You've gone too far and you should hang your head in shame

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

16/02/24 : Vultures 1 - ¥$

Who?  Ah, apparently it's a "hip hop superduo" made up of Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign.  I can't say my expectations are massively high, but I very much doubt it's going to be boring.

Well - I wouldn't quite say it's boring, but it's not massively interesting.  I actually liked "Beg Forgiveness" but the rest of it was either a bit dull or somewhat questionable with a lot of casual misogyny on display - I didn't need to listen to "Back To Me" to know that "beautiful, naked, big-titty womеn just don’t fall out the sky, you know”.  As with most of his later work, there just doesn't seem to be the intelligence and humour present that was so obviously there in his earlier albums.

Amazingly enough, this week we're not at #1 with a new entry - we're at #2 with a new entry!  The rest of the top five are Noah Kahan (he made it - well done to the lad!), Declan McKenna (another new entry), The Weeknd best-of and The Last Dinner Party (I called that wrong, didn't I?) and the next highest new entry is Zara Larsson (#15 and I'm quite tempted to check her out).

So I was a long way off with my guess of #43 for The Last Dinner Party - in my defence, I did say it was a tricky one but if I'm being honest I'd never have guessed #5.  I very much hope this album bombs, but I suspect it will hang around for a bit - I'm going for #7 because stuff like this tends to hang around for a bit (but it could go anywhere!).  And this week's Taylor stats are two in the top ten, five in the top twenty and (as usual) nine in the entire chart.

Wikipedia has a massive amount for a new album (384 milliPeppers) but that's probably not so surprising given that Mr West is involved.  Firstly we have to cover the most excellent news that Vultures 2 and 3 will be coming out in March and April - thank God for that, eh?!?  Several references are made in the post to Kanye's apology for his antisemitic comments - and then it goes on to explain that the original artwork for the album was planned to be a painting by one of Hitler's favourite artists, so I'm not sure we can read all that much into the apology.  The critics are mostly of the opinion that it isn't a great album, but it is at least better than the trash he's recently been producing and it's done (obviously, yet depressingly) very well commercially.

"Customers also listened to" Travis Scott, Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, The Creator - some big names for you there.  And Kanye is still up there with the biggest of them, but there's very little here to interest me, I'm afraid - I'm both surprised and pleased that Noah kept him off the top spot.

09/02/24 - Well worth a listen
23/02/24 - Surprisingly enjoyable

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