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“You see it’s leaders, and it’s followers,” Kanye West tells us. “But I’d rather be a dick than a swallower.” And Yeezus, Mary and Yoseph, does he mean it. Yeezus is the darkest, most extreme music Kanye has ever cooked up, an extravagantly abrasive album full of grinding electro, pummeling minimalist hip-hop, drone-y wooz and industrial gear-grind. Every mad genius has to make a record like this at least once in his career – at its nastiest, his makes Kid A or In Utero or Trans all look like Bruno Mars.

“We get this bitch shakin’ like Parkinson’s,” he implores over the system-shock body rock of album opener “On Sight,” one of three songs co-produced by Daft Punk. Yet, if the overall feel is jarring, the sonic palette is as typically rich as ever. There’s bunker-club hipster dance music, ring-the-alarm Jamaican dance hall, forlorn Auto-Tune soul, crackling old-soul samples and downcast techno rap of the sort he pioneered on 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak – often all at once. “Hold My Liquor” is an elegantly wasted house ballad, with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver as dyspeptic diva crooning under the amber waves of drank and teenage Chicago rapper Chief Keef playing the sad gangsta. “Black Skinhead” is Marilyn Manson reanimated as a mechanical animal programmed to chomp whitey.

Executive co-producer Rick Rubin gets a beard-load of credit for helping make what could’ve been an assaulting overload feel contained and of a piece. He and Kanye deployed a less-is-less strategy, making sure that every contusive hit has maximum impact. Kanye’s lyrics are pretty focused too, rendering his classic themes as petulant primal screams. On “I Am a God,” a lurching, nightmarish throbber, he raps: “I am a god/So hurry up with my damn massage/In the French-ass restaurant hurry with my damn croissants.” During “I’m in It,” which sounds something like the soundtrack to a snuff film for Cylons, Kanye sounds at once righteous and evil: “Black girl sipping white wine, put my fist in her like the Civil Rights sign.”

On that song, Kanye brags that he wants to “start a new movement.” It’s ironic, then, that Yeezus‘ best track is classic soul, and vintage Kanye; “Blood on the Leaves” is a buzzing, bluesy, static-y track that flips a chipmunk-soul sample of Nina Simone doing “Strange Fruit” into a fevered tell-all about a pregnancy with another woman (“We coulda been somebody,” he laments in a pained sing-yell). Only Kanye West would take an American masterpiece about a lynching and use it to back a song about what a drag it is to have to attend basketball games with a girl you knocked up sitting across the court. And it’s hard to imagine anyone else making it this urgent. The dick sure has some balls.-Rolling Stone

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One thing that has remained constant throughout the history of SNL has been the incorporation of music into the comedy, from the Blues Brothers all the way to the Lonely Island. Adam Sandler’s “At a Medium Pace”, Eddie Murphy’s “Boogie in Your Butt”, and Steve Martin’s “King Tut” all set the bar high for future SNL cast members’ comedy record attempts, and many have failed along the way because we have these aforementioned crown jewels of audio comedy to compare everything else to. Luckily, a couple of notches to the funny bar have been added with The Wack Album, although it’s definitely a rap experience. In fact, it’s some of the dirtiest rap out there. SO dirty, even Blowfly would blush… a little. That could end up being a double-edged sword for the Lonely Island, alienating the comedy fans who despise hard rap music. But millions upon millions of fans can’t be wrong. Just remember, it’s shtick. It is what it is. Still, when you’re hit with (and I paraphrase) “The Lonely Island were beaten to death with their own ‘junk’ outside a strip club” within the first 60 seconds of The Wack Album, you’ve gotta give it a genuine laugh. Just like you did when you first heard Adam Sandler’s “At a Medium Pace”. Even if SNL Digital Shorts and toilet humor in general are your forte, honestly… could you see that one coming.

SNL favorites “YOLO” with Adam Levine and Kendrick Lamar and “3 Way” with Justin Timberlake are here, and having those cuts in high quality without the laugh track makes a great argument for shelling out the Lincolns and Washingtons on Wack, but Wack is more than just critical commentary, raunchy comedy, and greatest hits. It’s also a loving tribute to hip hop, giving nods to some of the cherished moments in the genre. “Spell It Out” shamelessly channels K-Solo’s “Spellbound”, “We Need Love” is an obvious ode to LL Cool J’s “I Need Love”, but also tips its hat to Digital Underground’s “Freaks of the Industry”. “Perfect Saturday” has got a lot of love for Cali, breaking down Snoop’s style over a formulaic revisiting of Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day”, then turning its focus onto what could be the start of a new trend… the gangsta fart joke. There are a couple of throwaways scattered among the thoughtful. “The Crew” and “We Are a Crowd” don’t come off very well, but two out of 20 ain’t bad at all. — PopMatters

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