10 Quick Reactions to Kanye West's "Yeezus"

Kanye West's sixth solo album, Yeezus, finally hit the streets today. Or, the e-streets. The 10-track album, featuring production by Daft Punk, Rick Rubin, and guest appearances from Chief Keef, King L, and Kid Cudi, among others, leaked five days before its official release date of June 18.

It adheres to no boundaries. West was not looking for a radio hit (hence the lack of singles leading up to the release), and the jarring, electro-influenced production is about as far away from anything that could be described as "easy listening" as possible. But while there's plenty of new sounds, it's filled with familiar personality. Plenty of the emotions that Kanye fans have come to expect: arrogance, self-righteousness, anger, vulnerability, fear.

We got our hands on Yeezus and made 10 quick reactions to the 10 track project. Yeezy Season is in full effect.

Peep the full tracklist below:

Few albums have been so minutely dissected and analyzed before their release as Yeezus. And while there has been much discussion of the EDM influence and the Daft Punk production and the "Strange Fruit" samples and all the rest, there has been much less discussion of the profound dancehall influence on the album. Not only is the overall sound of the record—stripped-down, hard-edged, digital—very much representative of a dancehall asesthetic, but it's full up of dancehall reggae samples.

Remember when Kim Kardashian and Kanye West hit up the 2013 Met Gala? Forget Kim's dress, Kanye graced the stage to perform new music that we can now identify as "On Sight" and more. However, there was one track, reportedly called "Awesome," that model Coca Rocha Vined at the event.

The caption to the Vine is "Kanye telling Kim not to worry what anyone says that she's awesome. Quite touching really:"

The track, with a chorus that sounds something like "I've got a love/I've got a hope/I got a chance/'Cause baby you're awesome," is nowhere to be found on Yeezus. —Lauren Nostro

Even as 'Ye has left his hometown behind for the museums and runways of cities more cosmopolitan than the old hog butchery capital of the world, Chicago still plays a big role in the sound of his music. It comes up in obvious ways; the two guest rappers are Chief Keef (on a hook only) and King Louie, young leaders of the city’s infamous "drill scene." His inclusion of King Louie is particularly interesting. Keef, obviously, had the attention of the same kind of trend-spotting art students that seem like a core part of Kanye’s aesthetic world these days. But Louie, although a part of the same scene, missed much of that attention, despite considerably more developed lyrical abilities. But it could also be about Kanye’s former manager and old friend, John Monopoly, who discovered King Louie early on; he is referenced on “I Am A God”: “Monop in this bitch again.”

Other Chicago touch-points are more musical. Kanye has claimed an early Chicago House influence in his recent New York Times interview, and there is a focus on texture and abrasion that seems, at the least on a surface level, derivative of Chicago House music’s searing 909 basslines and synthesizers. (At times, the rough timbre of certain tracks sounds even even closer to industrial artists like Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle.) But the opening, Daft Punk-produced track “On Sight” was actually more reminiscent of a later Chicago house artist who Kanye might have heard on a few runways in his early years: Felix Da Housecat, whose “Silver Screen (Shower Scene)” was a key single in the early-'00s “electroclash” movement that took hip urbanites by storm in the early 2000s—right around the time ‘Ye first started seeing success. Of course, the album is considerably less functionalthan most house music is. There are beats, but they don’t seem very focused on the physicality. Instead, they sit apart, a piece of art.

Of course, the most Chicago moment of all is “Black Skinheads,” which seems to flip the drums from Gary Glitter’s “Rock N Roll Part 2,” a song used in plenty of sports arenas, but that has been a longtime staple at the Chicago Bulls’ United Center. Tommy Edwards, the Bulls’ announcer from 1976 to 1990, is credited as the first sports announcer to play the song, back when the Bulls still played in Chicago Stadium. To this day in Chicago, it’s common for Bulls fans en route to the arena to hear a bucket boy play the beat while singing the na na na na na na, HEY chorus. —David Drake

At Milk Studios in New York's Meatpacking District earlier this week, Kanye West said it himself—his new strategy is called no strategy, and he's found a way to sell more music, and that's called making better music.

What's better music? Music that's not catered to radio play. He said himself at Govenors Ball on Sunday night: "But honestly, at this point, when I listen to radio, that ain't what I wanna be no more."

It's the first recognizable concept after a quick listen of Yeezus track by track. If TNGHT beats aren't played on the radio now, a Kanye verse may expose them to the nation—but the "R U Ready" beat now on "On Sight" and industrial electro tracks like "Send It Up," and "I Am a God" certainly don't fit the radio mold. (Nor, of course, does screaming "I am a God.")

There's no song structured like a radio hit—verse followed by hook, with a solid intro or outro. It's entirely abstract, with tracks like "Bound" absent of drums, "I'm In It" heavy with samples and dark, otherworldly production. If anything, "Hold My Liquor" with Chief Keef may be closest thing to radio fare. And even still, with Keef's verse taking the autotunedsing-rap vocal style he wierded us out with on "Citgo" to new strange new heights, it sounds like nothing you might hear on the radio. Exactly like Kanye wanted. —Lauren Nostro

There’s a certain feeling that only your first listen to highly anticipated album can give you. It’s like unwrapping the ultimate Christmas present—except you do it for an hour, and then it turns out that the present is actually a jigsaw puzzle that you can’t wait to put together. We got that feeling in spades today with Yeezus, it's almost a little overwhelming.

Everyone has been talking about Kanye's shift towards minimalism. When chatting with the New York Times's Jon Caramanica recently, Kanye himself boasted about bringing in Rick Rubin for his famous minimalist ear. He wanted help in paring down from the original arrangements. Listening to the final product, we're surprised by its fullness. Every song sounds loud, like “Play this at a screeching volume so you’re parents think they need to put you back on Ritalin” loud. Tracks like “Blood On The Leaves” have so much going on—two concurrent but totally different samples run while Yeezy oozes on auto-tune that it’s hard to digest in one take. If this is the final product, we can’t even imagine what Rick Rubin reduced from. —Insanul Ahmed

Kanye West isn’t just ambitious, he’s one of the most adventurous artists in music period. Over the years, his progression has mostly been on a macro level; album to album he’s changed up his sound and explored new territory on every project. But on Yeezus it happens on a micro level. Certain songs either evolve into new sounds as they go along (like on “Can’t Hold My Liquor” and “Blood On The Leaves”) or they take a quick hiatus (like on the middle of “On Sight” or the end of “Bound”).

This isn’t total departure for Kanye, he’s done it previously on the end of “Drive Slow” and the midway point of “Devil In A New Dress.” Still, he’s taking it to a new level here, which suggests the wide breadth of sounds ‘Ye wanted to touch on. It’s kind of like a cheat code, throwing in a short sonic interlude without sacrificing the overall effect. —Insanul Ahmed

When the news first surfaced that Kanye had mashed together “Strange Fruit,” an iconic song about the lynching of black men in the American South, and C-Murder’s 1998 “Down for My Niggas,” it was the absurdity of the juxtaposition that seemed most noteworthy. One of No Limit’s most unapologetically low-art singles brushing up against one of the most powerfully political songs in history was, in the moment, a one-dimensional punchline in the vein of a Girl Talk mash-up. How irreverent!

But there is definitely more to this. “Blood On The Leaves” is an especially in-your-face track. The song begins with plaintive piano and a sample of Nina Simone’s cover of “Strange Fruit.” The original is not a song that goes down easily—it’s a stark, harrowing indictment of America’s terrorism of its black citizens. There’s a chutzpah to even touching a song of such weighty significance, especially when attaching it to a narrative that seems autobiographical.

It’s not unprecedented for him—he’s previously sampled such celebrated, revered tracks as Curtis Mayfield’s optimistic Civil Rights anthem “Move On Up,” just to have Lupe Fiasco rap about Lupin over it. And he swiped Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” in a way that mostly proclaimed, "I have enough money to sample this song." But even those songs, as much extra-textual significance as they had, were nothing as confrontational as this depiction of the violence at the heart of American racism.

Then "Blood On the Leaves" suddenly punches in with horns that seem directly derived from KLC’s beat for C-Murder, and is soon followed by Kanye chanting that song’s hook. C-Murder’s song is about loyalty to your crew—a common idea in rap. (Think of Lil Reese’s “Us” hook from last year, or Drake’s “No New Friends” derivation of it this year.) But on “Down 4 My...” it’s explicitly racial. It deals in exclusion and in identity.

A few years after it had been released, it was still being used at my college by the black student organization at parties. Where the white-dominated fraternities would play “Pour Some Sugar On Me” for a moment of communal unity, the black men’s organization played C-Murder. It was the time when, as a white person, you stepped to the side. This song was about an experience that was hyperspecific, and that immediately put two groups of people on either side of experiencing it.

Interestingly—and I’m not sure if this is intentional, or a Freudian slip—Kanye actually misquotes the hook: “Fuck them other niggas cuz I’m down with my niggas,” is what Kanye says. In the original version, C-Murder says he’s down for them. —David Drake

"Don't judge 'em Joe Brown." (“On Sight”)

“We get this bitch shaking like Parkinsons.” (“On Sight”)

“No sports bra, lets keep it bouncing.” (“On Sight”)

“In a French ass restaurant, hurry up with my damn croissants.” (“I Am God”)

“I'm 'bout to wild the fuck out, I'm going Bobby Boucher.” (“New Slaves”)

"Eating Asian pussy all I need is sweet and sour sauce." (“I'm In It”)

"They ballin in the d-league, I'm speaking swag-hili." (“I'm In It”)

“Uh, I'm a rap-lic priest/Uh, getting head by the nuns.” (“I’m In It”)

“She say, ‘Can you get my friends in the club?’/I say, ‘Can you get my Benz in the club?’” (“Send It Up”)

“Start a Fight Club, Brad reputation.” (“Bound 2”)

Here is a key to understanding Kanye West's art: his enormous, famous, gargantuan sense of self is balanced by an equally enormous, less famous, gargantuan willingness to expose his own self doubt. Remember in "Runaway," when he's toasting his own assholish behavior, but over melancholic piano plinking that says more than the words themselves? And then at the hook, he tips his hand, makes his self-loathing explicit? "Run away from me, baby," is his only advice. "Because I'm a terrible monster-person who sort of hates himself" is the unspoken message.

There's a point on the new album that exposes the same. So awesome to call a song "I Am a God." So bold and confident. So "Fuck you and your humility." And I don't think he's being ironic, either. If ever there was an artist confident in his power, in his ability to create worlds, and move people to action, it is Kanye. And the start of the song, again, revels in shamelessly boorish behavoir. "Hurry up with my damn massage!"

But then what's that sound at the end of the song? The screaming—harrowing, desperate, scared. It's like something out of a horror movie. Gasping for breath, the sound of running footsteps. Kanye is the one running now. Away from something that, by the sound of it, is much bigger and more powerful than he is. What's happened here? Nothing celebratory. This is the sound of paying a terrible price. The cost of self-regard? Of blasphemous hubris? —Dave Bry

The album concludes in stunning fashion with "Bound 2," which will leave fans of hip-hop's soul-sample era foaming at the mouth. The production is remarkably minimalist, composed of just samples and a Charlie Wilson-featured breakdown that revisits Kanye's work on Graduation. Lyrically, he makes sure no woman over the age of 30 will ever set foot in Forever 21 again, drops a few well-timed references to the hilariously uncouth Jerome character made famous by Martin and analyzes relationships as only Kanye can.

The beat, which is the closest to straight up "hip-hop" on the entire album, will have everyone from wannabe rappers to the experienced ones who should know better kicking freestyles all summer long in an attempt to recreate the magic Kanye captures here:

Can anyone top that? We'll hear rappers try, whether we want to or not. —Julian Kimble