Thoughts on ¥$'s VULTURES 1

In the early hours of 10 February 2024, Kanye West—who currently goes by the name Ye—released his delayed collaborative album with Ty Dolla $ign, VULTURES 1. Within the first minute of the album opener, “Stars”—over a beautiful sample of Dijon’s “Good Luck” with added heavy drums—Ye raps, “[k]eep a few Jews on the staff now.” For those that have (entirely understandably) nope’d out on Kanye’s late era of seemingly endless, surreal controversies and often depressing musical output, this line is a reference to the PR firestorm that he has been engulfed in since the fall of 2022 when he made a series of antisemitic remarks on social media and in interviews with right-wing grifters, leading to the suspension of his X/Twitter and Instagram accounts, the end of his lucrative brand partnerships with Adidas and Balenciaga, and voided contracts with his legal team and talent agency, amongst other developments. Though Ye later recanted on X/Twitter and Instagram, posting a screenshot apology in Hebrew,¹ VULTURES suggests he remains largely unchanged. If anything, he appears to be doubling—or, at this point, is it tripling, septupling, octupling?—down on his views in the face of legions of “haters” and “censors.”

Way back in June 2018, in introductory remarks before the listening party for Ye’s then-new album ye, Chris Rock provocatively stated, “hip hop music is the first art form created by free black men. And no black man has taken more advantage of his freedom than Kanye West.” This was, at the time, a veiled reference to Ye’s controversial public support of Donald Trump’s first presidential term and his statement that 400 years of chattel slavery sounded “like a choice” on TMZ in the lead up to that LP’s release. 2018 Ye is, unbelievably, a period that now feels strangely quaint when viewed in the wake of post-2022 Ye’s public presence. Though Rock advised the listeners in Jackson Hole, Wyoming that night in 2018 to “listen without prejudice” to ye, attempting this with Ye’s recent output has become increasingly challenging, if not impossible.

VULTURES 1 is a deeply puerile album. We might even call it a pornsick album. Having seemingly moved past the Christian moralism that was most evident on 2019’s austere Jesus Is King and still there—residually perhaps?—on 2021’s Donda, Ye is now back to profligate cursing and bog standard misogynistic rapping. Seriously, the amount of casual misogyny and objectification across this record makes me feel like Tipper Gore when I’m listening to it. Almost completely bereft of lyrical inspiration beyond petulant, empty provocation—more on that later—and fleeting references to their children, Ye and collaborator Ty Dolla $ign resort to some of the most grating sex raps imaginable on VULTURES 1. As an illustrative example, the chorus of “Carnival” is literally an ominous male choir chanting the refrain, “Head so good, she a honor roll / She'll ride the dick like carnival / I done did the impossible.”

Though jokes were made in 2021 about the Donda rollout’s “divorced dad” energy—I mean, admittedly, he was sleeping in a stadium locker room and livestreaming himself pumping iron—VULTURES 1 feels like his true fresh divorcé record. He’s in a new marriage—albeit with a near lookalike to his ex-wife—gallivanting around the globe and collaborating with a surprising number of people that will still risk their personal brands by associating with him. Ye’s cult of personality remains influential, particularly with younger generations of rap stars like Playboi Carti, Travis Scott, JPEGMAFIA, YG, and Lil Durk who seem constitutionally unable or unwilling to cast judgment on their idol, seeing him as a mercurial, vanguard, “generational” artist that operates in rarefied culture-shifting aesthetic territory beyond any reproach. Ye’s late period, Cancelled Era seems to have, if anything, given him somehow even more cultural capital in certain circles, allowing for hateful groypers and brainless, clout-chasing hypebeasts to rub shoulders in the moshpits at obscenely overpriced “rave” listening parties that, themselves, feel like hollow retreads of previous events held before the release of albums like 2016’s The Life of Pablo and Donda. For the hypebeasts, the fact that Ye carelessly appropriates white nationalist aesthetics is edgy— even punk—and disconnected from any real-world repercussions created by such a gesture.

In addition to the abovementioned lyric on “Stars,” there are two other tracks on VULTURES 1 where Ye directly addresses charges of antisemitism: the title track and “King.” “Vultures” was the first single from the album and, as a result, the culture has had longer to react to Ye’s putrid “How I'm anti-Semitic? / I just fucked a Jewish bitch” line. “King,” the album’s closer, is a sketch of a song over which Ye boasts in the track’s chorus:

“Crazy, bipolar, antisemite”

And I'm still the king

Still the king

Still

They thought headlines was my kryptonite

Still the king

Still the king

Both moments are—to say the least—beyond the pale. They are also deeply revealing of tendencies of Ye’s that date far back, but that have resurfaced in this new post-2022 context in even more appalling form.

The “Vultures” line takes the debased, sex-obsessed Ye of past albums—the kind of rapper who would rap about putting a fist in a woman “like a civil rights sign” or having sex with models’ bleached assholes—and ups the ante by vapidly trolling those that were concerned about his public antisemitism. Interestingly, heading into 11 years since Ye’s 2013 album Yeezus—which features the track “I’m In It” that contains the fisting lyric—the critical tides have (rightly) turned against the rapper, and there seems to have been, to my knowledge, basically no critical attempt made to intellectualize and rescue the “Vultures” lyric as there was with similar Yeezus lyrics. Whereas in 2013, a Kanye-obsessed acolyte would have perhaps attempted some kind of exoneration of “I’m In It” as, let’s say, a “blunt but forcefully effective” conflation of hedonistic carnality and the African American freedom struggle—some real “Goop on Ya Grinch” tweet style critical exegesis—instead, in 2024, the “Vultures” lyric arrives and we’re honestly able to say something like, “Holy shit, how is this lyric able to be, simultaneously, so offensive and so tedious at the same time?”

The “King” lyrics are fascinating in another, perhaps even more troubling way. Essentially, what initially shocked me about these lines was how seamlessly Ye had slotted in “antisemite” alongside “crazy” and “bipolar” as epithets that he has been called across the latter half of his career, but that he resists, using charges of them to fuel his creative process. At the end of ye’s track “Yikes” from 2018, the rapper appended a likely ad-libbed outro that claimed that his “bipolar shit” was his “superpower”:

You see? You see?

That's what I'm talkin' 'bout!

That's why I fuck with Ye!

See, that's my third per—

That's my bipolar shit, ni**a, what?

That's my superpower, ni**a, ain't no disability

I'm a superhero! I'm a superhero!

Obviously, the conversation around Ye’s mental health is extremely complex and not something that I can attempt to do justice to in a dashed off Substack post. But, the “King” lyrics immediately made me think of this moment on “Yikes” where Ye attempted to turn something used against him into something powerful, a badge of honour, and a quality that made him an exceptional artist. Why “King” is so disquieting is because it collapses the controversy around Ye’s antisemitism into that same narrative. Granted, the term is placed in quotes in the track—attributed to “haters” or doubters or just the public—but it made me wonder if Ye proudly now wears his antisemitism in the same way that he bragged about his “bipolar shit” being a “superpower.” Truly dark territory.

This is all very disappointing, particularly because there are brief musical moments on VULTURES 1 where I still—despite myself—catch glimpses of Ye’s genius. The sampling on “Stars” is another instance of his brilliance in selecting moments in songs that instantly become iconic when transformed by his own production. The beat on “Back to Me” is propulsive and infectious. As has been singled out online, the melodic sample on “Burn” feels like something out of his production bag of tricks from 20 years ago. But the lyricism—whether in debauched misogynist rap trope mode, or in repugnant culture war edgelord mode—tarnishes the project beyond rescue. This is a shame. I’ll leave the last words here to The Washington Post’s pop music critic Chris Richards who just published his review of the new record and sums up this entire situation the best:

One of the great tragedies in 21st-century popular music is how the words “new Kanye West album” went from meaning “thrilling expression of pathfinding nowness” to “sad guy saying more gross stuff.” What an undoing. We should be mourning a lost greatness, but grief feels impossible when the fallen maestro won’t stop being hateful and annoying.

1. An apology that, as some pointed out, could have easily been authored by ChatGPT.