In late April, Kanye West turned the music industry inside out when he announced he would be producing five albums, all set to drop in back-to-back weeks across the early summer. But before we had a chance to fully grasp the magnitude of what Ye sought to accomplish, the creative stretch had already met its end, with the release of Teyana Taylor’s Keep That Same Energy on June 22. After a whirlwind of dramatic presentations, what do we have to show for it?
Now that the numbers from K.T.S.E. are finally in and we have the full picture, the answer is a handful of half-sweet, half-bitter morsels of albums full of Kanye’s most fanciful production efforts. Some songs were immediate favorites; others were a slower burn, and some have yet to catch a spark. Even more polarizing are the albums in full. Some felt like complete, fine-tuned bodies of work (looking at you DAYTONA and Kids See Ghosts). Others… well, you can do the math.
What’s undeniable, though, is Kanye West and G.O.O.D. Music ruled rap (and a smidge of R&B) for five straight weeks, all by the sheer force of will. Yeezy announced it, and it was so—kinda. Along the way, there were hella bumps in the road, mixed in with some pleasant surprises: Hypebeasts got their neon merch;soul samples were strewn across every project; Ty Dolla $ign popped up again and again; streaming apps crashed; listening sessions started ridiculously late; and Kid Cudi hummed, a lot.
To help you better wrap your head around the enormity of everything that happened during Yeezy SZN these past several weeks, we’ve gone through every album and its surrounding release elements with a fine-tooth comb. The infographic below tallies the quantifiable parts of Kanye's production run on DAYTONA, Ye, Kids See Ghosts, Nasir, and KTSE.
Illustrations by Jonathan Fouabi
