Kanye West Makes a Record for the A.I. Era
More than a year ago, in February, 2025, Kanye West, who is now known as Ye, gave an interview in which he said that the title of his next album was inspired by one of his children. “My son was playing with some kid, and then he kicked him,” Ye told the interviewer, Justin Laboy. “I asked my son, like, ‘Why you do that?’ He said, ‘ ’Cause he weak.’ And I was, like, ‘This man is really a bully.’ ” Ye said that the new record would be called “Bully,” and told fans to expect it in June.
Of course, Ye’s fans have been taught not to get too attached to their expectations, though many of them have a tendency to forget the lesson. Ye is probably the most contentious figure in all of popular music: a hip-hop revolutionary who has changed the genre’s sound several times over, while reinventing himself more times than that. Last March, about a month after the Laboy interview was posted, Ye seemed to announce another shift, writing on X, “My new sound called antisemitic.” Not long afterward, he released an ugly and transfixing track called “Heil Hitler,” which overshadowed the promised “Bully” album—and which, to some listeners, might overshadow everything else in Ye’s discography. But he kept tinkering with “Bully,” teasing and releasing different versions of the record’s songs. Then, in the early morning hours of March 28th, an eighteen-track collection named “Bully” finally appeared on Spotify and Apple Music, marking the official release, at long last, of Ye’s twelfth solo studio album.
Despite its title, “Bully” is in some ways a conciliatory offering. For years, Ye had been obsessed with notions of Jewish villainy, while also identifying himself with Adolf Hitler and Nazis. In 2022, he told Alex Jones, on Infowars, “I like Hitler,” adding, “The Holocaust is not what happened. Let’s look at the facts of that, and Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” But this past January he published a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal in which he apologized for just about everything, writing that a 2002 car accident (which was the inspiration for his breakthrough single, “Through the Wire”) had injured his brain in ways that contributed to his bipolar disorder, which in turn has led to “poor judgment and reckless behavior.” He said that he was recovering, “through an effective regime of medication, therapy, exercise and clean living.” And he asked for forgiveness. “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” he wrote. “I love Jewish people.” You can hear both contrition and defiance in “King,” the first track on “Bully,” which has a fuzzy, buzzing bass line and lyrics that suggest that, sometimes, pride goeth not just before destruction but after it, too:
Often, over the past quarter century, the thrill of listening to Ye has been the thrill of listening to someone trying to figure himself out. On his 2004 début album, “The College Dropout,” he sounded like an excited young man whose considerable (and justifiable) confidence only barely outstripped his insecurity, crowing, “Hold up, hold fast, we make more cash / Now tell my mama I belong in that slow class.” By the time he released “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” in 2010, he had entered his imperial phase, and his rhymes reflected the luxurious but sometimes lonely life of a hip-hop star who had mastered his art, and was now trying to master himself: “I just needed time alone with my own thoughts / Got treasures in my mind, but couldn’t open up my own vault.” In the past decade, his more scattershot discography has similarly seemed to reflect his troubled state of mind. His last official album, “Donda 2,” from early 2022, began with a track that appeared to refer to the children he shares with his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian: “When I pick ’em up, I feel like they borrowed / When I gotta return them, scan ’em like a bar code.” It is just about impossible to follow Ye’s music without following his life, too, and without thinking about the permeable membrane that separates them.
So who is Ye now? Listening to “Bully,” it can be hard to tell. Some of the tracks seem designed to remind listeners of his older, less incendiary incarnations. “Punch Drunk,” which lasts less than two minutes, is built on a sped-up sample of the Clark Sisters, and it sounds like a throwback to Ye’s early years, when he made his living by turning old records into new beats that he could sell to fellow-rappers. And “All the Love” evokes the grandeur of the “Twisted Fantasy” era, thanks in part to the contributions of André Troutman, who plays the talk box, a robotic voice-morphing instrument that was also used to great effect by his cousin Roger, from the early-eighties funk band Zapp. The talk box was a precursor to Auto-Tune, which Ye used to create the moaning, melancholy sound of his 2008 landmark, “808s & Heartbreak”; rappers have been leaning heavily on software-enhanced singing ever since. But the new version of Ye that emerges on “Bully” is much less funny than the old version, in addition to being less bilious than the recent version. “I brought a white queen to the altar / Couldn’t happen without Martin Luther,” he declares in one couplet that contains neither a rhyme nor, really, a punch line. Many of the tracks resemble fragments or sketches, with bits of singing and rapping that sound unusually tentative, as if Ye isn’t quite sure how, or how much, to give his listeners what they want.
Over the years, Ye has amassed perhaps the most obsessive fan base in all of hip-hop, and some of them have carefully charted the evolution of the tracks on “Bully.” During that Laboy interview, Ye enthused about a new technology that was allowing him to make music in a different way: artificial intelligence. Ye has often used writers to help compose his music; now, using A.I., he showed Laboy how he could take a recording of someone else rapping and render it in his own voice. A year ago, Ye released a half-hour-long video accompanied by several “Bully” tracks, and many fans thought that they heard evidence of his newfound interest in A.I. Was he really delivering lyrics in Spanish, on a track called “Last Breath,” or had he merely reprogrammed a Spanish-language singer to sound like him? In a post on X last week, he seemed to announce that the new version of “Bully” would contain none of this sort of manipulation. “BULLY ON THE WAY NO AI,” he promised.
Did he deliver? Listeners have been trying to figure that out. A streamer known as ImStillDontai filmed an hour-long reaction to the album that earned about a quarter of a million views in its first twenty-four hours. He enthused about the record’s downcast finale, “This One Here,” but also voiced his doubts. “I hate A.I.,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to be thinking about this, bro. I should be able to just listen to him and be, like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s killing this.’ But now I’m, like, ‘Is he? Or is the fucking machine killing it?’ ” There seems to be a widespread perception that musicians who use artificial intelligence are engaged in a form of cheating. It is a familiar concern, because it evokes earlier arguments against sampling, and also against Auto-Tune, both of which were commonly described as a way for lazy musicians to make low-effort music. “People are, like, ‘Stay away from A.I.’—it’s a more negative reaction than Auto-Tune,” Ye told Laboy. It should be said, though, that the Auto-Tune backlash was once plenty negative; in 2009, Jay-Z released a track called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” which suggested, memorably though not accurately, that the era of processed vocals was just about over.
The arguments over Ye’s use of artificial intelligence seem to have something to do with a desire for connection: fans want to be sure that the voice they hear is really his, even as new technology makes it harder to reliably distinguish between pure and impure recordings. This is a particularly vexed question in the case of Ye, who so often changes his mind and his persona, and whose discography is full of leaks and revisions and contradictions that leave listeners scrambling to figure out which releases are the “real” ones—and, for that matter, which Ye is the real one. Is the March 28th version of “Bully” the final one? Did Ye really write, or at least authorize, that contrite statement in the Wall Street Journal? Can we even be sure that that was him on Alex Jones’s show, with his entire head concealed underneath a black hood? The English musician James Blake was credited as a producer on “This One Here,” but, after the album arrived on streaming services, Blake announced that he had asked to be removed from the credits, saying that the final version didn’t reflect the “spirit” of the track he had worked on. In fact, many listeners may find that the rather spare and wobbly version of the song that appeared last year is more affecting than the plusher version on the new album, just as they may find themselves missing Ye’s slightly uncanny Spanish-language delivery on the second verse of “Last Breath.” Throughout his career, Ye has often communicated in a jittery voice that sounds overwhelmed with emotion, but on “Bully” he is uncharacteristically subdued, and it is hard not to think about a different transformative technology: the program of “medication” that he mentioned in the Journal. “Bully” is perhaps the first major album of the artificial-intelligence era—the first, that is, to be evaluated primarily in terms of how much it does or doesn’t use A.I. Not coincidentally, it’s an album that forces fans to think anew about what, precisely, might make music sound “artificial.” It is not, by any stretch, a great album. But it might nevertheless be a landmark. ♦