OPINION — Kanye West wants you to listen to him. For the past ten years, we’ve all been comfortable with hearing him. We’ve been comfortable bobbing our head to his beats. We’ve been comfortable, but he’s never been comfortable. Kanye always wanted you to hear him. If the latest rumors are true, you’ll have no choice but to do just that.
Rumors are floating that Kanye West will forgo beats altogether in his next project and will release a spoken word album. Is there any solid evidence that this will actually happen? Not really, but who’s to say it won’t? A Kanye West spoken word album would be the most Kanye West thing to happen in his career.
Nobody is more aware of Kanye West’s brilliance than Kanye West. Those memes that you see on the Internet of Yeezus taking pictures of himself and thinking he’s the greatest thing to happen to the world since sliced bread are a little overboard but aren’t as big of hyperbole as one might think.
This is the same guy who takes close to 30 minutes out of his live show just to talk. Not rap, not sing, not dance or anything … just talk. An entire album of just that can’t be too farfetched, now can it? I know you’re sitting on pins and needles waiting for Mr. West to drop a beat-less album where he tells us that we are all sheep and slaves for following big corporations as he signs his deals with Adidas, but who are we to judge? You’re going to listen anyway.
It’s the ultimate troll moment in the history of music.
Critics of his last project, Yeezus, said that his beat selection was too jarring and not as aurally pleasing as his soul-sampling past would indicate. “On Sight” literally gave listeners headaches upon first listen, and that was done purposefully.
So what will Kanye do to satisfy those who didn’t like those beats on Yeezus? Dump beats altogether. That’ll teach us. Listening to West wax poetic about how Nori goo-goo-gah-gahs and how his wife is an American icon and how they had Vogue magazines flying off the shelves is something that the gossip rags might eat up. Music fans, however, might make this the last straw with Kanye.
While I’m not a betting man, I don’t think Kanye would forfeit his greatest talent just to tell us how great he is and how horrible the rest of the world is for 13 instrumental-less tracks. It’s not like he’ll listen to any of this anyway. In Yeezy fashion, Yeezy is going to do what Yeezy wants to do. And in true Yeezy fashion, we might all follow his lead, again.
Kazeem Famuyide is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheSTASHED.com. Tweet him at @RealLifeKaz.