Who was it let him get in his zone? Was it you? Wasn’t us!
[Video][Website]
[6.83]
Anthony Easton: Despite the arrogance of he who occupies the throne, he can still construct a decent beat, abstract an odd rhyme, brag unusually, occasionally work well with others. I am forced to listen again, work through the puzzle, see how the pieces push together, because if it was up to me, and just up to me, this would be another pussy-and-Lambo pimp Decameron, and I would be bored, but the assquake/assstate line is worth something, and white girls politickin’ is a nice dig, and, well, someone somewhere will explain to me why a Lambo is worth anything at alll, and while they do that, I can sit back and appreciate Pusha T’s swagger.
[8]
Iain Mew: Kanye doesn’t get the first or last or longest word, but his verse is still the main event here to a massive extent. Not to discredit everyone else, because there’s not really a weak link, but, well. Kanye sounds startlingly forceful and focused and goes with a call to “turn up the bass ’til it’s up in your face” and a startling image of a party “melting like Dalí” which suggests more than mere sweating as the music mounts up to face-melting levels of tension of its own. When he describes his property deals he sounds like some kind of super-villain.
[8]
Brad Shoup: The Fuzzy Jones bits point to an intriguing tack for Kanye: the DJ booth as throne of judgment. I think he’s picking up on the vibe — cf. “the whole party is melting” — but I could be forcing it. Mostly, he comes off as cranky. Maintaining the same pace like they co-ordinated it, everyone else leans on those triplets I associate with Houston. When the opportunity comes to get apocalyptic, they defer to a man. Though Mikes Will and Dean give West the electropulse bed, and he raises the mercury accordingly, we’ve got 2 Chainz bunting in the cleanup spot. I love the sound, but I’m not nuts about the orthodoxy.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Pusha and 2 Chainz’s contemptuous hoe-baiting are a match for the sinister backing track, the best Kanye’s assembled in some time despite the five-minute length. Kanye himself tries to outdo them in venom. You’d think these fools were still in their teens.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Kanye: awesome, albeit more for the crevasse beneath his verse than him. Pusha T and 2 Chainz: adequate. Big Sean: albatross. Graded harshly because surely Kanye knows this. Right? Please?
[6]
Jonathan Bogart: Big ups to hearing Fuzzy Jones on even the lower reaches of the chart. Producer Lifted does a slight tweak of the “Niggas in Paris” beat, which lends gravity to the verses that not all of them deserve. Kanye owns the song, as you’d expect him to do (what are posse cuts with a bunch of hangers-on for, otherwise?), but the keening dancehall “weepin’ and a moanin’ and a gnashin’ of teeth” sample far outhaunts any pitch-shifted daydream about getting a handjob in a Lamborghini.
[7]