You were the only thing that felt like home
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts
09/08/24 : Vultures 2 - ¥$
Oh joy - of all the albums that I might have been looking forward to a sequel, it's fair to say that this one would not have been on the list. I hope you appreciate the suffering that I go through for my art...
Hold on - what's happening here? "Slide", the opening track, is actually surprisingly bearable (provided you don't listen to the lyrics). A lot of the sounds employed throughout the album are actually quite interesting and surprisingly varied - it goes without saying that the lyrical content is as dubious as ever, although it's possibly not quite as relentless as it might have been, but that does make it sound a bit lazy in places. I wouldn't go as far as saying I found this album enjoyable, but it certainly wasn't as hateful as I was expecting.
We're at a surprisingly low #7 with a new entry in the chart this week, which suggests that possibly people are finally starting to get bored with Kanye because the previous one came in at #2. The top five this week are Chappell Roan (finally making it to the top after seventeen weeks), Charli, Taylor, Billie and Eminem - which is a re-ordered version of last week's top five. Interestingly, if Kanye and Ty hadn't given us a new entry, we'd have visiting yet another Taylor Swift album from '17 all the way down at #24 - so it will be interesting to see where we are the next time we have a quiet week on the new album front.
And this really was a quiet week - there are only two more new entries in the entire chart. Firstly we have Jack Black (#33) which sounded exactly like I expected it too - it's skilful but doesn't float my boat. We then have a big gap to 86TVS (#79) which I guessed was K-pop from their weird name but it's UK indie which reminded me of The Maccabees, so imagine my surprise when I found out they've got a couple of ex-Maccas in there. Oh, and I didn't mind it at all!
Last week, I guessed that Chappell would be pushed down to #6 by a couple of new entries, so we can see I got that wrong. Y$ will not be hanging around and I'm guessing this will be another one that drops out of sight - never mind, eh? And this week's Taylor stats are one in the top ten, six in the top thirty and ten in the entire chart.
Wikipedia has comparatively little for a Kanye album, but there's an impressive guest list of artists on there - Playboi Carti, Don Tolliver, Young Thug, Lil Wayne, Kid Cudi and Travis Scott. Which somewhat surprised me - I'm not a huge fan of "cancel culture" but I do think that people should think carefully about who they want to be associated with. The critics are pretty negative about it all - you definitely get the impression they're losing patience with the guy. So I guess they'll be as happy as me to hear there's going to be a third album - and a world tour to support it! Commercially, there's still plenty of interest out there globally though with it hitting the top ten in loads of countries, #2 in the US and #1 in Canada (I would have expected them to know better).
"Customers also listened to" Travis Scott, Playboi Carti, Yeat and Kendrick Lamar - all of whom fine without having them in my life. As is definitely true for Kanye, but I do have to admit I was surprised at how little I hated this.
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