There was Ye — the artist formerly known as Kanye West — standing in a once-familiar place: on top of the world.
At the first of a pair of sold-out 70,000-capacity shows at SoFi Stadium near Los Angeles earlier this month, he delivered his performance from atop a dome that was also a screen — a la the Las Vegas Sphere — which for much of the night was made to look like a globe spinning beneath him. The image was clear — all of the Earth at his feet.
From a distance, it appeared plausible. A few days prior, Ye released “Bully,” his 12th solo album, and it was on track for a chart debut at No. 2, with tens of millions of streams and tens of thousands of physical copies sold, behind only the K-pop juggernaut BTS.
Less than a year ago, Ye released a song called “Heil Hitler,” the seeming culmination of years of festering antisemitism and erratic behavior that had all but incinerated the good will of fans and business partners. And yet here he was, drawing in a crowd for whom that behavior apparently wasn’t disqualifying. You could see the shape of the beginnings of an improbable comeback, a trial balloon for a possible return to mainstream acceptance.
New obstacles loomed, though. Ye had recently been announced as the headliner of the Wireless Festival in England, and the chain of events that followed was perhaps less surprising: Major corporate sponsors pulled out, and the British government announced that it would not allow Ye into the country, owing to his history of antisemitic provocations. Shortly after, the festival was canceled outright.
Comebacks require landing places. For Ye, who has had a noxious few years, to mount a meaningful return, certain systems of complicity must be in place and active — a public to adore him, artistic collaborators to tolerate him, a music business to amplify his work. And implicit in all of that is some combination of forgiveness and omission. For almost his whole career, Ye has been tempting fate with a combination of alienating people and wooing them right back. But in this moment, his ability to do both at once is more brittle than ever.
On “Highs and Lows” — one of the better tracks on “Bully” — Ye croons, “I put you through a lot, I know,” and it’s tempting to hear concession and regret. The specifics and depths of the offenses vary, but to listen to Ye has been to live in the overlapping space of resistance and resilience. The context has shifted, though: That same line a decade ago would have been received as a boast.
“Bully” is album as olive branch. His last two full-length projects felt more like responses to the musicians he’s inspired than innovations. Now he’s aiming to hold together fragile coalitions — between skeptics and enthusiasts, new fans and old fans, new Ye and old Kanye.
Miss “College Dropout”-style sampling? Try “Punch Drunk,” a conciliatory callback. Longing for the angsty robot vocals of “808s & Heartbreak?” Put on “All the Love,” a warm distraction featuring Andre Troutman, son of the founder of the iconic digital funk outfit Zapp.
These are mildly successful songs, which in the context of the last few years counts as a kind of victory. But they’re little more than sketches.
Ye has long employed ghostwriters, a onetime hip-hop taboo that he helped break. What that means is that much of what you hear in a modern Ye album is Ye embodying the character that others have written for him, inspired by older versions of himself. These writers may or may not be better rappers than Kanye is, but they are almost certainly lesser imagineers. They are, more or less, A.I. models trained on the old Kanye, uncertain how to innovate beyond those modes.
All of this isn’t inherently wrong — it’s a little like a fifth sequel of a hit film franchise, retaining enough DNA to ensure tingles of familiarity while lacking the core urgency of the original. (Add to this the actual A.I. vocals used on “Bully” demos, and the definition of new Ye music becomes almost philosophically unstable.)
The real thrill of listening to Ye rap has been the sense that he could spill over at every turn — rhythmically, emotionally, politically. But apart from “Preacher Man,” which has the most authentically messy flow on the album, most of the verses on “Bully” are fully within the lines. And some are mystifying: “Now they want the tea ’cause it’s piping hot / Life gave me lemons, made a Arnold Palmer on the rocks” (“Whatever Works”); “I used to be on Worldstar, now I’m making Newsweek” (“Father”).
As a collection, the songs on “Bully” are far less important than the back-to-back unofficial tracks Ye released last year: “Cousins,” an uncommonly beautiful number about a traumatic childhood sexual relationship with a male cousin, which was followed by “Heil Hitler,” a grotesque jock jam. These songs are Ye at his most invigorated — primally interrogating taboo, though without a moral weather vane. Both have been removed from streaming services, but “Heil Hitler” has had a grim afterlife through perverse cover versions appearing on TikTok, and also as a soundtrack for an incident in a Miami Beach nightclub involving the right-wing and manosphere internet figures Nick Fuentes, Andrew and Tristan Tate, Clavicular and Myron Gaines.
This eagerness to play the villain traces back at least as far as “Yeezus,” Ye’s 2013 album that took a hard turn toward industrial noise. It’s his most scabrous album, and its immediacy is now a hallmark of the genre, from the stadium exhortations of Travis Scott to the digital vocal shards of Playboi Carti and his many acolytes.
That era also marked a shift in Ye’s live presentations. Since then, Ye concerts — or sometimes, playback sessions with little actual performance — have been exercises in psycho-artistic grandeur. They function almost as art installations, impressive in their primal physicality and sheer scale — designed for wonder first, entertainment second.
During the “Yeezus” tour, he performed in a mask from atop an icy mountain. On the “Life of Pablo” tour a few years later, he hovered on a stage directly over the crowd on the arena floor, and allowed himself to be touched by fans at the stage’s rim.
The SoFi Stadium set, too, was a monument to ego and ambition. But Ye was distant, removed, a literal world apart. A man who did not want to be reached, or touched. Onstage, he often appeared tentative, and not simply because he was tethered to the top of the dome and could only walk a few feet in any direction. His only moment of true, visible joy was when he was joined by his oldest daughter, North, 12, who’s become a musician, too.
At this show, the songs from “Bully” were the least enthusiastically received. For long stretches of time, the audience appeared largely inert. (In videos from the second show that circulated online, both Ye and the crowd appeared more energized.) The only moment in which there was discernible emotion in his voice, apart from when he was lambasting the crew for technical mishaps, was during his set closer, “Runaway,” his classic ode to incivility, cheeky bravado masked as self-awareness.
These slippery presentations used to feel startling and invigorating — that someone so hubristic could also be so vulnerable felt, for years, like a revelation. But the past few months in Ye’s world have underscored just how much that perspective has curdled.
In an attempt to atone for his many antisemitic outbursts, he apologized in an ad taken out in The Wall Street Journal and a set of quotes emailed to Vanity Fair. These acts came off as perfunctory box checking, a dull, eyes-averted foundation for a flashy attempted comeback that didn’t even bother to accurately channel the rawness of his voice.
But crucial to Kanye’s success was that he long has set the terms of his own expansion; limitations enforced by others were, in truth, unenforceable. For that reason, he appeared uncancelable — shaming someone with little sense of guilt or self-doubt, bolstered by ample financial and social resources, is a fool’s task. It’s been almost a decade of this, beginning with his adventures in MAGA. But the new walls he’s facing — fans who won’t give another chance, or a literal border — are firmer. His fame is resilient, but also, now, contingent.
Unlike most stars of his size, who aim to please widely, Ye has long been a mass cult figure, which is to say his success has relied on idiosyncrasy and jagged innovation. He’s been compelling enough to sell those attributes widely, making him one of pop culture’s most meaningful change agents, taking one risk after the next, and pulling millions along in his wake.
In this troubled iteration, he has become the converse — a cult mass figure. His intense and improbable amounts of fame and true cultural ubiquity now come with a clear outer boundary. Ye has long used the coexistence of love and hate as the engine of his success. But more than ever, it seems, you’re either in or you’re out.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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