Kanye West & Kid Cudi

Kanye, having lost the responsibility for his words in an infantile manner, recorded, together with Kid Kadi, an album about how catharsis and liberation make us return to childhood. Having ceased to defend their freedom in the world around them, they recorded seven gospel ballads about the struggle for internal freedom, the struggle against personal demons.
At the end of April, when Kanye was tweeting and making public round-the-clock, I wrote a short note that he was a “free” person in a certain sense, mainly because he was not responsible for his words. By chance it somehow happened that for his two plates (“Ye” and “Kids See Ghosts”), released this month, the topic of freedom turned out to be central. However, the solo “Ye” was by and large a stupid album, the first unsuccessful disc by Kanye, where, by inertia, he continued to provoke the public, to joke scabrous jokes and to make vague statements. His and previous promo campaign with Trump and statements in the spirit of “slavery was a choice” could be interpreted in the spirit that free thinking is an opportunity to express things that people sympathizing with you can offend and strain. Which in itself, of course, is a value — America (as far as can be judged from abroad) is now politically polarized, and the pop-cultural establishment in it somehow gathers in a heap on one side of the political spectrum, and at least one Kanye, who refuses to play this game by the rules, he needs for a change. However, the problem lies in the fact that after 2010 Kanye himself lost the ability to make interesting complex statements and qualitative storytelling in his texts in favor of minimalism and cultural provocations, and therefore it turned out that apart from this bare idea, Ye did not offer anything intelligible and resonant ( Well, unless you are really interested in the details of his personal drama – I know that there are quite a few such people).
Thus began the collaboration of Kanye and Kadi 10 years ago.
Kids See Ghosts is a completely different conversation. I can not say how good this album is – humanity in general has long since lost its line to measure albums in which Kanye is involved (as is always the case with people whose public person eclipses creative activity by context), and assesses them indirectly: jumped on another celebrity , there is / there is no respected person on the album like singer Weekend or Kendrick Lamar, whether Kanye himself is like a person in a sober mind and mind or not. The only thing that matters is the answer to the question of whether Kanye has once again done something new and trend-determining what pop culture can steal from him or not. With “Ye”, the answer is rather negative, “Kids See Ghosts” is definitely positive. Kanye, having lost the responsibility for his words in an infantile manner, recorded, together with Kid Kadi, an album about how catharsis and liberation make us return to childhood. Having ceased to defend their freedom in the world around them, they recorded seven gospel ballads about the struggle for internal freedom, the struggle against personal demons.
At the same time, the aesthetics of the album do not allow us to talk about infantilism, it describes the psychedelic experience of “reset”, which pop culture extensively referred to earlier, and its markers on the album read well: the cover itself, psychedelic rock and prog-rock of the 60s, the experience of rebirth under DMT action. Even the onomatopea gun on the first track sounds like an antistress exercise, which the guru of unconventional psychiatry would suggest to the patient.
Do you remember this? Yeah with a golden wreath on his head and Kadi in the form of a hipster from the 60s in the video for the most driving track from the second “Man on the Moon”.
Of course, without Kid Kady, nothing would have happened. Musically, there was always a contrast between them in the sense that Kanye’s emotional songs sometimes prevented him from writing his ego, and Kid Kadi, in turn, spent his whole career a kind of experiment: he tried to sing on a pure emotional outburst, he wrote insanely bad rock -album, not knowing how to play rock, and by and large, even rap did not really know how to read. It is not surprising that over the past ten years they eagerly scooped each other’s ideas and eventually recorded an album where Kadi played good music for the first time in many years, and Kanye for the first time in many years does not sound like a complete goat.
The fact that the album is innovative and outstanding is as true as the fact that it will very well lie on the hot topic of normalizing mental diseases and openly discussing them. I don’t know if he will help someone cope with personal devilry (very likely, because the songs, damn, really emotional), but I’m sure that literally in a year the fruitful Negroes will flood the genre, who will fall into childhood in whole districts and its heavy mental lobe. And it will look ridiculous again, and it will again be clear to everyone who the father of the genre is, and it will inspire confidence in the future; it seems that Kanye even after the fortieth anniversary.