If there were any further proof needed that cancel culture isn’t real, look to Kanye West. After the artist now known as Ye made a series of antisemitic remarks that prompted many fans and commercial partners to desert him, plenty of other fans remained, spurring him to his biggest commercial success in years.
Not only did the Ty Dolla $ign collaboration Vultures 1 top the US album chart on its release in February – West’s albums invariably do – it also produced a genuine global hit in Carnival, which took him back to the top of the US singles chart for the first time since 2011. There was no dignified cleaning of the slate – the title track joked about the antisemitism in the ugliest manner imaginable – but most critics felt that Vultures 1 was at least an improvement on his previous album, 2021’s Donda.
The second instalment of the three-part Vultures project also doesn’t start afresh. Instead, it continues West’s tried and tested current blend of edgelording and emotional candour.
At the album’s centre are twinned tracks, Husband and Lifestyle, in which West seemingly leverages a girlfriend’s dwindling finances to trap her into marriage: “Won’t be long ’til you’re out of bands / The only thing you really need is a husband / The only thought you ever need is: I trust him.” It’s chilling and the guest stars can be just as bad: nihilism is the core of Future’s brand but his line “Fucking on a IG model / When I get through / I’m kicking her out / She dead” is cold misogyny.
530 is framed as a tequila-wasted voice note sent by West to, presumably, ex-wife Kim Kardashian (there are references to nannies and “visitations on FaceTime”). But the way West leaves his lyrics unmastered and unfinished here, blurring into hopeless almost-words, is startling: a portrait of someone drunkenly trying to piece his thoughts, and life, back together.
The emotional confusion is mirrored in the beats and musical choices. For every clever detail – the degraded voice sample in Lifestyle – there’s a mindless one, such as the sampling of Portishead’s Machine Gun on boring posse cut Field Trip, which muddies the beat (and was probably unauthorised given the objections of the group’s Geoff Barrow over the weekend). Bomb, featuring daughters North and Chicago, should have stayed on the family fridge where it belongs; there are more unwanted guests in the AC Milan ultras who chanted on Carnival – an eye-rollingly “edgy” choice – who reappear sounding just as dreary and leaden as before.
Some of West’s other lyrics are just embarrassing – “I’m on vibranium, claws, they titanium”, is the kind of thing a substitute teacher would rap to ingratiate themselves with their unimpressed charges – but there are some inventive flows too, as he asymmetrically presses words on to the seasick beat of Slide, or nimbly babbles over a breezily strummed electric guitar on Sky City.
Fried is a mixed bag with witless porn-addled bars (“she giving blowjobs and I applied”) alongside some satisfyingly weighted ones (“You was typing crazy, out your mind / This is not a typo, we reply / Now you spilling type O out your side”); he and Ty are convincingly unhinged when delivering the song’s climactic lines, sealing the kind of blown-out rager that West helped inspire with 2013’s Yeezus and which is still at the heart of mainstream rap. Ty’s soulfully melismatic voice remains an asset throughout, though as on his frequent guest spots with other artists, he feels rather anonymised.
It all makes for another paradoxical West album: bloated and occasionally focused, tired and occasionally futurist, morally redundant with enough humanity to supply a fraction of redemption. For all its egotism and longueurs, Donda, animated by faith and familial love, seems to me a much richer document of his post-divorce search for meaning. On the Vultures project, due to end later this year, West is in danger of wrapping up that search before he uncovers any wisdom.
