Kanye West

You wouldn't know it to hear Yeezus, but Kanye West is a kept man; he fell in love with Kim Kardashian, they just had a daughter and his non-committal good life is changing in so many ways. On Yeezus, West invites us to the decadent, bonkers bachelor party of his dreams; it's an all-id affair where his dick barely stays zipped up inside his black leather jeans. "One last announcement/no sports bra, let's keep it bouncing," he spits towards the end of scorching opener "On Sight," and it's one of many problematic objectifications of women West drops with a shit-eating grin. A Kanye conundrum (one of a gazillion) lies in the fact that he's both the sophomoric king of clever gutter rhymes and a high-minded artist who unquestionably impacts popular culture with every new flourish. "I am the nucleus," he recently told the New York Times and, though he has been rightly mocked by comedians and critics not buying his "I Am a God" posturing, dude is undeniably right. "There's leaders and there's followers," Ye states on the pulsing, simmer-to-boil rage of "New Slaves," and he's so the former — the most significant artistic force in music right now — which is vexing because he acts like such an asshole. So, where's he taking us? On Yeezus, it's this futuristic soundscape, moulded by West, Daft Punk, Chief Keef, Bon Iver, Kid Cudi and many more, that executive producer Rick Rubin stepped in and stripped down to its minimalist core. Where West's 2010 landmark, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, successfully aspired to find some middle ground between layered, classical ornamentation and gritty boom bap, Yeezus is for the screwface snobs in the club with secret hate-crushes on the hipsters at their day jobs. It's Kanye West baring his fangs, over-sharing ("To all my second-string bitches, trying to get a baby," he growls on "Blood on the Leaves," presumably at groupies but this precedes allusions to Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and we've all seen the pics of BK scowling at KK) and consciously grappling with this over-reaching, over-indulging beast within, fighting hard to believe that "one good girl is worth a thousand bitches."