Kanye West Is Going to Drop a Brick and It's Going to Hurt

Jayson Greene gathers the facts on the imminent Kanye album, and speculates on what it may--or may not be.

Kanye West’s seventh studio album remains a mystery. No one knows if it is finished, if he’s scrapped several versions of it, if he’s still tinkering with it, or if it’s been sitting somewhere, done, for months. Seth Rogen heard a live version of one, rapped to him in a van by Kanye himself, in December. Theophilus London heard one three times back to back, or tweeted that he did before swiftly retracting, a few months before that. The title keeps changing: It was going to be called So Help Me God for a bit, and now, apparently, he’s calling it SWISH, which seems about as likely to stick as Good Ass Job. It might come out in a few hours, or tomorrow, or months from now. The only thing that seems clear is that Kanye cares less about this album than any other he’s ever made.

-=-=-=-This is not speculation: He said so, more or less, in a Paper Magazine interview. "Right now, over 70 percent of my focus is on apparel," he declared, a grim calculus for his music. Last week, in an interview with Ebro and Nessa that seemed arranged largely for him to debunk rumors that he’d been thrown out of a Chuck E. Cheese, he stressed that he was working on the project "slowly", so that he can "deliver the innovation that I know I can." He also seems to be distancing himself, daily, from Yeezus, the first of his projects to win no Grammys, and the one with his lowest-ever sales—even lower than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. At his Governors Ball performance before Yeezus was released, he boldly declared that he had no interest in the radio, but he seems to have backpedaled a bit on that statement. "That was a joke," he told the iHeartMedia Music Summit this year. He distanced himself even further last February during an interview with Power 105, calling Yeezus "a protest of music….I didn’t even have no music. I just let y'all have a little music on 'Bound,' but that was it. But this album is just embracing the music, embracing joy and just being a service to the people."

As mission statements go, that’s vague, and the music he’s released is even more so. Of the four songs he’s released and performed in this year—"Only One", "FourFiveSeconds", "All Day", and "Wolves"—only "Only One" and "FourFiveSeconds" feel like they came from the same head space. Both songs feature Paul McCartney, and have a relaxed, unforced energy. They feature no rapping, and seem designed to highlight our simplest feelings with simpler chord progressions. The other two feel like they were made in different years, for different iterations of the same project. None of them feel like surefire hits, and they also haven’t done much to spark speculation or enthusiasm for the album they herald.

All of this seems to point to a troubled project, or at least an unfocused one, and the seemingly unthinkable starts to come into focus: Kanye West might be poised, possibly, to drop a brick.

Now, something might happen in the next few hours or weeks that will make this post seem foolish. The first time I recall people wondering aloud if West had painted himself into a corner, it was right after Graduation. If he were to well and truly drop a brick, it would be the first of his career, and it would break, or at least interrupt, the most impressive streak of the millennium. He has proven remarkably, even uniquely, deft at brick-dodging, and part of the thrill of his career has been watching him him defy the predictions as to when it was all going to end.

But for the first time, there seems to be no animating idea behind his next project, no mission statement. He seems in general more focused on the parts of his life—being a father, developing clothes, making motivational speeches—that don’t involve the arduous process of album-making. Tellingly, the material he has released isn’t quality-controlled up to his usual standards.

"Wolves", which he tipped as his album’s lead track and which he debuted at the unveiling of Yeezy Season 1, sounded disturbingly like Gotye’s "Somebody That I Used to Know", or something that might have been a side project like Cruel Summer, than anything that’s ever made its way onto a finished album. We haven’t heard anything about the song in the meantime, indicating that perhaps he’s abandoned it, and continues to tinker with the album’s shape.

There are warts left in all of these songs, spots where vocals are mumbled or left out entirely, indicating that they are probably all demos. This isn't a new thing; Kanye has often allowed us to hear his mind at work. Tracking the progress of a Kanye demo to a finished album track allows us to learn something about the sound he is chasing in his mind. Consider the leap from the "So Appalled" demo that leaked years ago to the completed "So Appalled" that appeared, a year later, on MBDTF, or the the multiple versions of "Love Lockdown", some barely distinguishable from each other; in all of this churn, you heard a big idea take shape. But the versions of these new songs we have seem to have simply dropped off the back of some truck, with little clarification or follow up. This is a person who reportedly remixed "Stronger" 72 times before releasing it, and the only extant version of "All Day" we have still has a glaringly botched line in the opening chorus.

To promote these songs, he’s doing many the same things he always does: He’s performing them relentlessly, on awards and morning shows across the world, usually standing alone onstage to telegraph his commitment. But there is an oddly dutiful sense to all of it—which of the six or seven versions of "Only One" he’s performed feels like The Performance? The BRIT Awards performance of "All Day", flamethrowers and all, bristled with nervy energy, but the song itself feels strangely uninspired, a callback to earlier sounds of his.

It is a disorienting feeling, having this much Kanye West material available generating so little palpable excitement in the universe. Meanwhile, Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Drake, and others push outward in directions specifically influenced by Kanye, and it becomes harder to hear, or imagine, how he might match or lap them. He is responsible for the current zeitgeist, but listening to his slightly confused new material, you get the distinct sense that he’s struggling to find his current footing in it.