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. This was the maximalism that began with Late Registration in 2005 and 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” and “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.
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. 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 about an early version of Bully. The headline (“It Brings Us No Pleasure to Report that Kanye West Made a Good Kanye West Album”) 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.
If you look hard enough, you can always see the money. What was always clear to many people is that Kanye could effectively keep printing cash if he put out palatable, nominally new records at a moderate pace as an excuse to play a series of one- or two-night engagements in stadiums around the world. Hence Bully; hence the shows in Mexico City and Los Angeles, and the upcoming dates in New Delhi, Istanbul, Arnhem, Marseille, Reggio Emilia, Madrid, and Algarve. The machine whirs on.
On the weekend this new version of Bully hit streaming, there was fretting online: What were we going to do if the album was good? The honest answer was always: probably nothing. If Donda had been 50 percent better, it’s unlikely it would have restored Kanye’s music to a truly central place in pop culture. At least since Yeezus, his celebrity is tied to his reputation as a musician as much as his current output.
Obviously, Bully was not good enough to force any sort of mass reckoning. This was true of both VULTURES just as it was true of both Dondas. What’s shocking, however, is how quickly it has evaporated from the culture. This is a social phenomenon but also a fair reaction to the music: The shaggy charm from the original Bully has been crowded out by what is blunt and anonymized. It’s becoming increasingly clear that that’s what has happened, and will continue happening to, work this devoid of vision, of idiosyncrasy, of any sort of spiritual center.