This that feeling we need more of
The hating just brought me more love
Guarantee my vices different than yours was
Drunk off power and I was pouring up
Often, over the past quarter century, the thrill of listening to Ye has been the thrill of listening to someone trying to figure himself out. On his 2004 début album, “The College Dropout,” he sounded like an excited young man whose considerable (and justifiable) confidence only barely outstripped his insecurity, crowing, “Hold up, hold fast, we make more cash / Now tell my mama I belong in that slow class.” By the time he released “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” in 2010, he had entered his imperial phase, and his rhymes reflected the luxurious but sometimes lonely life of a hip-hop star who had mastered his art, and was now trying to master himself: “I just needed time alone with my own thoughts / Got treasures in my mind, but couldn’t open up my own vault.” In the past decade, his more scattershot discography has similarly seemed to reflect his troubled state of mind. His last official album, “Donda 2,” from early 2022, began with a track that appeared to refer to the children he shares with his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian: “When I pick ’em up, I feel like they borrowed / When I gotta return them, scan ’em like a bar code.” It is just about impossible to follow Ye’s music without following his life, too, and without thinking about the permeable membrane that separates them.
So who is Ye now? Listening to “Bully,” it can be hard to tell. Some of the tracks seem designed to remind listeners of his older, less incendiary incarnations. “Punch Drunk,” which lasts less than two minutes, is built on a sped-up sample of the Clark Sisters, and it sounds like a throwback to Ye’s early years, when he made his living by turning old records into new beats that he could sell to fellow-rappers. And “All the Love” evokes the grandeur of the “Twisted Fantasy” era, thanks in part to the contributions of André Troutman, who plays the talk box, a robotic voice-morphing instrument that was also used to great effect by his cousin Roger, from the early-eighties funk band Zapp. The talk box was a precursor to Auto-Tune, which Ye used to create the moaning, melancholy sound of his 2008 landmark, “808s & Heartbreak”; rappers have been leaning heavily on software-enhanced singing ever since. But the new version of Ye that emerges on “Bully” is much less funny than the old version, in addition to being less bilious than the recent version. “I brought a white queen to the altar / Couldn’t happen without Martin Luther,” he declares in one couplet that contains neither a rhyme nor, really, a punch line. Many of the tracks resemble fragments or sketches, with bits of singing and rapping that sound unusually tentative, as if Ye isn’t quite sure how, or how much, to give his listeners what they want.
Over the years, Ye has amassed perhaps the most obsessive fan base in all of hip-hop, and some of them have carefully charted the evolution of the tracks on “Bully.” During that Laboy interview, Ye enthused about a new technology that was allowing him to make music in a different way: artificial intelligence. Ye has often used writers to help compose his music; now, using A.I., he showed Laboy how he could take a recording of someone else rapping and render it in his own voice. A year ago, Ye released a half-hour-long video accompanied by several “Bully” tracks, and many fans thought that they heard evidence of his newfound interest in A.I. Was he really delivering lyrics in Spanish, on a track called “Last Breath,” or had he merely reprogrammed a Spanish-language singer to sound like him? In a post on X last week, he seemed to announce that the new version of “Bully” would contain none of this sort of manipulation. “BULLY ON THE WAY NO AI,” he promised.
