TOP 5 YE ALBUMS OF ALL TIME (RANKED)
Having read the Sunday Times Culture supplement's mealy-mouthed inclusion of 'Runaway' by Ye (formerly Kanye) in their Hip-Hop themed article titled '50 Years Of Swagger And The 25 Best Tracks', I felt it necessary to expound a little further on the subject of this glass smashing colossus of the genre.
And as music's most controversial and polarising figure since Richard Wagner has just made a comeback guest appearance in Rome last night on Travis Scott's 'Utopia' Tour, I thought I'd take a crack at ranking his top 5 albums and focus on what I believe is one of the most impressive recording legacies of any modern artist since the days of Frank Sinatra's concept albums at Capitol Records, Miles Davis's genre-bending experimentalism in Jazz and the zeitgeist popping genius of The Beatles twelve-album run for Parlophone/Apple.
Before I rank his top 5 albums, I should just say that all eleven of Ye's albums are near or near enough masterpieces and I have always tended to see them as one giant album in totality, constructing what I believe is a mega diary of a man who has been both God fearing and dangerously messianic in equal measure.
There have even been times when I believed that his increasing fragmentation of sounds leaning heavily into electronic punk/avant grade was a perfect metaphor for his ever-degrading celebrity dameon which could only ultimately end in an Alexander McQueen-style 'Glass Box' audio suicide. But ever since 2013's 'Yeezus', a more spiritual trajectory has emerged replacing the frequent celebrity nihilism of '808s', 'Twisted Fantasy' and 'Yeezus' with albums such as 'The Life Of Pablo', 'Ye', 'Jesus Is King' and 'Donda'.
This is why, in essence, I believe all these albums are interconnected in more ways than just by the mere fact of them all being created by the same artist but more by actually documenting Ye's life journey through both his subjective Blake-like visions of heaven and hell while on this earth.
5. The College Dropout (2004)
This 2004 album flew in the face of the popular Eminem, Dr Dre and D12 gangster-style rap albums at the time by introducing gospel choirs, Jesus-themed lyrics and loved-up R & B type jams. Ye was subversive by single handedly challenging the orthodoxy of the culture at the time and it's why, even to this day, nearly twenty years later, 'The College Dropout' sounds as fresh as ever.
For me though, personally, this debut album felt like sunshine streaming through a window after having the curtains closed for years. Perhaps my acquiring this album coincided with a time in my life when I suffered from quite bad anxiety and songs such as 'Through The Wire', 'Never Let Me Down' and 'Family Business' rescued some part of my self-esteem during that difficult time. If it was just for just that reason alone, 'College' would automatically be in my top 5 Ye albums. However, it just also happens to be a game-changing masterpiece.
4. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
Returning from the wilderness after becoming America's second most hated figure after Bin Laden, Ye returned like one of those Buddhist monks that disappear for years on end with the 'Sgt Pepper' of the 21st Century and pretty much blew everyone's minds with his switching up of production, lyrics and overall visionary approach to creating a narrative, half confession/half braggadocios manifesto album.
It is often said that where '808's & Heartbreak' was the ultimate exercise in pop minimalism, then 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' was the reverse with decadent maximalism. You can hear it from the first track until the last that this is an album bursting at the seams of an artist barely able to contain the bi-polar inspiration flowing inside his head.
"They say I was the abomination of Obama's nation" Ye declares on 'Power' and he wasn't far from the truth when he delivered perhaps his closest thing to a musical suicide note, teetering on the brink of an obese celebrity ego raging out of control as he adopts the perspective of a hip hop Lucifer, a fallen angel that had been long led astray from God's army.
Ultimately, 'Twisted Fantasy' could be seen as a commentary on a peak hyper-consumerist/narcissist/celebrity culture that is inevitably doomed to collapse. The micro (Ye) becomes the macro (America) and perhaps even the wider Western world at large.
And on a slightly less grandiose level, I was also pleasantly surprised to find Ye had sampled a track my Uncle Steve played on for Manfred Mann's 'Earth Station' for his collab track with Jay-Z 'So Appalled' but that's just my little flex here. You'll forgive me. My ego's clearly out of control.
3. 808's And Heartbreak (2008)
When certain albums arrive at the right, or even the wrong time of your life, then it's as if the artist has designed the album for your very own personal soundtrack. Well, that's exactly how I felt about '808s And Heartbreak' which coincided with a breakup I was going through at the time. If 'College' had rescued me from anxiety then '808s' rescued me from heartbreak and so became of extra importance to me personally back in the year of 2008.
The album's historical significance in the discography of Ye has grown and grown since its release fifteen years ago. Not only was it a departure from the 'Tribe' like happy-go-lucky Hip-Hop style of earlier albums but also came at a time of great personal grief for the artist after losing his mother from a surgical tragedy.
Using a Vocoder to sing on the album, it sounded like nothing that came before it and has subsequently played a huge influence on future artists with its stripped-back production and vulnerable, confessional style. I've often thought of the entire album as being like a cross between Phil Collin's 'In The Air Tonight' combined with a clean, Moroder-like production.
2. Yeezus (2013)
'Yeezus' is most definitely not for the faint-hearted. Even to this day, it sounds like a high-voltage security fence being zapped by continuous lightning strikes. Lyrically, it would offend pretty much everyone on the planet but this, I believe, is the point of the album which is Hip Hop's closest record to punk ever recorded. It's jagged, uncomfortable and far from heaven.
Velvet Underground's Lou Reed wrote in glowing terms about the groundbreaking nature of 'Yeezus' and expounded on it in an interview for 'Talkhouse' back in September 2014.
"Kanye West is a child of social networking and hip-hop. And he knows about all kinds of music and popular culture. The guy has a real wide palette to play with. That’s all over Yeezus. There are moments of supreme beauty and greatness on this record, and then some of it is the same old shit. But the guy really, really, really is talented. He’s really trying to raise the bar. No one’s near doing what he’s doing, it’s not even on the same planet.
People say this album is minimal. And yeah, it’s minimal. But the parts are maximal. Take “Blood on the Leaves”: there’s a lot going on there: horns, piano, bass, drums, electronic effects, all rhythmically matched — towards the end of the track, there’s now twice as much sonic material. But Kanye stays unmoved while this mountain of sound grows around him. Such an enormous amount of work went into making this album. Each track is like making a movie.
Actually, the whole album is like a movie, or a novel — each track segues into the next. This is not individual tracks sitting on their own island, all alone.
Very often, he’ll have this very monotonous section going and then, suddenly —“BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP!” — he disrupts the whole thing and we’re on to something new that’s absolutely incredible. That’s architecture, that’s structure — this guy is seriously smart. He keeps unbalancing you. He’ll pile on all this sound and then suddenly pull it away, all the way to complete silence, and then there’s a scream or a beautiful melody, right there in your face. That’s what I call a sucker punch.
"But musically, he nails it beyond belief on”New Slaves.” It’s mainly just voice and one or two synths, very sparse, and then it suddenly breaks out into this incredible melodic… God knows what. Frank Ocean sings this soaring part, then it segues into a moody sample of some Hungarian rock band from the ’70s. It literally gives me goosebumps. It’s like the visuals at the end of the new Superman movie — just overwhelmingly incredible. I played it over and over."
Even to this day, 'Yeezus' sounds dangerous and toxic but in a deliberate way that was necessary for Ye to evolve into the second half of his eleven-album odyssey.
1. Donda (2021) & Donda 2 (2022)
If Donda (2021) is Jekyll then Donda 2 (2022) is Hyde and the two together seem to perfectly demonstrate the bi-polar express of Ye's musical career. Just as soon as he achieves a glimpse of Heaven, he quickly descends back down into the pits of Hell and rinse, repeat etc.
For Ye fans who've been in lockstep with the artist's journey ever since his debut album, Donda felt (at least to me) like the top of the mountain where everything that had come before was now reduced to its purest essence in a full spectrum of all his many colours and tones and executed with the single greatest roll out for an album I've ever seen in my life. If 2016's 'The Life Of Pablo' had experimented with the concept of a living, breathing album with continual uncertainty (even to this day) about what the actual official final version is, 'Donda' managed to do similar but on an even more satisfying and grander scale.
'Donda 2', which has never been officially released outside the launch of the StemPlayer, swaps the choirs, church organs and hopes of redemption of 'Donda' for a more trap-like album that resembles more a kind of soul-conflicted purgatory for Ye where he can no longer return to either his late mother's home or his ex-wife Kim's.
It's almost as if once the Atlanta-born artist makes perfect ('Donda') he then has to break it all to start all over again ('Donda 2'), just like Pablo.
He may be a Devil/Angel, Warhol/Hitler but one thing is for sure he's done sonic miracles for me (and the world) and for that, I'm eternally grateful.