Note: This review is based on last night’s livestream of Nasir, which hasn’t been officially released at the time of publication. You can watch the stream below.

What is freedom to Kanye West? The answer to that question is becoming exceedingly difficult to understand. He’s always positioned himself as a free thinker in the mold of Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, and other titans of industry (without pausing to note the irony that his free thought brings him to the conclusions of the…

It makes a certain inevitable sense that Kanye West would be a Rick & Morty fan. First—and, we’ll admit, it gets harder to remember this part with every passing day, as the platonic image of the show’s “Pickle Rick!”-screaming fanbase continually threatens to overshadow its actual merits—the Adult Swim series remains…

Kanye West may not be God, but nobody can deny that he’s just about as close as we’re ever going to get. On Saturday, he descended to our mortal realm to try and break up the feud between Drake and Pusha T—though “feud” is a little generous considering that Drake essentially brought Socker Boppers to a knife fight…

Clearly worried that all this online drama, outsized public egotism, and needless divisiveness will distract people from the important things in life—i.e., the life and antics of one Kanye West—the Ye rapper is now attempting to put his foot down to stop the feud between his frequent collaborator Pusha T and Canadian…

In a way, Ye is what everyone wanted. The word “Trump” appears nowhere on the album. Kanye only acknowledges his risible claim that “slavery was a choice” obliquely, and with regrets (“I ain’t finna talk about it another four centuries”). He doesn’t attempt to fit the hateful rhetoric of his YouTube thought leaders in…

After a lead-up that involved multiple hours of inviting fans to watch a webcam pointing at a campfire burning somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, Kanye West debuted his eighth studio album tonight. According to West’s friend Chris Rock, who was on hand to introduce the album, it’s titled YE, and, as ever with West,…

The music blogosphere has been filling up with reports today of a fancy, super-exclusive listening party being held in Wyoming tonight by rapper Kanye West, reports we’ve watched with studied objectivity during all the times when we weren’t walking out to check our mailboxes this afternoon, just because, no reason,…

Following May’s especially strong lineup of releases, June brings long-awaited returns from Neko Case, Nas, Lykke Li, and Gang Gang Dance, as well as anticipated efforts from Drake, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Zeal & Ardor and promising debuts from Snail Mail and Juliana Daugherty. In hip-hop, it is undoubtedly the…

With the Thanos event now long over, famous Fortnite streamer/music superstar Drake can finally get back to his regular “nine to five” gig. He already announced a new album in April, the weirdly Drive-adjacent Scorpion, and he’ll be going on tour with Migos for the Aubrey & The Three Amigos Live! tour starting in…

Pusha T came out of the gate fully evolved. He kicks off the intro to Clipse’s Lord Willin’, released in 2002, talking shit and pushing weight—“Playas we ain’t the same, I’m into ’caine and guns”—a statement of purpose from which he never wavered. He was 25. Over Clipse’s ensuing mixtapes and albums, he and brother…

Tomorrow Pusha-T’s long-awaited new record comes out, his first since 2015. The 7-track DAYTONA is executive produced by Kanye West, serving as the first in the producer’s volley of five new records, and, while it should be Pusha’s show, Kanye’s still stealing some of the headlines. A few leaked clips from his album…

Kanye West has been on a bizarre tear lately, actively and loudly rejecting anyone and anything who tries to tell him what he can and cannot (or at least should not) do. This has resulted in him repeatedly declaring that Donald Trump is pretty cool, sharing a bizarre new song, and suggesting on TMZ that slavery was a…

If there’s one throughline to Kanye West’s current interactions with the world—which are running the gamut this week, from a thoughtful, 105-minute sitdown with interviewer Charlamagne Tha God, to a volatile conversation with TMZ that ended in West confronting a staffer over his assertion that 400 years of slavery in…

On Saturday, in the middle of his ongoing heel turn toward Trumperism, Kanye West dropped the surprise announcement that a photo of plastic surgeon Jan Adams—the man who performed the surgery on West’s mother, Donda West, that ultimately led to her death in 2008—would appear on the cover of his next album. Rather than…

We’ve been through a number of KanyeStorms—the brief but exhaustingly energetic bouts of attention-seeking behaviors, new music, outright trolling, and occasional pure marketing savvy that rapper Kanye West shifts into whenever he’s got something big coming up to promote—at this point, enough to know they each have…

As part of his current (and exhaustively ongoing) marketing campaign/sudden rightward shift/one-man attempt to personally destroy Twitter, Kanye West released a new song today, titled “Lift Yourself.” West dedicated the track to DJ Ebro Darden, who, among other major black figures in the musical world, has recently…

We’ve been keeping just as much of an eye as everyone else on this week’s drama involving Kanye West being a little too logged on here at The A.V. Club, but frankly the whole thing has been too exhausting to thoughtfully chronicle every twist and turn, especially after the signed MAGA hats and Trump RTs got involved.

Kanye West is going to keep on tweeting crazy shit, much of which will be ridiculous and disturbing and all of which will be ripe for people to make fun of on Twitter. This is, of course, part of why he will keep on doing it. Twitter is set up to turn this into something of a competition for the best joke, and, while…