Why is it called an opera? As Kanye has no ability to write an opera whatsoever I can only surmise that it’s not one, but has been called one, or it’s sort of one and other people have written it.
How do you know Kanye has no ability to write an opera whatsoever? Did he tell you? And since when was collaboration in pursuit of the realisation of an artistic endeavour any sort of anomaly or failing? In any case, it was a capital O avant-garde Opera. It wasn't pop music in any shape or form. There were a couple sort of catch-your-breath interludes that came close - a woman played an acoustic guitar for a moment, the Golden Idol cooed the hook from "Wolves" - but mostly it was strange and abrasive stuff.
I mean, it was ramshackle as fuck, a halfways-realised sort of idea just peeled off his brain before it was ever even done being thought and flung on stage with folk racing around with Sellotape trying to keep the fucking thing in place as it progressed, and a lot of the same sort of thing kept happening over and over, a lot of Nebuchadnezzar just screaming at people and running around in circles. I didn't realise at the time that Nebuchadnezzar was Sheck Wes, but then I didn't know what Sheck Wes looked like. I listened to his
Mudboy album a lot last year but I couldn't have picked him out of a line up of just him and a hedge.
But there were some bits that were jaw-dropping. The choir all falling to one side one after the other like dominoes as Nebuchadnezzar ran screaming among them. That was fucking stunning. There were a few bits like that where it was clear a lot of thought had gone into what was happening, but then there was also a lot of stuff that felt like they were just running about waiting for the next thing that they actually put some work into.
A lot of people have remarked on Kanye reading the line about "Nebuchadnezzar fell on his FACE!" three times because Sheck Wes didn't hear him and didn't respond appropriately. Kanye just laughed and carried on. I didn't catch that. I heard him repeating the line, but I assumed it was an artistic decision, not an accidental result of probably about fifteen minutes rehearsal an hour before the thing was meant to start. I wouldn't be surprised if the two hours late thing was because they were frantically making the half of it up backstage and hadn't decided exactly what to do yet.
Physically, I mean. Not musically. That was locked down.
His reading was pretty bad throughout. Sounded like he was reading the thing for the first time. Maybe he was.
But fuck it, I love it. I love that he just decides right, an opera next, and here it is within a couple of weeks. I mean, part of me wishes he would put a bit more thought into these projects he's dishing out at six thousand miles a minute.
Kids See Ghosts seems like an aberration in his recent work, the only thing that comes close to sounding as fully realised as
Life Of Pablo .I'm not counting
Daytona or anything in that, just stuff where he himself is front and centre. Obviously
Daytona is fucking stunning. But as far as solo or near-enough projects go, I don't think we're going to get anything else like that coming out of him for a long time. If this
Jesus Is King 2 with Dre sees the light of day I don't doubt it'll be half-arsed too.
But then it's not half-arsed. It's over excited about itself and under-realised. It's not the result of laziness, it's the result of an artistic and creative restlessness and an imagination that won't shut the fuck up for two minutes and won't be happy working on one project when there's a thousand others that could be worked on instead. So we get a thousand projects that he was surely ecstatic about creating, but then his brain ran away with him somewhere else.
Saying that, what I'm listening to most is that
Yandhi bootleg. I still put it on most days, for it sounds phenomenal and doesn't really sound much more "Unfinished" than
Jesus Is King does.
