One recent tweet: “We’re trying new ideas without the fear of not being perfect … It’s just a gut feeling sometimes … just making stuff with your friends … ” Another: “We’re still the kids we used to be.” That last line quotes from Ye’s “Ghost Town,” the song that’s both the outlier from and decoder for this phase of West’s music. West, hearing the braps, skrrts, and yughs of his peers, has responded with baby talk: scoop! Which fits with his general childishness kick of late. As “mumble rap” rises, so does the importance of the ad-lib (catchphrases and onomatopoeias blurted in the margins).
Hip-hop has, any traditionalists will tell you, been playing with willful incoherence in other ways lately, too. But West’s work of the past month highlights the deeper ethos that’s been crossing over: rock’s specific approach to the visceral over the verbal-its comfort with the gloriously inarticulate-as it strives to portray inner conflict. Rap and rock have been for the last few years in a crossover moment as the younger genre has leapfrogged the older one in popularity while borrowing its signifiers, and West and Cudi have long admired guitar gods. Six-string strums, including from a Kurt Cobain sample, figure in other songs, too. II)”-that roil with peeling guitar, off-key yowls, and drunken drumming. The standout songs of his album Ye and the follow-up Kids See Ghosts are a duo-“Ghost Town” and “Freeee (Ghost Town, Pt. Which might explain why, in 2018, the best music from hip-hop’s lead provocateur is rock and roll. Or they’ve been mouth noises: the gat-gat-gats he opens the Kid Cudi collaboration Kids See Ghosts with, or the scoopity-poop he trolled the world with on the pseudo single “Lift Yourself.” He’s in a phase of feeling, of signaling, rather than effectively explaining.
Or they’ve been images: the crackling bonfire of the Wyoming release party for his album Ye, or the infamous signed MAGA hat he put on Twitter. They’ve been beats, as in the sleek rattle of Pusha T’s Daytona. Kanye West has put a lot of words into the world this year-in tweets, epic-length interviews, and an album-a-week producing spree-but his most memorable statements haven’t been verbal.
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