Kanye West Best Posts: rick rubin on "yeezus"

Fazers · Mar 20, 2016

Mar 20, 2016
checked rap genius for something, and even though most of the annotations are cancerous, rick rubin did an annotation for most of the tracks on yeezus and found it interesting information to pass along:

on sight:

I don’t think this one changed at all, with the Daft Punk sample — or I should say track, the arpeggio coming out of their big modular synth. I think all we did was mix that.

We hadn’t really heard anything like that in hip hop before. That may have been one of the inspirations for the minimal direction for the whole album. So we put it first, and it was really non-musical, super aggro, really noisy. I loved it, it made me crazy. A lot of people hate it — it divides people.
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black skinhead:

Kanye played at some festival after the release ofYeezus, and his whole rant was something to the effect of “I turn on the radio and nothing speaks to me, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it, and I don’t want my music on the radio because I don’t like what the radio is.” So in that mindset, it makes sense that he makes a record that isn’t for that. It’s not about that. It’s so anti. It’s almost anti-hip-hop. It’s crazy.
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i am a god:

When he played Yeezus for me, it was like, three hours of stuff. We just went through it and figured out what was essential and what wasn’t. It was like deciding a point of view, and it was really his decision to make it minimal.

He kept saying it about tracks that he thought weren’t good enough and needed work. If he was going to leave me to work on stuff, he’d say, “Anything you can do to take stuff out instead of put stuff in, let’s do that.”
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new slaves:

He works with a lot of people over a long period of time. Then, he curates all of that material. I’m there to help with that process, to be someone he can bounce it off of.
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i'm in it:

I remember a few days after Yeezus came out, Kanye sent me a message, so excited, like, “I just realized there’s no snare drum on Yeezus until the sixth song! How cool is that?”
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blood on the leaves:

I think he worked mostly out of an apartment in Paris, but I don’t really know the details, I never went there. I do know that it was a large space, because you could hear the reverb of the space in a lot of the tracks even when you didn’t want it. I think he liked the vibe there more than thinking it was a good place to make a good-sounding recording.
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guilt trip:

Kanye told me Yeezus was the first album where he was happy with the way it came out.
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bound 2:

“Bound 2” was a track that wasn’t initially a sample-based track. It was a band track with singing, no idea who. I got involved late in the game.

He came in one day and said he got inspired driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, on the way to my studio. He thought it would be a good thing to try the sample he found, so we tried that and the whole song changed. The chorus was still the old way, where it was sort of a band version. I took everything out of that and reduced it to one sort of ugly sounding synth. I would say the old version was more like MOR, R&B. That’s just an example of one song onYeezus that changed a lot. Some of them changed a little, some of them changed a lot.
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Mraczewsky · Mar 21, 2016

Mar 21, 2016
i love yeezus so much

Back when Kanye knew what he wanted to release

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