Kanye West: "Power"

“No one man should have all that power,” Kanye seethes on the hook of his new single, and: yeah. Or: ugh, depending where you’re coming from. “Power” will, like most other lead-off Kanye singles since, like, “Through The Wire,” neatly divide those who love and those who hate West, some hearing a big, conflicted monster of a track, a street-leveler and an id unleashed, and others hearing a mawkish rock-rap beat with a bleating dickhead spitting platitudes over top, ego unleashed.

Me? I’m caps-lock-on, YEEZY YOU DID IT AGAIN, but the point is that it doesn’t really matter. The same things that I love—“Fuck SNL and they whole cast / They can kiss my whole ass”—are the same things others will hate. The same things some people love—the doubletime “I was the abomination of Obama’s nation” bit—strike me as pointless and obstructive. It’s paper-thin, this whole Kanye divide, because chances are that we’re all looking at flipsides of the same image, choosing to view the same things as pluses or minuses as we see fit. But time has proven one thing about Kanye West. And that’s that hate this track if you want—but in two weeks, if you have a pulse, you will be dancing to it. It will be in your car; it will be in your head. And if you hate yourself for it, all the better: because all Kanye’s self-love is paper-thin, too. Ye loves himself so much that one can question why anyone else would want to, but he hates himself enough for all of us, too. On “Power” this power reaches a new level of fragility, and it is a tense and remarkable thing to witness. From this angle, anyway.