Shock value is nowhere near a revolutionary idea. In 2025, it’s easier to get away with bad behaviors so long as it falls within a certain anti-woke perspective — racists and and Nazis flourish on X while pro-Palestine protestors can be arrested and deported. It’s what’s so exasperating about Kanye West’s latest turn towards provocation. He’s been able to twist his unfathomably dumb and extremist thoughts into a never-ending loop of content, just like all of the men currently in power have. He just so happened to once make formally excellent and sonically daring music.
It’s increasingly difficult to reckon with both of those thoughts — that West was a once-brilliant musician and is currently a real-life idiot. Although there’s reason to believe he was possibly always less intelligent than people thought. “Crack Music,” from Late Registration, is weirdly conspiratorial in a way that makes you think about his current stances, though he at least had a foundation and understanding of white supremacy and political violence back then. This is no longer the case. There is no part of his behavior that is a means to a solution or a clever plan. He’s a mentally ill, hateful, and jealous man.
However, we now know that when Kanye West isn’t being a “Black-owned white supremacist,” fecklessly screaming about Blue Ivy Carter, or loudly posturing about Kim Kardashian’s influence over his children, he can still make quality music, which is all the more frustrating. Bully, his latest project, appeared as a short film tweeted out on his X account and has the makings of something that could’ve been a jolt to this frustrating era of Ye’s career. As with all Kanye projects in this cursed era, the release was full of chaos. After leaping to the top of YouTube’s charts, the video was inexplicably taken down, and just this week, the album’s songs were removed from Apple Music.
Of course, we’re used to megalomaniac surprises from West. Yeezus had guerrilla marketing schemes, projections of his Black, stern, once-handsome face on the same sidewalks that homeless people sleep at; The Life of Pablo re-contextualized what it meant to finish an album, forcing us to catch up to his midnight tweaks of “Wolves” and other tracks on Pablo. This is a man who will both take his time and rush to release an album; the goal is to shock us, something that has long since worn off. This time, West didn’t make the world stop, as much as he made people roll their eyes in annoyance. But, to the surprise of many, this writer included, Bully had some juice — more life than any of his post The Life of Pablo work.
The film opens with his son, Saint, turned away from the viewer, in a boxing ring. This is the same boy whose father famously wasn’t worried about on “No More Parties in LA.” (“I be worried about my daughter/I be worried about Kim, but Saint is baby Ye, I ain’t worried about him”). Saint is a stand-in for his father, who envisions himself as a martyr being attacked by all sides. It’s not only an act of nepotism; it’s a dad using his son as a vessel for his burdens and sins. Luckily, the video is nonsensical, very rich, and disarmingly funny: a snapshot of how delightful West’s past music videos could be. The video begins with the song “Preacher Man,” which sounds like it could have been a loosie from the post-Yeeezus press run, when Adidas had just signed West; that version of him was more light-hearted, at ease, and an eager collaborator.
These days, West is a reactionary, sometimes both in politics and in overall mood; he feels one way, and then he switches directions with glee, almost laughing at the basic people who can’t catch up. “Preacher Man” is akin to 2Pac, Future, or Thug, the style from which Ye borrowed lyrically around 2013-2016. Instead of rapping like Mos Def or Jadakiss, he decided to be minimalist; he opted to rap about plainly spoken details of celebrity life instead of wordplay; jokes about women not liking sports unless there are floor seats hearken some of the playful misogyny on “Blood on the Leaves” or “Gold Digger.” Don’t you remember when West was a crowd-pleasing artist, eager to bring people of all stripes together to join in on his knowable solipsism? “Preacher Man,” in all of its naked optimism, is as good a song as we’ve heard since Donda, an album about his faith while he is losing his family.
Speaking of family: Do we know whether Ms. Kardashian knew that West was going to use their son as a proxy for himself for this music video? Ye’s children have been a point of contention in recent weeks as his ex-wife expressed frustration over Ye featuring their daughter North on a song featuring Sean “Diddy” Combs. That song was swiftly taken down, though North made a different debut on a song with FKA Twigs this week.
As for the rest of the music on Bully, we’re treated to glimmers of Kanye’s past. On “Circles,” the fourth song on this short project, West, on a patient, lively beat, flips Cortex’s “Huit Octobre 1971.” Here, he is at his best—an interpreter of other songs, using a sample to affect you emotionally, empowering your brain to remember the first time you heard the original, while adding new and warm vocals that create an entirely new feeling. (“H to the Izzo” is a great example of this; “All Falls Down” too). MF Doom and Tyler, the Creator have both sampled this particular Cortex track, and while Doom’s version is easily the most powerful, West is able to defeat Tyler’s flip with ease. Elsewhere, like on “Bully,” Ye sounds like he did on 808’s and Heartbreak, where he used auto-tune to build a whining crescendo — a dramatic effect for a man at his limit emotionally. It might be fun to listen to for some people. I was less enthralled; I’m shocked at how nonsensical the lyrics are.
And that is, ultimately, where Bully leaves you. While listening to the record, something happened to me that had never happened with a Kanye West record: boredom. Boredom with everything: his antics, his non-music tweets, and the perpetual discourse cycle. According to him, half the vocals were A.I. Although I couldn’t quite tell where the artificial vocals start, it made me laugh that I couldn’t even disclose when the A.I. happened. “Highs and Lows” sounds like you could have typed in 808s and Heartbreak in a futuristic MacBook and popped out his vocals, but it’s still unclear. It’s all a guessing game at this point — like if today will be the day that everything crashes down for him. Everything is muddled; nothing actually matters. The cycle continues.
