Take " Jesus Walks", where he references another Psalm while gasping from on high: "I walk through the valley of the Chi where death is/ Top floor, the view alone will leave you breathless." Then, on "POWER", he contemplates leaping out of the penthouse, "letting everything go." In a way, Yeezus is the panicked sound of that ensuing free-fall, a rush of angst and despair with absolutely nothing left to lose. His intensity here has a heightened desperation as he howls into the void, but the Chicago native has always been beguiled by the view from above. These are the immeasurably lofty stakes Kanye deals in on Yeezus, his sixth solo album. In Kanye's hands, being a god sounds stressful as hell, something we can all relate to, and the song's apparent inspiration is a passage from the book of Psalms: "I have said, Ye are gods and all of you are children of the most High." The song is pierced by a series of primal screams, pixelated outbursts that are only briefly able to halt the beat's heaving evil. Here, Kanye raps about loyalty, respect, threesomes, and, yes, croissants with the urgency of someone being chased by a 30-ton steamroller. For starters, the track sounds less triumphant than breathtakingly vexed, crashing in with a gnarled dancehall vocal sample and paranoid sawtooth synths that aim to destroy. But just as the Beatle's proclamation was fuller and wiser in context- "I believe that what people call God is something in all of us," Lennon would later explain- "I Am a God" is not simply the latest self-important blast from one of pop culture's pre-eminent egoists. Look at the song title "I Am a God" and it seems like easy blasphemy- Kanye West's update of John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" shocker from 1966.
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