Ye’s Fix-as-You-Go Approach is Officially Broken

If you’re reading this, it’s too late to salvage Vultures 2. But that doesn’t mean Ye won’t try.

The second collaborative album of the year from Ty Dolla $ign and Kanye West (known collectively as ¥$) dropped last week with a disclaimer via the YZY homepage: “Updated songs will be published in real time.” Thus far, those adjustments have ranged from song title changes to engineering rejiggers to truncated tracks. For all we know, Ye could be tweaking stem files at this exact moment, preparing to dispense a batch of changes like his late idol Steve Jobs would deploy iOS updates. Art has, perhaps, never felt so commodified.

This has long been the Yeezy way: release music and tinker, tinker, tinker, until it meets his creative benchmark. That said, the rollout of Vultures 2 has been sloppy, even by Ye’s logistical standards. This 16-track affair (plus the five deluxe-edition cuts added post-drop) sounds remarkably unfocused and unfinished—a worst-case scenario for the fix-as-you-go approach to modern music making. Ye’s perfectionism has never been more self-defeating. Vultures 2 is proof that his haphazard system has finally broken.

Who knows why Ye, who is presumably in the driver’s seat despite the album’s joint billing, would insist on this manner of operating. Sure, it’s an intriguing experiment, but the outcome is clear: This ain’t it, chief. The unconventional workflow has already resulted in the harshest reviewed work in the Kanye canon. YouTube comments on the 1.0 version “Time Moving Slow” are littered with complaints about the updated album version being inferior. (One commenter on the OG “River” garnered hundreds of likes for venting: “The whole vultures era has been creating the greatest music you’ve ever heard and then ruining it.”) And the subpar version of Vultures 2 available on streaming services is still glaringly rough around the edges. It all bears the question: Who is this actually serving?

It wasn’t always like this. Kanye West’s early career showcases the upside of his obsessive tendencies. From his 2004 debut, The College Dropout, to 2013’s Yeezus, every kick, snare and background vocal felt meticulously considered. He famously boasted about recording a “perfect” album in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and his prior LPs are generally considered ambitious, if not immaculate, works of art.

Still, even in those nascent days, Ye would retool songs that had already become fan favorites. Five years after dropping the Get Well Soon... mixtape cut “Home” in 2002, Kanye substituted that track’s excellent John Legend hook and pitched-up soul beat for Chris Martin singing over a sleek piano arrangement on Graduation’s “Homecoming.” Replacing an unclearable Lauryn Hill sample on “All Falls Down” was a necessary, albeit effective, reworking of an early classic. But Ye became more transparent regarding his process with “Love Lockdown” in 2008. In response to less-than-lukewarm feedback, he updated the 808s & Heartbreak lead single ahead of the album’s release. “There's a new version of Love Lockdown coming,” Kanye wrote on his now-defunct blog, indicating that he’d replaced the drums and resung the vocals. “Your prayers have been answered!”

Kanye fully embraced this technique of building the aircraft while flying it with 2016’s The Life of Pablo, itself a disorganized launch that he referred to as “a living breathing changing creative expression.” As such, “Wolves” got a facelift after the album dropped, with Ye adding features from Sia and Vic Mensa and relegating a Frank Ocean cameo to its own interlude. (Ye’s “Ima fix wolves” tweet quickly became a meme, although not all were pleased by the alterations.) More than half of the album’s songs were renovated post-release. He’d do similar touch ups on Ye a couple years later.

In 2020, Pigeons & Planes lauded the tech- and design-inspired recording method that birthed TLOP, suggesting it could be both a creative and business boon if others followed Ye’s lead. But his approach has since felt more like a crutch than pushing the envelope. Donda (2021) and its sequel released the following year arrived especially untidy and incomplete. There was a redeeming factor for those two albums, which were released in conjunction with Kanye’s Stem Player, a now-discontinued device that allowed fans to deconstruct and assemble their own Frankensteined versions of the songs—a forward-thinking innovation.

Vultures 2, however, feels like a homework assignment from a student who ran out of time. Which is odd, because it seems Ye caved in to a self-imposed deadline. There are portions of the album that seem to retain AI filters (“Sky City,” “Field Trip”) that make human voices sound unnatural. Some songs are audibly unmixed (“My Soul”). “Lifestyle” features a duplicative Ye verse that also appears on “Husband” (it was trimmed on the album’s censored version on Thursday, though it remains on the explicit version). First impressions matter. The album debuted in shambles and has only marginally improved since.

Giving Ye the benefit of the doubt (which he has long ago worn out), he just might believe it’s a treat for listeners to see a musical mastermind get in his zone. Maybe he feels he’s putting the art of music creation on a pedestal by showing his work, flaws and all. Truth is, it’s only negatively shifting the perception of his merit as a scrupulous creator. In this case, seeing how the sausage is made is nearly as unappetizing as the cliché itself.

Ye was once a poster child for albums of the highest grade—he sought to create art that blasts music toward the future. In contrast, the greatest fault of experiencing Vultures 2 and its series of updates is that it’s difficult to know which artistic choices are intentional, which are blunders, and what is merely being tidied up to appease fans who will inevitably be split regardless of what changes are made. The artistic statement is sapped of its potency. What’s progressive about that?

Vultures 2 isn’t all bad: Future helps carry “Promotion,” while the unbridled energy of “Field Trip” is palpable. Yet the bitter vent session “530” has its potential spoiled by bouts of rambling and incoherent mumbling. Is this gibberish meant to evoke drunken babble, or is it merely a placeholder to be replaced at some point in the future? We might never know.