The Dropout

How to lose everything in 20 years

Wake up Mr. West

Everyone’s got their own personal falling out with Kanye moment. Mine was “Blood on the Leaves.” To me, it signaled the rotting of a once-inexhaustible freshness in myriad ways. The most soulful producer’s deft touch at offsetting the shrillness of a chipmunked sample with unexpected orchestral swells and musical elements that showed genuine care and stewardship for his craft — gone. The most lasting imprint from the track is the single word “leaves,” tortured upwards in pitch and usually isolated into little electrocutions that zap you throughout the six-minute track. The visionary auteur whose artistic and personal megalomania used to justify itself — gone. Because OK, I get it. He wanted to sample “Strange Fruit,” period, to say he did. 

Except unlike the delicious kabob he made of “Try a Little Tenderness” on the awesomely fun “Otis” a couple years before, this was becoming a crowded mess. The blaring TNGHT horns, umpteenth Auto-Tune bleeding into the red, six-minute length, “how you gonna lie to the lawyers,” “when you tried your first molly,” and the historical weight of “Strange Fruit” itself. A lot of critics pulled out the usual masterpiece language, but none of it was cohering. In fact, the harder you looked, the worse it got. Slap that mosquito-like sample (which reminds me of how Lil’ Nutzzak sampled just one word from Dewey Cox in Walk Hard and resurrected his entire career) and you get some kind of paranoid prenup fantasy that invokes this lament for the lynched, in the same album cycle where he betrothed himself to a Kardashian who really didn’t need his money.