Kanye West's Yeezus Analysis

Kanye West’s Yeezus was released on June 18, 2013 as the artist’s sixth studio album. I use the term artist to describe West because this album proves that Kanye deserves to be regarded as one, and in the same realm of todays highest fine artists. Known for a stylistic maximalism in his albums up until this point in time, West’s Yeezus is characterized by its “raw and minimalistic sound.” Mirroring the “spare, direct and throbbing” sound that makes up the minimalist tracks on Yeezus, West’s largest influences in the creation of the album were minimalist sculpture and architecture. In a similar artistic manor, the producing process of Yeezus was conducted through a series of critiques; identical to the process in which a piece of visual art

Each of these three visions of modernity constructed by west are important, as “they reflect the challenges of contemporary culture and society.” Yeezus lives within the last of the three periods, in which West speaks back onto “the societal systems that seek to control, construct, and consume him.” In a discussion of West’s performance of “Black Skinhead” on Saturday Night Live, NPR Music reporter Frannie Kelley

In regard to the jarring title, Dawn Boeck writes: “Black Skinhead,” emphasizes his antiestablishment attitude as it reverses the white supremacist attitudes traditionally associated with the term “skinhead.’ Instead, West is a black man, rapping and screaming into a microphone— spewing his perspective unapologetically. West’s song acknowledges current social issues connected to racism, most notably his own public persona as a black man perceived as “King