West released his sixth studio album last June, and it’s as close to a hip-hop masterpiece as the rapper may ever produce.
The album fuses punk, post-punk, and industrial vibes with the steady dissonance of hip-hop. The critics loved it; the public was fair to middling in its overall appreciation.
The album went platinum globally with more than one million sales as of January, but the album has only sold 630,000 copies in the United States.
In concert, West has always been as much about performance art as he is about the music, and his Yeezus Tour in particular was a visual feast of high-tech pyrotechnics.
Williams has worked on videos with artists too numerous to mention; among the more notable are early rappers The Notorious B.I.G. (“Warning”) and Missy Elliott (“The Rain, Supa Dupa Fly”) all the way up to Coldplay (“Viva la vida”), Nicki Minaj (“Massive Attack” and “Va Va Voom”) and Beyoncé (“Drunk in Love”).
Needless to say, the Yeezus teaser bears all his trademarks. Check out the video below and be sure to follow TheImproper on Twitter for the best music news and analysis.
Keith Girard has four decades of experience as an award-winning reporter, editor-in-chief, and senior media executive. Keith’s career began in Washington, D.C., where he was a reporter for The Washington Post and a contributing editor for Regardie’s and Washingtonian magazines. He also worked as a writer/producer in CNN’s Washington Bureau and has written one book on the U.S. Marines in the Gulf War and two novels: The ‘Heidelberg Conundrum’ and ‘The Curse of Northam Bay.’