a review of "bully" by kanye west

(originally published on rateyourmusic. fuck you to whoever took this down)
i can be the cleanest millionaire, i'm from the mud still

from the very moment its "official" release appeared, i knew that my listening to donda in full was a genuine impossibility, the same as the reversal of gravity, a medium so saturated with infamies it could not in any way be genuine, but one must understand kanye once lived, was once vivacious as they came, once required vigorous defenses to friends and family who refused to understand his merits as they were in those days, that he would come back around, and that his life was a samsaric cycle in miniature of sorts, a constant series of rebirths. years passed, and this possibility became more and more restricted, all the way until donda ceased to embrace its great, daring emptiness one could hear in the early listening events, refusing to acknowledge nothing would be filled in. i could never find joy in the hackneyed christian morality imposed onto donda, lines like "kanye and jay still brothers, they both billionaires" nagging at me the whole time i tried to listen, no rebirth having been made so long as ye's self-denial would proceed, the cycle of west in suspended animation, a hope fading and fading with each subsequent twist and turn. now, ye the nazi, ye the demagogue, ye the one with whom they fear to associate for damn good reason, is not a billionare, this line dated to only a series of specific moments in his life which can no longer be recreated under any circumstances. thus, through self-interpolation and AI-aided self-debasements, ye acknowledges an extraordinary inverisimiltude within himself on bully, the incompleteness finally a salient factor in his work, the larger-than-life nature he cultivated no longer able to suffice as an environment in his dental-gas mind, and in acknowledging the hellishness of being kanye without any self-mythologization, without any self, ye finally, in many ways, is able to be somebody. one could even call him purified at last, airing out his last grievances, being ran down the lobby, no longer hearing screams of a vast, forsaken love. no family surround kanye, dying fameless and soon broke, except stock-market plummeters and oval-office ghouls, which must mean it's over after, on "close to you," he - or some machined approximation thereof - goes quiet in barely-comprehensible moments of apparent brain-fried earnest, trying to reason or perhaps negotiate. everything is silent, as is everyone, because the artist has left the room, leaving only semblances and footprints to be collected for distant-future reliquaries ignoring prior deeds, just as ye himself knows no precedent, no joy, no spirit.

in 2018, kanye west attempted to make an album titled love everyone. therewithin, a song titled "dj khaled son," to leak in full several years after the album's existence became public knowledge, plays out quietly, unmixed and unmastered, detailing what i might describe as a rich man's false filial piety, a son as a gun, family ties as weapons. it, in the manner of a child, reduces family to a method of self-defense, forming likewise justification for some kind of artistic regime, yet half the lyrics can barely be made out, to be labeled unintelligible on lyric sites across the internet, essenceless. even though, with plentiful incoming societal upheaval which surely will rob us of much contemporary work in its haphazardly wobbling place, most art made today will not receive half the appraisal bully will, we must remember that this is art's logical extreme, the formation and asasembly of its own absence, looking into a mirror and seeing no reflection. remember this when someday you, historian, write your prosopographies.