Despite these varied textures and this breathtaking pace, the writing on any given song, and certainly on the album when considered as a whole, is amorphous, vague and almost interchangeable. Put another way: VULTURES it is quite forgotten. Raps about money sound exhausted, and those about sex—such a fixed focus it's almost pathological—ultimately sterile.
I'm not writing this with a backpack. I'm not. This is not a problem of moral or even political conscience, but of style: Yeezus he is equally fixated on sex, but he treats it as an alien force lurking just beneath domestic life, ready to swallow it whole. On VULTURES it's a watch It wouldn't do to pick lyrics out of context to point out the shallowness of the album. it is impossible to prove that West's old conceptions of sexuality are entirely absent. But consider that the moment in “Hoodrat” where he raps, “I hit it from the back/Whore, whore” isn't presented with real anger, remorse, sensuality or intelligence. It's just something he says, the way he collapses into incredibly obvious samples (“Back That Azz Up,” “Can It Be All So Simple”) sweep as acrobatics without a hint of reframing or subversion.
There is a strange, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and the setting and the sound just so, but you can't shake the nagging feeling that there's no center, just a mass of references. without reference. Whatever moments of exuberance or inspiration are overcome are drowned out by the hum of professionalism.
A little over a decade ago – the exact midpoint between Dropping out of college and VULTURES—West was wandering around a Rick Owens show in Switzerland when he was moved to play the then-unreleased Yeezus for a multitude of people. Before turning on the album from his laptop, he recounted to the audience his realization, as a young man, that his primary role as an artist would be that of an interpreter. “I found that when I put in samples, my friends would react more to that” than to the original music, he said. He compared himself to Warhol. he joked about how skeptical, racist crowds in galleries might mock “a black guy” who invokes “the most obvious artist in the world.” For nearly his entire career, West has twisted raw material from his subconscious and the outside world into unique records. VULTURES it's a highly competent album with punctuated beats that are truly irresistible. It also feels, for the first time in West's career, profoundly cynical, like he's prodding your brainstem with a surgical instrument, hoping to elicit the meanest reaction: How about there?
