KANYE GETS BACK TO BASICS
Still Alright, It’s Not Me, It’s You,
Sheezus — was a bit of a mess.
“[I lost] my authenticity and my honesty, and it just didn’t feel like a true representation of who I was at the time, so it was really difficult for me to get out and promote that record because I wasn’t 100 per cent into it. I dealt with that in a manner of ways, one of which was turning to alcohol and substances, and that had a knock-on effect on my marriage and everything, and it all kind of deteriorated.” Allen says, laughing. “But I’m better now.”
Allen began writing her new word meditation on suicide and ends with a bruising ballad about his daughters, called Violent Crimes. Kanye sings as much as he raps.
For the first time since The College Dropout, we have a Kanye album that doesn’t push him, or hip-hop’s boundaries, to their absolute limits. “Shit could get menacing,” West declares on the chirpy bounce of Yikes. But it never really does.
Instead, Ye is condensed, favouring small bursts of energy over multi-song suites of mania. It regularly mentions West’s state of mind and mental health. On Yikes, he calls bipolar his “superpower”. “I hate being Bi-Polar its awesome,” declares
Ye’s cover art.
Kanye’s still innovating: the breathy beats of All Mine, the way I Thought About Killing You switches moods, the outro on No Mistakes. But the album’s centrepiece is Ghost Town, which starts like something off Graduation, adds stadium-sized guitar riffs, and verses sung by Kanye, Kid Cudi and 070 Shake. Not a single line is rapped, and it ends in a clattering of drums, riffs, video game bleeps and a record, No Shame, in late 2014, and finished it in the latter half of last year. “It was a really long and laborious process,” she says, exacerbated by the fact that those three years were perhaps some of the toughest of her life.
“In that time I got separated from my husband, and was confronting life being a single mother, and then went into another relationship. I also had a stalker and a big court case that went with that.” (Allen’s stalker broke into her home and threatened her with a knife in 2015). “So it’s been a struggle, but I guess things are looking slightly more rosy now than they were a couple of years ago, and that’s reflected on the album.” The “shame“of the album’s title encompasses a number of meanings; from the liberation of living shamelessly to the way women are shamed by misogyny in the modern day. “Women tend not to feel just shameful about the things that cappella chants of “I feel kind of free”. Transcendent is the only word that really describes its effect. Tell me the last rap album that made you feel that way.
Sure, Ye’s upset the Kanye diehards, but he’s also proven his brand of genius is mortal, and the results are still engrossing. That’s better than another boring sex quip about Tay-Tay.
For pure visceral rap thrills, fans of Kanye’s harder-edged material instead have Pusha-T’s Daytona to blast out of their subs.
The former Clipse star scrapped an entire album in favour of this, seven songs of brutally direct, soul-drenched rapbattle classics, one that’s
already taken aim at society might look down on, but also ashamed of the things that they should be proud of,” says Allen.
“You’re encouraged to be as hard working as you possibly can be, but then that comes into question when you have children; those two things conflict each other in the way that society perceives it.”
“We like to congratulate women on their achievements, but ultimately if I left the house without wearing makeup, there would be pictures in the newspaper of me looking not my best,” she says. “And even though the words underneath the picture wouldn’t be saying it, the subtext is, ‘How dare you leave the house without having your hair straightened, and without putting a full face of makeup on. You look disgusting.’”
No Shame returns Allen to her familiar honesty and authenticity, but this time, there’s a vulnerability to her process. From love songs My One and Pushing Up Daisies, to the stripped-back tracks Higher and Three, Allen works her way to optimism over the 14 songs.
On Three, Allen writes from the perspective of her daughter, imagining how it feels when she leaves on tour. It’s a touchingly beautiful song that reaches a level of emotional honesty Allen has never found before — and her daughters are huge fans.
“They’re obsessed with it, they want to hear it all the time,” she says. “They both think that it’s about the other one.” hip-hop’s biggest name: Drake. So far, Pusha appears to be winning.
Daytona takes Kanye’s best production efforts in years, with Pusha drenching delicious soul samples in his brutal flow. He’d sound good rapping grocery lists, so this is a meeting of the minds. I must have listened to If You Know You Know 20 times by now, and I still get chills when the beat drops.
But Daytona’s more than just the year’s best rap album, it’s a sign that Ye might mean more once all five albums from Kanye’s Wyoming rap camp are released. After Daytona, Kid Cudi, Nas and Teyana Taylor have their work cut out to deliver A-grade product like this. Verdict: A-grade product from hip-hop’s hard man.