Vultures  1 – Kanye West, Ty Dolla $ign

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2024	Vultures 1	Kanye West, Ty Dolla $ign	★½	31	Hip-Hop

Some habits die hard, like smoking when you’re out on Friday night with friends or spreading anti semitic sentiments in public forums. No matter how bad things get with Kanye West musically and professionally, I just can’t quit at least giving his new albums a try when they eventually come out, no matter how guilty it makes me feel to listen to his music.   

When you’ve invested so much time following an artist and enjoying their music, especially from back when they were less socially destructive, it’s hard to just cut that out of your life completely. As naive as it is, with Kanye West —  being a musical visionary who shaped hip-hop into what it is today makes and who has made some of the very best albums and songs of the 21st century — I can’t help but hope that one day he’ll get help, come back down to earth and will once again create a masterpiece in a way that only he can.

It’s crazy to think that Vultures 1, Kanye’s new collaboration album with Ty Dolla $ign, is coming out less than three years after his most recent major-label release, Donda. Donda, despite some of the obvious bloat and lyrics that fall flat, had some extraordinary high points that are so easy to appreciate and spin over and over again, and that remind you of what Kanye West is capable of. It was a triumph. 

There’s nothing triumphant about the package that we’re getting now in 2024, which comes with so much less energy and creativity, and so much more baggage and self sabotage. And it’s a predictable result after the failed “release” of the underwhelming Donda 2, the gimmicky Jesus Is King, and the underwhelming Ye. It’s becoming pretty obvious that Donda was actually an outlier of the past 10 years of Kanye releases, not something replicable or that we should expect. 

Vultures is predictable in content, sound and quality. There are some mildly interesting beat concepts — with dark, aggressive industrial and R&B elements — that have cool moments but never really climax or conclude in satisfying ways. There are some choice, big name guest features to grab your attention, in this case the likes of Travis Scott, Freddie Gibbs, Lil Dirk, Quavo and Chris Brown, to name a few. And there are a lot of absolutely terrible lyrics and rapping by Kanye himself. 

Ty Dolla $ign valiantly tries to bring life into some of the songs with dancy or emotional hooks and bridges, but we know from his past efforts that he really can’t carry an album on his own, and without Kanye to compliment his efforts or to share the load, Ty’s hung out to try. 

Kanye doesn’t even bother to enunciate some of his verses, and as is par for the course with other recent releases, he repeats lines and phrases over and over again. He also constantly revisits the same tired themes about being canceled or not caring about being targeted by the media, while dismissing his very real and obvious mental-health struggles like bipolarism, and playing down any of his past transgressions. 

His performance is so distracting that, whenever he starts going on a song, it takes your mind off any of the potential good that was presented elsewhere in the music. Kanye West seems capable of making interesting beats still, and the best course of action he might have honestly been for Kanye to put 100% of his effort in producing the record for Ty and  loading it up with guest features who compliment his singing. 

On the closing track, his chorus repeats “Crazy, bipolar, antisemite, And I’m still the king” as if it’s something to be bragging about. On the album’s lead single/title track, he says “How I’m anti-Semitic? I just fucked a Jewish bitch.” It isn’t funny, it’s gross.

On “Back To Me,” hey say “Beautiful, naked, big-titty womеn just don’t fall out the sky, you know?” over and over again.

The song “Problematic” has some of the worst lines on the record and of his career. “I just fucked the world raw, she need a morning after” is empty and unnecessary. Then there’s his entire passage: “Wish somebody woulda warned us, When I was fifteen, my soulmate wasn’t born yet. African king in a different time, We got multiple wives too, just at different times. Picture this, if every room got a different bitch, Do that make me a po-nigga-mist? Without the deals, I guarantee I’m still nigga rich, Shit is fucking ridiculous.” 

The last line is a call back to his great 2010 track “So Appalled,” while the Pinocchio references earlier on the track conjures up memories of 808s and Heartbreaks closing track. Earlier on the album, there’s also a “Hell of a Life” rerun with an “Iron Man” interpolation. There are other instances like that on Vultures I that feel like fan service working too hard to make you remember when you actually liked Kanye West, like a superhero movie with more Easter Eggs than new substance. 

I don’t think I legitimately liked any songs here enough to put them in my rotation or for them to even scratch my top 150 songs of the year. If I was going to provide some positive feedback though, on “Burn” — while it has some not-so-great lyrics about burning bridges and burning contracts and burning his reputation — Kanye does sound like old Kanye here for the first time since “No More Parties in LA” about eight years ago. “Beg for Forgiveness” has a raw, emotional, repetitive bridge that feels kind of like 808s and Heartbreak. “Good (Don’t Die)” has a fun reimagined Donna Summers sample and danceable beat. And the opener feels like an appropriate set up for an album that sounds like this, even if the rest of the record doesn’t live up to it. 

While I think Kanye West clearly has to take responsibility for his actions and some of the terrible things he’s said and done over the past decade (beyond a canned apology on X that nobody believed to be genuine) I don’t think he’s fully to blame for his actions or how poorly this record and other recent efforts have sounded. In both his personal and  professional life, it’s clear that nobody in his inner circle has bothered to try to give him truthful guidance that would be beneficial to his health, his mental state and his creativity. 

If anybody in his circle had any balls, they would have told him that these bars were trash and borderline offensive. They would have told him that the beats here and on Donda 2 were unfinished and needed work. If they aren’t even willing to truthfully criticize and acknowledge his declining musical works, there’s no way they’re giving him the much-needed help and feedback he deserves in his personal life. 

And that’s terrifying, because one day he’s going to really hurt someone (beyond the emotional harm he’s done to folks with his public statements and debacle of a presidential run), or he’s going to end up in jail, or he’s going to get himself killed. And when that happens, people are going to look back and write stories asking “what happened?” or outlining “the decline of Kanye West,” when the signs have now been right in front of our faces for 10 years.