Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has been floundering as of late. Politically, personally, artistically — he’s in a bad place. His newest studio album, Bully, was slated to be released last Friday after a series of unexplained delays, but once again it’s been pushed back — this time until November. For a long time, this deadline-related sloppiness was excused by the public because he was seen as an unparalleled genius. “But he made Graduation,” is a common response to whatever newest controversy has arisen as a result of his actions. It’s a joke, but like all good jokes, it’s a little bit true. There’s an unspoken societal consensus that once an artist reaches a certain level of fame or talent, all bets are off. Ye has been able to skate off of this for a long time, but given the negative reception of his actual latest album, Donda 2, his time seems to be running out.
Donda 2, officially released by Ye on April 29 after its unfinished release three years prior, is simultaneously his newest album and not new at all. Bully exists in a nebulous third space of constantly pushed-back release dates, from June to September to November; and in the wake of this, we’re left wondering if the messiness of Donda 2’s release was part of an emerging pattern. The album existed in a similar transient state since February of 2022 at the earliest, during the original ill-advised Stem Player launch, and its “official release” involves very little new content. Yet even beyond that, Donda 2 just feels incomplete, like Ye is stalling, and Bully proves that he’ll continue trying to outrun the clock until the end.
Why does he do this? What is he running from? When it comes to Ye, there are unfortunately fewer concrete answers than we may like. Part of it, of course, might just be a question of work ethic or spontaneity. The cover for his 2018 album Ye was famously shot on his iPhone on the way to his album listening party, an off-the-cuff decision that received very little scrutiny from the public, in part because Ye was widely praised. When did this permissible messiness cross over into the land of incoherency and betrayed deadlines? It seems, in many ways, to correspond with Ye’s increasing political radicalization. He no longer makes statements about the Bush administration’s passiveness in the face of the death of Black Americans; rather, he praises Hitler on Infowars. It’s a bizarre shift in beliefs from him, but if you start to think of Ye as someone who prioritizes attention over all else, the incoherency starts to make sense. Ye doesn’t have to have real, consequential beliefs, because that was never the point. The point was validation, love, and all eyes on him. Can something like that still be waved away with the assertion that he made Graduation?
Donda 2 cannot help but be tremendously psychologically revealing as a prayer to return to a nebulous better time, when all of Ye’s albums were chart-toppers — when he was viewed as an eccentric genius rather than the trash fire in slow-motion we’re viewing now. The majority of the songs are unchanged from their prior unfinished iterations; the album is a copy-and-paste job to the core. “Selfish” and “Eazy” have been removed, and there are some new tracks such as “Suzy” and “Jesse” — both of which seem unfinished and sonically disjointed — but overall, it’s much of the same experience. All witty lyricism has degraded, reduced to utterly baffling verses rhyming “Morgan Freeman” with “semen” in an attempt to capture a charming vulgarity that is so clearly inaccessible now. There are no more turns of phrase in store, no lyrical cleverness. What you see is what you get.
Even more uncomfortable is the extent to which Donda 2 is an open plea: Ye begging for his wife to take him back, Ye begging to see his children again, with a thin veneer of entitlement lurking below the surface. Ye runs from responsibility. To him, his divorce is Kim Kardashian’s fault, as is said inability to engage with his children. Will Bully, now slated to release in early November, break this trend? I’m not hopeful. The continued delays with zero communication as to why inspire little hope — and suggest to me that Bully will carry on Donda 2’s legacy by shying away from interesting music in favor of rushed, uninspired lyrics that unsubtly signpost Ye’s deep, pathological desire to be seen.
Why does anyone go to a freak show? Our modern sensibilities understand them to have been dehumanizing affairs: spectacle for the sake of humiliation. The social function of such was primarily that of tension release: the frills of high society falling away for a moment to expose a class of person agreed to be worthy of bearing any amount of ritualized abuse or mockery. Any joke was permissible with them as the punchline. Nowadays, we can recognize such a thing as inhumane, objectifying, and yet we still take pleasure in platforming and gawking at a man in mental distress.
This process of objectification is exactly what’s happened to Ye, a process which is morally complicated by his complacency. It’s hard to paint him as a victim over a response he’s encouraged. Nevertheless, his subjective victimization matters less than what it reveals about us as we still watch him dance. We can only speculate as to how bad Ye’s mental health has gotten, but one thing is clear: A man is melting down, publicly, and has been doing so for a very long time. We can’t just say, “but he made Graduation,” anymore. Bully may or may not come out Nov. 7, but regardless, we should all hope that it’s the end of Ye’s attempts to prioritize personal drama over art. The freak show is an immoral institution. We can’t keep paying for Ye to be a performer there.
