Album Review: Kanye West, Bully

Culturally, Kanye West has brought us into uncharted territory in the last few years. No other artist could’ve embraced the far-right, rubbed shoulders with Nazis, released a song praising Hitler, and still maintained even a shred of global cultural relevance.

But Kanye West’s main problem this last decade (well, his main problem after all the problems listed above) is that his music hasn’t been very good. Not since 2016’s The Life of Pablo has he sounded like he’s had anything interesting to say. 2017’s Ye was a paltry affair, 2019’s Jesus Is King insisted on itself too much, while 2021’s Donda and 2022’s Donda 2 felt like poor attempts to capitalise on the zeitgeist’s penchant for controversy - both albums felt beneath him.

Bully is a surprisingly good album. The album cover features a black-and-white photo of West’s child, Saint, wearing titanium grills (this seems like a wiser choice than the previous album cover idea - a red swastika over a black background…). The artist unveiled most of the album tracks at a listening party, which was live-streamed on YouTube. As the album plays, a series of masked men wrestle with each other in a four-pointed wrestling ring, with the kind of quiet geometrics that recall Beckett’s Quad (No? Just me?).

The album is a return to the old Kanye. He starts off with ‘KING’, where a gospel preacher voice gives way to insanely infectious dark synth beats. Lyrically, he’s back to reflecting on the whirlwind of his life through the prism of pop cultural references (“I brought a white queen to the altar/Couldn't happen without Martin Luther…[But] What's the Kelly Price? What's the Kevin Costner?”)

The album is a lot more vulnerable than you might’ve expected for a man who once seemed lost to the dark rabbit hole of far-right conspiracy theories. On ‘Mama’s Favourite’, he genuinely sounds like he’s in a state of grace; the song is in the same category as 2005’s ‘Hey Mama’ and 2004’s ‘Family Business’, and features a touching, recorded outro from his long-deceased mother. He is also graceful and lucid on ‘Preacher Man’.

He addresses the controversy around his highly publicised behaviour several times during the album, but he wears it all very lightly, as if it were all just a stepping stone to further his art. There are no apologies, but nor are there over-justifications or defensive relitigations of his actions. He sums things up playfully, casually, on ‘Whatever Works’: “Had a change of heart, I've felt different at first/Lotta pain, lotta hurt, but still - could've been worse.”

When he’s good, he’s so good. Bully finds him locked in, knowing exactly what samples to use, when to cut them, when to let them run, when to warp them into something unique. On 2016’s song ‘I Love Kanye’, he poked fun at the tired expectation for him to “Be the ‘old Kanye’/Chop up the soul, Kanye,” but you get the impression here that he’s reconciled himself with the gifts that soul music offers him. And why not? He’s brilliant at mining old soul records and breathing new life into them. This album isn’t pushing new boundaries - the way that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus did - but so what? Arguably, West’s biggest musical problem of the last ten years has been constantly trying to do the unexpected rather than just doing what he’s good at.

The album part of the listening party ends, majestically, with ‘Highs and Lows’, which features rousing piano chords and lyrics addressing his place both within and without the cultural matrix: “Ain’t nobody bigger than the program/’Til you bigger than the program.”

After the album proper ends, we get mixed versions of several of the songs, followed by an odd playlist-coda, featuring everything from 2010’s ‘Runaway, to 2013’s Bound 2’, and the Esdeekid song ‘4 Raws’. Why he chose to end it this way is anyone’s guess.

Is this his best album ever? Nope, but it’s certainly his best in 10 years. Will he chop and change and delay it before it gets its official official physical album release? Bet on it.

8/10