The Kanye West Album 'Bully' Does Not Exist
Original article by Paul Thompson for Passion of the Weiss
Kanye West has been out of ideas for a long time now. This didn’t use to be a problem.
Kanye West has been out of ideas for a long time now. This didn’t use to be a problem. On 2016’s The Life of Pablo and Donda, from 2021, there were, if anything, too many of them; unfinished and too-finished iterations of different impulses clouded rather than deepened one another. (Even 2018’s ye, a creative nadir, came during his sprint of 7-song albums produced in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which yielded some excellent music from other vocalists.) This was the maximalism that began with Late Registration in 2005and reached its apex eight years later, on Yeezus, where radically disparate parts were synthesized into a domesticity fever dream that is completely singular.
But Kanye’s post-Donda music—well, his post-Donda albums—have been shockingly devoid of that sometimes-controlled chaos. (Singles like “Cousins,” which is about youthful sexual experimentation with his male cousin, and “Heil Hitler,” which is called “Heil Hitler,” are best understood not as music per se, but as provocations meant to sustain a news cycle during what Kanye now describes as manic episodes.) This is true on a musical level, where even his most accomplished recent production has oscillated between straightforward adaptations of currently popular styles and diminishing retreads of things he’s done before. After two decades where this was distinctly not the case, you could reasonably expect to hit play on a new Kanye West album and find something that feels perfectly in step with what you heard earlier that day on the radio or on Rap Caviar.
In a way, this makes sense: Albums like his VULTURES collaborations with Ty Dolla $ign are rushed and overconsidered but fundamentally lazy. What’s perplexing is that this sameness is true of his writing as well. (I am again excepting “Heil Hitler,” which is about being divorced and Maybachs and Twitter—and Adolph, too.) This is a man whose every public appearance during those bouts of mania sends TMZ, and presumably more than a few lawyers, into a spin cycle. How does he avoid saying anything even accidentally interesting on his records?
A little over a year ago I wrote, for GQ, about an early version of Bully. The headline (“It Brings Us No Pleasure to Report that Kanye West Made a Good Kanye West Album”), which I did not write but do stand by, rankled a lot of people. But the essay is actually about how it was impossible to receive the record independent of Kanye’s public persona, which by that point was in lockstep with a segment of the American population that is downright evil. One of the first comments I saw when I hit play on the album-length video was “j3ws control everything.” You can cordon your work on Vimeo but your army of little neo-Nazis with anime avatars will show up and do their best to make you proud.
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