On Jan. 8, Kanye West released a song called “Real Friends” onto his Soundcloud and the world went crazy. As with every musical direction he takes, the Internet quickly took to hyper-analyze the song, which sonically resembled his older work and featured a hauntingly spare beat and exceptionally emotive lyrics. Yet, some minutes after its release and widespread news attention, Kanye mysteriously took the track offline. Half an hour later he explained that the original version had unwanted distortion and would be back up soon. Sure enough, after another half hour, “Real Friends” was back up — only to be repeatedly taken down and re-released not once, but three times. Later that night, after the track had finally situated itself around the web, West took to Twitter to officially announce his next album, “SWISH.”
The weeks that followed only further proved the eccentricity of Kanye’s sporadic, of-the-moment approach to album promotion. His wife, the gargantuan embodiment of modern celebrity, Kim Kardashian, also took to Twitter to suggest that Kanye would release a new song every Friday up to the release of “SWISH.” However, next Friday came along, and no new Kanye song. The second single, “No More Parties In L.A.,” surfaced on the following Monday, after Kim suggested that Kanye spent the weekend writing 90 bars for the track and hurriedly recording the final touches. He changed the album name and posted a handwritten tracklist that got updated multiple times with messy autographs of everyone from Earl Sweatshirt to Kylie Jenner. He called it not only album of the year, but “album of the life.” Instead of any sort of middle man, Kanye made us all feel like we had some intimate understanding and connection to an album that’s still yet to come out. His animated enthusiasm seemed no different than that of that kid you knew in high school who was trying to create unprecedented hype for his new mixtape.
It’s precisely this immediate and constantly updated persona that strikes West’s presence as jarring, as it is unyieldingly appropriate for the 2010s and the generation of never-ending connection. His previous LP, the industrial and jarringly experimental “Yeezus” had dozens of collaborators that predestined it for critical greatness, much like how I’m assuming Drake’s new record is coming along. The shift toward social media intimacy and a sense of “winging it,” then, mark the cultural impact of the currently named “Waves,” even before its release.
I’m more reminded of Sun Kil Moon, or within the context of rap, Young Thug in West’s current strategizing (or de-strategizing?) because of the stark realization of how completely current his music is. “No More Parties In L.A.” self-referenced “Real Friends” a week after its release, but the track list places the latter before the former. Sun Kil Moon’s last record, 2015’s excellent “Universal Themes,” moved me for its fleeting, encapsulated lyrics, which often referred to daily events that affected the narrator maybe as little as a week before they were recorded. While the musical stretch between the two is enormous, Kanye is positioning himself as a vulnerably authentic artist in a music scene where that exact value is constantly debated and fought over. Based on how the two singles play off of each other, West’s lyrics and conceptual goals reach this state of immediacy that complements a generation and target audience that not only hates the word "meme," but understands how to create an excellent one out of everything West does or says.
We, as intensely alert consumers, want new things, we want them quickly, and we want them to be good. Kanye appears to understand this, but at the very least he represents that idea in his work. Last year was the first since 2009 that West didn’t release a new project, but he spent it working on fashion and tailoring his next album based on how people reacted to his moves as a musician. “All Day,” “Only One” and “FourFiveSeconds” didn’t make the handwritten track list, but “Wolves” and “Fade” did, two songs that were received favorably, and neither of which saw a studio release. He operated distantly and mysteriously, leaving people to imagine his album could’ve dropped any day last year. Now that 2016 is upon us, Kanye West has changed back to a more human persona of his that we haven’t seen in over half a decade. A persona that, while far from humble, represents something utterly real and genuine.
The ultimate power of Kanye West’s current antics comes back to this generational idea of valuing honesty, authenticity, and cherishing the rapid, of-the-moment pace of everything around us. Infamously described as an untouchable, otherworldly figure, West has come back down from the heavens to let us know (via Twitter) that his album will not only be the best of all time, but that he’s also just another one of us.
