Even I, as a long-standing and at times obsessive Kanye fan, was straight-up flat upon my first listen of VULTURES 1 – a Kanye-led collaboration album with Ty Dolla $ign.
Compared to his gamut of work over the past 20 or so years, it just wasn’t as tight. And not as immediately fresh. The celebration. The comedy. The incisive commentary. All off. No call to action like Donda, which incites love and faith, even from the likes of gangsta collaborators like Jadakiss and Styles P.
The timbre of his voice not as smooth.
But with more listens and more reflecting it becomes apparent that the album represents something a bit more complex than just a second-rate Kanye album. Some of these include:
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About that voice…Kanye and the producing team could easily have fixed it with autotune but chose not to. This reminds me of a prayer about becoming someone who looks – and in this case sounds – like they’ve trudged all of life’s roads – the good, the bad and the ugly. One thing Kanye can’t be accused of is not living.
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Of course there are still snippets of comedic gold, like Mike Tyson’s commentary about Ye’s mental problems at the end of HOODRAT. In speaking about Kanye, he reflects, “No doubt he’s got some mental fuckin’ issues, most leaders do. The delusional issue, “I’m a God”
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A lot of the beats are very solid. Take the track PAID for instance, which I’d label as Kanye’s version of afrobeat, combining African-style drumming with with bass-y driving synths and elements of trap. Quintessentially Kanye.
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Another great track is BACK TO ME, even if a little conceptually puerile (the hook line “beautiful big titty butt naked women just don’t fall out the sky you know”). But a super catchy track which contains an exquisite verse from Freddie Gibbs, whose usual power is amplified by Ye’s subtle but driving bass synths.
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Whilst VULTURES 1 undeniably marks a huge departure from Donda, labelling it puerile or simplistic might be jumping the gun…one could argue that the sexually and materialistically gratuitous nature of tracks like, VULTURES and CARNIVAL, could be a meta commentary on the parallel universes of gang / hood life with that of global pop culture and politics. Sort of saying, ‘you all think you’re so high and mighty…well this is hood life and at the end of the day it’s not so different.’
The album intentionally concludes with the tracks PROBLEMATIC and KING, both of which see Ye signing off and explaining and acknowledging a few of the more controversial things going on his life, including that his wife is 15 years his junior and he evidently has a preference for white girls. And then more explicitly: “Crazy, antisemite, bipolar…(I’m) still the King.”
PROBLEMATIC reprises the classic line “shit is fucking ridiculous” from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Arguably a more relevant sentiment now, both for Kanye and the world, than in 2010.
Overall VULTURES 1 is a decent album with at least a few great songs. By Kanye’s standards, what it does lack is any clearly deep meaning or overarching narrative. This is a shame but not surprising given the public meltdowns we’ve seen of Ye over the past few years. We know from what it took to produce the masterpiece, MBDTF (e.g. rap camp!), evidently when it comes to rap, you need to be at the top of your game to make a masterpiece.
This a good album it has a few great songs
[…] the next instalment to Vultures 1, this LP does disappoint. Personally I was hoping that Kanye and the rest of the team would […]