production.
In this way, the progression of his albums is not about besting himself as much as narrating and indexing his own changes, becoming more and more sovereign and therefore more and more honest, taking inventory for the corporation he knows his identity is. If he’s not about shit at the moment, save for his new wife and the sex addiction she inspires, or inspires him to insinuate, then he tells us this. He wears that preoccupation on his sleeve. If he’s found god, he tells us this, risks seeming soft to take to the pulpit. If he’s thinking about killing his ex-wife, he records a song about it and protects himself by reminding everyone he’s bipolar on the album cover. There’s always an alibi for the accusations he knows are coming. He won’t be Young Thug in a courtroom having his lyrics weaponized against him out-of-context, like satire’s endgame punchlines. He pleads insanity— sanctified, craven, evil, paternal, he masters autobiography and in his devout capriciousness that means each album is the story of a new human being, a repossession of himself. He clones himself, and uses rudiments of hoodoo and ritual sacrifice, to outwit past selves, liabilities now. He’s cruel about it, unsentimental, and it is unsettling. And why are you looking for anything less from Ye, who enjoys being scandalous as long as it feels honest. He accepts the blows of what would for most be excruciating as the price of reinvention. He seems to see it as altruism (sometimes it is), in that he makes himself a decoy because there has to be an evil black man threatening to revolutionize something to expose the limits of how free and diverse blackness or freedom are allowed to be before they’re illegal, criminal. In relation to him, the crop of traditional talented tenth bourgeoisie feels self-righteously virtuous; all they do is go to brunch and read Fanon and DuBois and like and say and think all the right things in public. This thought criminal makes them look so decent, and exceedingly reasonable, so opportunistic, so dull. How lucky they are to be less crazy than the richest black man in American history, according to him and the hosts of Drink Champs.
It doesn’t matter that the bougie and degreed have less money than the rapper; they have the respect of white liberals. On “PAID” (I can’t help but think of Gangstarr’s Paid in Full as its antecedent) Ye reaches for his version of Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul.” The hook repeats, I’m just tryna get paid, so many times it goes from upbeat and aspirational to desperate; he needs to reclaim the parts of his fortune that were jeopardized when he went on the record discussing his perceived pact between Zionism and the entertainment industry. He has since apologized online, in Hebrew, but on this album he refers to himself as antisemite. The first livestream, held at a Chicago stadium, cut out after that line. The album itself doesn’t glitch or wobble with it, it’s deadpan and deliberate, he’s appropriating each one of the swords they attempted to bleed him with, sharpening them for his own use. Hold me like the homies in the Chi when they hold they guns, he pleads later, admitting the duel takes its toll. Dealers of affection must be armed. Ye is Miles Davis without a trumpet for a mask. He wears real masks so obnoxious they become fashionable in a Stockholm Syndrome meets Machiavellian kind of way— it’s easier to love him than to fear him. It’s easier to pursue the notion that he’s an artistic genius than the idea that he’s a ruthless con. In his music, he can be both. In his life, every vaguely normal interaction is earned by these pseudo bizarre deeds. He can exorcize what the vultures want from him publicly and then be whatever he wants when no one is looking.
“Talking,” his collaboration and call-and-response with his daughter North, is him being who he wants to be, loved and loving. He divulges his anxieties about her emulating him too well, unraveling in public as a means of self-actualizing. Who would want this for a child? Ye hopes North is not destined to unpack the sins of the father, but it’s clear North is a destiny, a destination for when the autobiography of Ye runs out of chapters and changes. What could follow the decadence of Vultures, either another more effective or affected ego death and rebirth, another turn to Christ, or a coming to, a sobering up and a moment of silence for all of the distractions he looses in seance. In Ye’s biography everything but the archetypes and their carnivals is expendable; we won’t remember the sequence of events, we will recall the pattern of self-sabotage and return, and one day we might discover that every pretend period of destruction, he was getting richer, happier, better at listening, and more publicly flagrant on purpose. You’re the one losing your mind he imposes, on Vultures he’s just enabling it, mirroring it, and offering the soundtrack to the Wasteland and desolation of post-2020 life in the West, so the zombies have something to bob their heads to at the post-apocalypse, something the be ashamed of loving.
And what if you get to the through the unequivocally sex, money and drugs obsessed album with caveats for open-hearted odes to fatherhood, and to the final track “King” where Ye proclaims, crazy, bipolar, antisemite, but I’m still the king? Will you do what the FCC did, do the police in many voices, and cut the stream of his consciousness, or will you consider that he’s just reminding you what you’ve called him, so you have to admit to yourself you love someone you think of as all of those terrible things, that you’re still listening to his album, that you’ve made it to its rock button finale where he offers this litany of his offenses like a sworn affidavit, unrepentant, and you, by listening, are the witness.
North steps on stage in Paris for the album’s listening tour, which has now grossed over twelve million dollars. She’s wearing all black and one of those floppy Russian hats with thick brown and beige fur encircling its brim so that when the spotlight shines down on only her and the rest of the stadium goes film noir dark, you cannot see her eyes, you just see her smile, delayed awe and total gratification, like she’s Billie Holiday being handed her first hit of heroin by the trusted friend that got her hooked. One of the comments on TikTok is accurate, “she’ll be chasing this moment for the rest of her life.” And just like that Vultures evolves from an album with great production and forgettable lyricism; to a black Antigone story. Whose job is to make certain she is not buried alive in the tomb, in this case the stadium, beneath the fiendish eyes of her father’s fans who claim to revere her as much as they do him, as she chases this high forever? Whose job is it to make sure she doesn’t hang herself in a moment of steadying plateau? Who’s gonna tell her? Paradoxically, Ye is. Just as she tells him. This is their call-and-response as transmutation of your projections, a public display of their shared survival instinct. They are gladiators together in the center of that stadium, they reify Fred Moten’s line, the commons is a ruin/ an abbey, with, a concert in the middle.
The most recent footage of Ye documents an exchange between him and Parisian paparazzi. He explains he’s leaving Paris cause they’re dehumanizing him by following him around when he just wants to step out for crepes during fashion week. Vultures, a wake of them everywhere black music is trafficked.
Your genius with that pen is otherworldly. Your writing makes me feel, substantially. What a gift.
Great to get this deep, serious engagement beyond the “problematic.”