A musical confession that echoes art and politics
Kanye West’s political misadventures, when he was last heard from, were a catastrophic mess of immature diplomacy and idiosyncrasy. The embarrassment to his listeners and lawmakers threatened to ruin his cultural standing. Now West returns with Bully, an album that revitalizes his career — plus, a music video for the song “Father” that ranks with the most compelling art works of the modern era.
The moral depletion of hip-hop is the subject of Bully. This new 18-track album by Ye (West’s present showbiz moniker) follows his recent public political implosion and, though self-examination is a rare phenomenon among public figures, also shares more intimate reflections.
Through this hip-hop lens, Ye observes the genre’s current decadence, the erasure of its folkloric celebration, and its absolute exploitation by hacks in government and the press. Very few black American artists address their political manipulation, but Ye understands, perhaps better than most, how it is both private and public. Bully begins, “The time is now, right now. This is the hour, this is the new dawn, this is the new day.” (Critic John Demetry has pointed out the resemblance to Morrissey’s lead track “You’re Right, It’s Time” on Make-Up Is a Lie.)
As Public Enemy said back when hip-hop was great: “This is a journey into sound.” Bully’s message kicks in through the art echoes of black culture and the religious allegory of the “Father” music video directed by Ye’s consort, Bianca Censori. She sets the video in a diorama format, a pale teal-and-beige color scheme depicting a church service with a choir on the left and congregants on the right. It is stylized like Swedish director Roy Andersson’s caricatures of social habits in About Endlessness. It’s a bizarre approach to the sanctities of black American gospel — bizarre, as Ye has been called by detractors — yet also original.
Travis Scott (no stranger to public ignominy) sings about a missing role model, ancestor, and creator. The longing for a divine, protective father figure responds to the intimidation of the cruel world. Censori’s two-dimensional imagery satirizes devotional chromolithography, inserting odd details: an armored knight, astronauts, magicians, UFOs, brides, a showgirl, Michael Jackson (impersonator Fabio Jackson) sitting on a back pew, and Kanye himself on a front pew so as to deconstruct religious conventions.
These modernist ironies portray the madness surrounding hip-hop’s degradation. “Father” echoes the early R&B transition of gospel to secular black pop music. Scott’s recurring vocal “You been better to us / Better than we been to ourselves” cites the Isley Brother’s epochal “Shout” (1959), in which black rejoicing accompanied the advances of the civil rights movement, a revolution bowdlerized during the Obama era.
Seeing Kanye himself unmasked by astronauts as an alien is a savvier conceit than Donald Glover’s This Is America. Censori and Ye transform minstrelsy into a new vision of Millennial black spiritual struggle. Anyone doubting Censori’s auteur credentials should consider whether this work of art is any less credible than the recent Academy Awards freak show featuring showbiz progressives who pretend that life in post-Biden, post-inferno L.A. is satisfactory. (The shock of this bully pulpit video evokes the album jacket of the Barry Godber painting for King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), known as “The Schizoid Man.”)
Playing with idea of alien (and alienation), Bully hits back at political exploitation. Its gospel-lite tunes announce the artist’s revival, an awakening. This is Ye revealing himself more effectively than he did in his eccentric political stances. “I Can’t Wait” samples the Supremes hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” from when black pop used to be superb. Without Diana Ross’s bounce, Ye’s mournful homage conveys authentic remorse and purpose — an amazing transformation that clarifies what made the Motown classic magnificent, unlike Phil Collins’s ’80s trivialization.
As Bully proceeds, “Punch Drunk” offers gospel ecstasies, and “Whatever Works” features gospel and R&B reverberations throughout. The contrapuntal “Preacher Man” is a lament for the promise of marriage and what it means, over the chirping voice of a blushing bride, while “Beauty and the Beast” reveals Ye, the bully who gets bullied, blushing. This allusion to the tabloid sensation of Ye’s marital split is the most serious break-up recording since Marvin Gaye’s two-disc divorce opus Here, My Dear.
On “This One Here,” a contrite Ye concedes, “I been fighting for my life.” He dramatizes the cultural dilemma of how marriage, camaraderie, and solidarity are built or achieved. “This done healed and moved on,” Ye says of being brutally misunderstood. “When the evening gets darkest / I know dawn is upon us.” Pop art of this serious quality confronts how black artists and politicians have lost God-consciousness, as demonstrated at the Jesse Jackson funeral that was converted into a political rally. Bully is superior to hip-hop’s usual political profiteering.
