Despite those varied textures and that breathless pacing, the writing on any given song, and certainly on the album when considered as a whole, is shapeless, indistinct, and nearly interchangeable. Put another way: VULTURES is pretty forgettable. The raps about money sound exhausted, and the ones about sex—such a constant focus as to be nearly pathological—ultimately sterile.
I am not typing this with a backpack on. I am not. This is a problem not of morality, or even political consciousness, but of style: Yeezus is just as fixated on sex, but treats it as an alien force lurking just beneath domestic life, ready to swallow it whole. On VULTURES it’s rote. It wouldn’t do any good to pick lyrics out of context to make a point about the album’s shallowness; it’s impossible to prove that West’s old notions of sexuality are completely absent. But consider that the moment on “Hoodrat” when he raps, “I hit it from the back/Whore, whore” is not presented with any real anger, contrition, sensuality, or wit. It’s just sort of something he says, in the way that lapses into incredibly obvious samples (“Back That Azz Up,” “Can It All Be So Simple”) scan as stunts without a hint of recontextualization or subversion.
There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent. Whatever moments of exuberance or inspiration slip through are drowned out by the din of professionalism.
A little over a decade ago—the exact midpoint between The College Dropout and VULTURES—West was wandering through a Rick Owens exhibit in Switzerland when he was moved to play the then-unreleased Yeezus for a crowd of people. Before he triggered the album from his laptop, he recounted to the audience his realization, as a young man, that his primary role as an artist would be that of the interpreter. “I found that when I would drop samples, my friends would react to it more” than to original music, he said. He compared himself to Warhol; he joked about how skeptical, racist gallery crowds might scoff at “a Black guy” invoking “the most obvious artist in the world.” For nearly the entirety of his career, West has twisted raw material from his subconscious and the world outside alike into singular records. VULTURES is a supremely competent album dotted by beats that are truly irresistible; it also feels, for the first time in West’s career, profoundly cynical, as if he’s prodding your brain stem with a surgical instrument, hoping to elicit the basest reaction: How about there?
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
