Kanye West unveiled A new album entitled "Ye"
A few days after the controversy surrounding his support for Donald Trump and an ambiguous statement on slavery, rapper Kanye West returns with a new album, covering what happened lately in the news but also depicting his recent struggles.
With his consummate taste for staging, he presented, on Thursday night, this eighth studio disc in front of a few hundred handpicked people, outside a hangar in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he recorded the album.
"Hip-hop is the first artistic form created by free black men," comedian and actor Chris Rock said in the opening. "And no black man has benefited more from this freedom than Kanye West", who didn't speak, contenting himself with making his last opus listen to the spectators present.
Nearly a month after challenging the chronicle with a series of tweets and a polemical interview, the Chicago child obviously wanted to let his music speak.
In late April, Kanye West tweeted his love for his "brother" Donald Trump, even posing with a "Make America Great Again" hat, the former developer's campaign slogan, and claiming his freedom of expression and opinion .
A few days later, he had put a token in the media machine by calling slavery a "choice" for blacks, triggering an uproar even greater than that prompted by his statement to Donald Trump. With his keen sense of the word, Kanye West returns to this episode in one of the seven tracks of this tight album, "Wouldn't Leave", evoking the outraged reactions that followed his remarks.
"Just imagine if they caught me on a wild day," he says in a tone of distrust, while paying tribute to the reaction of his wife, Kim Kardashian West.
"Told her she could leave me now, but she wouldn't leave," he says.
Other titles evoke the news, like "Yikes" with a reference to the movement #MeToo and hip-hop producer Russell Simmons, accused of rape by several women.
Kanye West also mentions pornographic porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had a relationship with Donald Trump, in "All Mine", devoted to adultery, without mentioning the name of the president of the United States.
But most of "Ye", the title of the album, lies more in the propensity of the rapper to introspection, which was part of its success.
This Musical Piece has a similar DNA to its predecessors, but has a more intimate tone, without the epic breath and complexity that have made several Kanye West albums references to rap.
"Ye", one of his nicknames, talks about the depression, which he personally suffered in late 2016, and the demons who live there, even evoking suicide in "I Thought About Killing You".
It is also a question of maturity in this very melodic album, with choirs that are dear to him and a crowd of prestigious guests, like John Legend or Nicki Minaj.
The forty-year-old, who turns 41 on June 8, describes the evolution of his vision of women, which he now sees as "something to grow, more like something to conquer".
In the same title, "Violent Crimes", which closes the album, he says this mixture of pride and anxiety that provokes at home his two daughters, North and Chicago, and which echoes his personality, megalomaniac, pile side , anxious, side-facing.
Whisper it from the rooftops or shout it in the underground clubs: hip hop, once a symphony of street-smart lyricism and beats that spoke to the soul, now dances perilously on the edge of an artistic abyss…