Kanye West does not make short albums.
His first, The College Dropout, is an insane 76 minutes long; and while it could prove tiring, it's instead exhilaratingly ambitious, an album-as-manifesto that stretches boundaries more than it stretches patience, the kind where the album-closing twelve-minute part-spoken-word track could feel unnecessary but instead feels absolutely mandatory. "Graduation,"an album West created to be more listenable and less complex than his previous works, still clocks in at a lengthy 52 minutes; where most albums max out around 45.
That's why the thing that surprised me most about West's new album Yeezus had nothing to do with its style, content, or method of distribution; what surprised me was that the album was only 40 minutes long. And indeed, that 40-minute running time epitomizes the album perfectly.
Calling Yeezus minimalist is somewhat misleading; this is not a quiet album, and certainly not an album with few things going on. More accurate is that this is an album of contrasts: One second, there will be thousands of overlapping synths and buzzes; the next, absolute silence. It's a distinctly impulsive album; you genuinely never know what's coming next. It's a jarring style; but it succeeds in what it's trying to do: Namely, keep you on the edge of your seat, and keep you listening. Where West's other albums have been romances and coming-of-age stories, Yeezus is pure horror movie; to the point where one song, "I Am A God," ends with the sound of a man panting and screaming. And the album is constantly pointing out that West has a triptych of roles: The man screaming, the monster chasing him, and the filmmaker choreographing the whole thing. And the album's repeated biblical and religious motifs tie into those roles too: The triptych of Jesus, God, and Hooey Ghost mirrors the other one perfectly. But where in West's first four albums he inhabited the role of the man being chased, and in Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy he inhabited the role of monster, here he is in full-on filmmaker mode.
Yeezus was made in an incredibly short period of time; a popular anecdote going around is that Rick Rubin went to the studio three weeks before the album was to come out and discovered three or four completed songs and a lot of scraps. And you can absolutely see evidence of that in the finished album; which has many seeming imperfections; sixteenth-beat stutters and feedback echoes. But the surface flaws add to the auterist meaning; in a similar way to the French New Wave practice of visible cameras and boom mikes, or the way Wallace And Grommet filmmaker Nick Park has intentionally visible fingerprints on his films' plasticize puppets, Yeezus contains fingerprints of its artists' presence with every blip and bloop.
Yeezus' sparseness can sometimes make it feel like it's not enough of an album; there is far less pure rapping here than nearly any big rap album of the past few years. And its dashed-offness can sometimes feel more careless than intentional; your milage will certainly vary as to whether you see it as genius or sloppy. When a rapper like Drake spends two years perfecting a masterpiece like Take Care; it can feel cocksure to dash your album off in a couple weeks. But when you're a god like Kanye claims he is, who cares if you take seven years or seven days?
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