Hello, reader.
If you’re wondering what Kanye West’s first official single for his album “So Help Me God” sounds like, it sounds like someone having a lot of fun. More so, “All Day” could be viewed as a defining point of a career that has been spent in constant redefinition – Kanye is having fun again! Why am I so happy that perhaps our most controversial artist – and our best one – sounds like he’s having a blast while recording this?
In no uncertain terms, we need this.
We need Kanye West to call out Allstate commercial actor Dennis Haysbert for looking like a “fake Denzel.” We need these embarrassing-yet-hilarious “broad way” puns in reference to wife, Kim Kardashian. Most notably, we thirst for beats that sound great in the car, at home, in the summer, when it’s snowing and during downpours.
The underlying theme of the song is this: Kanye West, unlike a large percentage of musicians currently working, puts everything on the line for his fans and non-fans, alike, when he releases music or does anything in an artistic field. He allows himself to do this because he has fearless, reckless ambition – a willingness to try new things and the acceptance that some of them may fail. Kanye has rejected an innate value that youth are taught consistently throughout their upbringing, whether through sports, school or at home: it’s not okay to fail.
We see failure as something to hate and to avoid, not something we should embrace. Kanye understands that this, in his case, is wrong. For him to grow as an artist and for him to remain our most interesting, innovative and best musician, he needs failure. Without failure, Kanye never makes his masterpiece, 2010’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”
He needed 2008’s “808s & Heartbreak,” a deeply personal and painful record, to fail on a critical and commercial scale. He needs the backlash from stealing a microphone from Taylor Swift, the only other artist currently on or near the Kanye tier of music. He needs his romantic past. He needed to watch 2013’s “Yeezus” confuse and confound his audience while also influencing and changing what hip-hop was doing at the time of its release. He feeds off of failure because it builds him back up and shows him which steps to take next. He needs to be the best Kanye that he can be, and that means him doing whatever is possible to assert his position on the musical throne.
His response to “Yeezus,” a clustered, abstract, beautiful mess of a record, is this: a pretty straightforward rap that describes Kanye West, the man, and Kanye West, the musician.
“All Day” will never be Kanye’s finest five minutes. It’s a great song – what else should we expect? – but it’s no “Runaway” or “Through the Wire” or “Touch the Sky.” It serves its purpose as the first single from a record that Kanye was quoted as calling “music to play at cookouts” in a recent interview. It’s much more light-hearted, pun-focused and funny than Kanye has been in a while. With world events as full of strife as they’ve been in our generation’s lifetimes, we need fun. We need failure to show us where to go next. Most of all, we need to understand that failure isn’t a hindrance, it’s a crucial building block. Without failure, how do we know what we do best and how we build onto that?
On 2004’s “Through the Wire,” Kanye, jaw wired shut, starts off with a line that defines his entire career – “they can’t stop me from rapping, can they?” The “they” always changes, but the ‘Ye remains the same.
