Lou Reed Reviews Yeezus

A few weeks after its release on 18 June 2013, Lou Reed sat down with Kanye West's Yeezus and wrote about it for The Talkhouse. He was fascinated by the contradiction at its centre: a record that sounded stripped back, abrasive, almost skeletal, but was built from an enormous amount of detail.

‘People say this album is minimal. And yeah, it's minimal. But the parts are maximal.’

That description gets more interesting once you look at what's actually inside that supposedly minimal object: the DNA of Yeezus.

• Blood on the Leaves: Nina Simone, ‘Strange Fruit’
• I Am a God: Capleton, ‘Forward Inna Dem Clothes’, plus Manna Dey, Rahul Dev Burman and Asha Bhosle, ‘Are Zindagi Hai Khel’
• New Slaves: Omega, ‘Gyöngyhajú Lány’
• Send It Up: Beenie Man, ‘Memories’
• I'm In It: Kenny Lattimore, ‘Lately’
• Bound 2: Ponderosa Twins Plus One, ‘Bound’, plus an interpolation of Wee's ‘Aeroplane (Reprise)’
• Guilt Trip: elements of ‘Chief Rocka’ and a sample of the ‘Blocka’ remix

Nina Simone. Hungarian psychedelic rock. Jamaican dancehall. American soul. Hip hop. Indian film music. All of it compressed into one of the most deliberately stark pieces of packaging of its era. Just a clear jewel case with no booklet and no artwork, a barcode, and a strip of orange tape.

Reed wasn't uncritical. He thought some of the lyrics were juvenile, ‘the same old b.s.’, and said as much. That's part of what makes his praise land. He wasn't there to worship the record, he was there to listen to it. And musically, he heard someone pushing structure, texture and contrast further than most mainstream artists around him were willing to go.

A few more things worth pulling out of the full essay. Reed treated the record less like a collection of singles and more like a movie or a novel, with tracks bleeding into one another instead of sitting alone on their own island. He also linked it back to his own catalogue: when critics once called his experimental record Metal Machine Music ‘challenging’, Reed said he never saw it that way, he just thought of it as pure guitar in every variation, made because he loved it. He heard that same instinct in West, someone making a record because he loves it, not to dare the listener into keeping up.

He also zeroed in on details most listeners skip past: the buried sample of a 1970s Hungarian rock band inside New Slaves, which he compared to the visual effects at the end of a big-budget film, and the contradiction of West claiming outsider status on that same track while very obviously living large. For Reed, that tension was not hypocrisy so much as the whole point, a way of keeping one foot in the street even after becoming one of the people he claims to distrust.

His verdict, in the end, was about as strong as Lou Reed's verdicts got:

‘No one's near doing what he's doing, it's not even on the same planet.’

Thirteen years on, the samples on Yeezus read less like curiosities and more like a template for how far a mainstream pop record could reach across genre, geography and decade, and still sound like one thing.

Lou Reed on Kanye West, writing for The Talkhouse, 2013. Full review: talkhouse.com