"Eazy" is Kanye's Epitaph

True Hip Hop Stories #1

Kanye West has made more great rap music than any other human being. He’s made more great music than many other greats. Moreover he’s managed to amass a tremendous amount of wealth and influence in the process. Seldom do these things align, one usually has to give. However, over the past couple of years his troubling insanity has metastasized to the point where he has become the world’s most visible mental health crisis. Along the way he’s stalked the mother of his children, threatened her new boyfriend, and endorsed National Socialism.

Largely forgotten among the flurry of mediocre tunes and the threats to Pete Davidson and the abhorrent politics was the strange substance and accidental coherence of the song ‘Eazy,’ the lead and only listenable single of the already obscure Donda 2. ‘Eazy’ is such an accurate reflection of the era that has probably ended Kayne’s career, such a comprehensive illustration of the moment of a man that it renders its litany of shortcomings completely irrelevant, like the musical antimatter of the way Kanye’s music used to be in 2005. ‘Eazy’ is Kanye’s career epitaph.

The Cover Art

The single cover art is a closeup picture of a dead monkey that’s been completely skinned, its arms raised above its head against a red field. You can view it here. The symbolism is visceral and unsubtle and revealing. I assume it’s the latest evolution of the “No more hiding the scars, I show ‘em like Seal,” mentality that he’s fostered since around 2016, yet done in the most distasteful, humorless, repellent manner possible. Kanye’s been going on and on about people not being able to control what he thinks, does and says for years. That his identity as a rapper, as a musician, as a celebrity, as political entity and as a black man is not for us (or ‘them’) to define. That he is more-than and not-bound-by the world’s perception of him. That these perceptions are merely surface level categorisations.

So what does he present us with as an alternative? Stripped of everything on the surface all that’s left is a permanently screaming corpse. A trite, nihilistic and uncomplicated assessment of nature of being. Yes, we are all weak and vulnerable beneath the surface. Yes, we all have scars that won’t heal. It’s the sort of revelation the ill mind will mistake as brilliant time and time again. But that’s the thing, Kanye is ill. In his public statements since around the Pablo era, Kanye’s inability to articulate himself in actual words has gotten worse and worse, despite his stubborn insistence on doing so. Instead his true feelings boil over and are expressed elsewhere, accidentally. Having his wife and children taken from him, and overexposed to the corrosive glare of the media and public eye, skinned Kanye alive. Leaving him with a permanent and total pain, which he can only scream through, helpless.

The Instrumental

His mind may have left him but his ear for beats apparently has not. ‘Eazy’s’ instrumental is built from a few layers of synths, some percussion and a couple vocal samples, and creates an unsettling, ethereal vibe. It’s dope. The star of the show are those synths. The melody progresses like it's going to hit a major chord on the next beat but never does. Instead, it constantly defers to a down note and loops back around again, as is if some kind of cathartic hope is always within reach only to be snatched away again a moment later. It sounds unwell. These synths float across a muscular 808, and a flat thin snare that sounds like it’s been reversed.

The hook is partly comprised of an pitched down vocal sample of Michel'le from Eazy E’s ‘Eazy-Duz-It’ track, where the song gets its title. The manner in which it’s employed, opening and closing the track, and looping in and out of Game and Ye’s take on the hook, is more evocative of the twins from The Shining than the ghosts of the African American musical tradition that used to apparate in and around and inform Kanye’s music. Everything about this instrumental screams Kanye but isn’t. It’s an inverse, a negative. Crucially, Kanye did not even pretend to have a hand in the song’s production, which is credited to Hit Boy, Mike Dean and DJ Premier and a couple others. It seems he’s even lost control of the music, the thing that he was best at, and it’s left to others to try and capture the Kanye of the moment, and what they capture is a incomplete pattern, a disembodied voice, and a persistent dread.

The Game

I like The Game. He has many good verses, many good songs, many good albums and is a good rapper. Game is also a has-been, a relic of the 2000s, of the era of gangsta rap music that Kanye himself extinguished during his comprehensive victory in a sales battle with a Shady-backed 50 Cent. The greatest amount of attention Game’s received since Documentary 2 eight years ago was this verse on ‘Eazy’ and a pointless one-way beef he still somehow lost with Marshall Bruce Mathers III. But as many has-been’s insist, he’s ‘still got it.’

This is highly technical, slaved over verse, littered with internal and multi-syllabic rhymes, potent imagery, clever lines and allusions and name drops that offers a panoramic retrospective of Game’s early life and career progression. It’s a man climbing out of poverty and gang violence, to one day record under the tutelage of Dr Dre. His flow is elastic and precise, finding rhythms and pockets well beyond the reach of the far less technically attuned rapper who is to follow. Yet for all it’s flashy technique and undeniable talent, Game’s verse is there and then it’s gone, as if it never happened, leaving no lasting impact. It’s wasted effort, like the effort Kanye appears to have wasted, another ghost of another era where the rapping actually mattered.

The Kanye Verse

By any sensible metric Kanye's rapping on this song is rubbish. The contrast in raw MCing ability between him and Game is about as stark as it gets short of teaming up Black Thought with Lil Xan. Yet it is significantly more interesting than anything Game is up to. His voice is strained like he doesn’t even want to be there, and he’s mumbling and slurring his words. After an underperformed bridge, the opening line: “How I ain’t bring nothing to the table, when I’m the table,” is stupid and egotistical, but his delivery is so half-assed that he cannot recapture the charm and charisma that made his most stupid and egotistical performances in the past so compelling. Kanye then compares himself to Tupac Shakur, then things take a turn.

It’s like an avalanche of unprocessed trauma, untreated illness and unchecked delusions, all playing out over the game over music from a haunted PS1 disc. Kanye again insists that this is the real him: “This is how I am in real life, not just on cable,” and that there is nothing to fix: “I don't negotiate with therapists.” The rest of the verse topically centered around his divorce from Kim Kardashian and his faith in God, every bar revealing a new contradiction. He says he’s having the “best divorce ever” yet purchases the house next to Kim as if being near her and their children was something that he was a risk of losing. He claims he watched his kids for five hours as if that’s some sort of accomplishment and not the mere act of parenting. He boasts of his wealth yet chastises his kids for acting spoiled. He appeals to family values yet engages in puerile Andrew Tate-style bluster regarding Bugatti’s and bad bitches.

None of this is Kanye’s fault though. Throughout the verse there are repeated, shallow appeals to providence that offer nothing to contextualize anything that’s going on. “This that "God did this" // Only God did this” seemingly absolves Kanye of any responsibility for anything that’s happening, much the way he eschews medical assistance for some scriptures offered to him by ‘Cousin Dre.’ Yet in handing all this responsibility for his life over to ‘God’ he’s lost the control over his life and his image that he so desires. The music, the rapping, the wife, are in the hands of other men. Kanye himself is left completely exposed, bloody, screaming, a ghost haunting a beat, in a permanent pain he can never dull.

The End

Kanye West will continue to release music. The problem with not knowing how far gone you are is you can’t see your missteps as you take them. Some of that music will be good, some of that music will be bad, most of that music will have the staying power of chewing gum, just like Jesus is King, just like Donda, just like Donda 2, and just like Game’s verse. ‘Eazy’ however will remain the epigraph on his career. The logical conclusion of madness poisoning things that were once wonderful. Eazy-E is, of course, dead. A disease killed him.