Kanye West's "FACTS": A Memorial to an Incredible 2015

By Zack Boehm on January 8, 2016

 When Kim Kardashian West tweets, the internet tends to bend its ear. And when Kim Kardashian West tweets portentously about impending new music from her beau and baby daddy, the Kardashian-West-Internet industrial complex hype machine goes from 0 to 100. Real quick.

 Such was the case on December 31st when Her Flyness Mrs. Kardashian West, in the dying hours of 2015, unleashed a tweet, artfully ornamented with treble clef and fire emojis (as if the hype weren’t already at a medically inadvisable level), that announced the imminent release of a new Kanye song, “FACTS.”

Courtesy of hip-hopvibe.com

Predictably, the tweet was met with frenzied anticipation and manic, irrepressible excitement not only from ardent and tireless Kanye devotees like myself, but also from the community of music fans writ large. In a 2015 whose hip-hop output was historically prodigious (Drake, Kendrick, Future, J Cole, Young Thug, et al.), the name Kanye West was, for the most part, conspicuously absent. With his attention fixedly centered on his burgeoning career in fashion, and his forthcoming album, tentatively christened SWISH, seemingly delayed into oblivion, Kanye fans have had to make do with the erratic release of one-off, stylistically eclectic singles like “Only One”, “FourFiveSeconds”, and “All Day.” And so when Kim K announced that Yeezy season may indeed be approaching once again, the Kanye-starved masses dutifully assembled, smacking their lips and refreshing their twitter feeds.

And then Kanye dropped “FACTS” on his Soundcloud. And it was ordinary. But not necessarily in a bad way.

Throughout his career, Kanye has actively sought to eschew and subvert convention. He’s a figure who has worked to, and I would argue (passionately to my last breath) succeeded in, reshaping the anatomy of popular music and redefining what it means to be a hip-hop artist. He is a titanic figure who has a preternatural ability for establishing paradigms, capturing and predicting zeitgeists, and consistently producing work that feels simultaneously new and timeless. The last decade of popular music can’t fully be understood without acknowledging the singular, ubiquitous influence of Kanye West. And so perhaps what was so remarkable about “FACTS” was how completely unremarkable it was.

Kanye’s intention with “FACTS” was clearly not to spurn mainstream hip-hop or to blaze new artistic trails. In fact the opposite is true. In enlisting the scolding hot producer du jour Metro Boomin as a collaborator, and in unrepentantly aping the staccato cadence from Drake and Future’s monumentally popular hit “Jumpman”, Kanye offered up a track that was less an exercise in ingenuity and more an amalgamation of everything that made hip-hop in 2015 so enduringly memorable. Some have interpreted Kanye’s repurposing of the “Jumpman” flow as a challenge or an affront to Drake and Future, but I see it instead as a kind of coronation—as Kanye, a legitimate hip-hop icon, acknowledging the achievements of the two younger rappers and conferring upon them the deserved title of hip-hop royalty. Other critics have labeled “FACTS’” production as unoriginal or derivative, but again, in conscripting Metro Boomin and his foreboding synths, Kalashnikov high hats, and rumbling bass, Kanye is paying homage to a talented, young, coveted producer whose fingerprints were found on seemingly every hit of the year.

“FACTS” is not pushing boundaries. It does not signal a new and unexplored aesthetic for Kanye’s next project. “FACTS”, in truth, is an ode to an exceptional year in hip-hop. It is a distillation of what we loved in 2015. It is a serviceable rap song with some funny one-liners, mostly at the expense of Nike, but more than that, it is a love letter:

2015, you were on one.

-love Kanye.

Courtesy of thegaurdian.com

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