“Yeezus sucked,” I heard as I did my best to contain my frustration. “Bound 2 is the only good song” – it wouldn’t stop. It seemed as though I was the only one who appreciated Kanye’s most groundbreaking record. Ironically enough, I can’t remember the last time I listened to Bound 2, the song over which the majority of my friends obsessed. It’s no surprise that a group of teenage boys whose taste in music was limited to mainstream was rubbed the wrong way by Yeezus. As much as I love Kanye’s sixth album, I’ll admit that upon first listen I found myself thinking “what the hell is this?” But Yeezus is the kind of album that gets better with each listen and four and a half years after its release, I’m still discovering nuances and intricacies. it’s a conglomeration of everything he had put out prior – the hunger of the College Dropout, the swagger of Late Registration, the electronic influence of Graduation, the anguish of 808s and Heartbreak, and the self-awareness of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The end product is not necessarily Kanye at the peak of his powers, but rather Kanye at the peak of his vulnerability. Yeezus is Kanye in his purest form.
Kanye’s chief influence in the production of Yeezus was minimalist design and he drew musical inspiration from a furniture exhibit in the Louvre, Le Corbusier homes, and a Le Corbusier lamp which he cited as his “greatest inspiration;” architects Oana Stanescu and Joseph Dirand, and interior designer Axel Vervoordt were among his closest collaborators. In addition to his affinity for minimalist design, Kanye brought in producer Rick Rubin, two weeks prior to the album’s release, to strip down the record to match his minimalist vision. Finally, West was keen on the album bearing a strong Chicago influence and while there is no overt nod to his hometown like he did with Graduation’s Homecoming, Hold My Liquor features Windy City rapper Chief Keef and has Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon talking about feeling sadness in the South Side, Chicago. The album also incorporates elements of 1980s acid house, contemporary drill, industrial, and trap, all genres that hold their roots in Chi-Town.
In an unreleased Hypebeast interview from 2013, Kanye says, “someone from Chicago is very sincere… they don’t give a fuck about what anybody is saying as long as it’s from their heart.” Yeezus has Kanye demonstrating his hometown influence through his most effective medium, ground-breaking art. Kanye approached the making of this album in a manner that starkly contrasted his previous creative processes. Unlike his most immediately preceding album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Yeezus was not only significantly more minimalist in nature, but also was created in a much shorter time frame. In a Pitchfork interview regarding the making of the album, Travis Scott said, “we always undermine the commercial,” a reference to their creative goal of avoiding songs that would get airplay in favor of songs that would have a lasting impact on music. As a result, Yeezus was a much shorter album than any of Kanye’s previous works, only 40 minutes in length. But Yeezus is similar to every Kanye album in one respect – it pushed the limits of what was acceptable in a hip-hop album. Without a shadow of a doubt, the album’s most braggadocious song is I Am a God where Kanye says, “I just spoke to Jesus, he said ‘what’s up, Yeezus?’” That line, that song, and the album as a whole do the best job of driving home the point that Kanye’s been trying to make for the entirety of his career – he is a musical and cultural deity the likes of which we’ve never seen.