{"id":590003,"date":"2026-04-08T10:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T10:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/590003\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T10:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T10:07:09","slug":"ye-is-better-than-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/590003\/","title":{"rendered":"Ye Is Better Than This"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe\u2019s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Driving around the morning after attending Ye\u2019s sold-out show at Los Angeles\u2019 SoFi Stadium, I found myself, understandably, in the mood for a Kanye<\/a> set. Much of the setlist at SoFi was built to function like a one-man Verzuz, a reminder that Ye has hits for days, timeless songs that both take you back to the moment in time when they were released but also sound potent and barely dated, even years and decades later. As I flew up the 405 on a solo mission, sun beaming down on the mountains on the horizon, I put my library of Kanye songs on shuffle and within a few tracks, landed on one of his best features: 2010\u2019s \u201cLive Fast, Die Young,\u201d born out of the Hawaii sessions that would yield My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy but ultimately placed on Rick Ross<\/a>\u2019 equally excellent project from that year, Teflon Don. It\u2019s a titanic song, two artists in their imperial phases talking cash shit, but one all-time Kanye bar in particular stuck out more than usual on this listen: \u201cI\u2019m back by unpopular demand\/At least he still poppin\u2019 in Japan<\/a>\u2026 Screams from the fans: \u2018Yeezy, always knew you\u2019d be on top again!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. Sixteen years ago, Ye was in a position similar to the one he\u2019s in now, a position he\u2019s found himself in often\u2014rapping his way out of cultural timeout, testing the waters to see if we\u2019ll take him back, finding solace in being poppin\u2019 in Japan<\/a> while he field-tests his comeback.<\/p>\n

The stakes in 2010 were obviously much lower; all he\u2019d really done was let his egomania and grief curdle into disrespecting America\u2019s Sweetheart on national TV, which now seems like a minor infraction compared to making a song called \u201cHeil Hitler,\u201d<\/a> wearing a Klan hood in an interview,<\/a> and the other host of Weird Shit<\/a> Ye\u2019s done in the past few years. Still, Kanye took the greater public\u2019s exasperation with him back then as a serious probational stint, retreated to a lair in Hawaii like a mad scientist, and didn\u2019t emerge until the music was bulletproof. In one of my favorite Kanye interviews<\/a>, a 2013 Yeezus-era chat with New York Times critic Jon Caramanica, Ye would dismiss MBDTF as a \u201cbackhanded apology\u201d: \u201cI was like: Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back.\u2019\u201d In that case, he overachieved\u2014from the moment you hear the album\u2019s opening notes, you can feel him swinging for the rafters, and then the first line confirms it, that refrain-as-mission statement: \u201cCan we get much higher?\u201d<\/p>\n

In the years since Kanye became Ye, his offenses have gotten more serious and the music has gotten progressively less impressive; the best thing you can say about Ye\u2019s new album Bully is that it\u2019s at least better than some of the sonically-unfocused, lyrically provocative-for-provocation’s-sake (\u201cNow I\u2019m Ye Cosby, bitch\u201d) music he made at his creative nadir. (Donda and Kids See Ghosts<\/a> innocent!)<\/p>\n

It would be fine to admit that a middle-aged Ye (he turns 49 in June) might not be able to recapture his peak, or that Bully and the tour are, at best, a step towards that goal; instead both Ye and his fans are already in victory-lap mode. A proper comeback in hip-hop calls for a little cockinesss\u2014verses like \u201cLive Fast\u201d only hit because he delivered them with the swag of someone who never doubted he\u2019d be back. But from where I sat inside the stadium, moments like Ye commanding the crowd to sing along to \u201cHeartless\u201d then saying \u201cthis is what 80,000 people sounds like,\u201d or him impishly smirking \u201cWelcome to SoFi, motherfuckers\u201d felt like flexes deserving of a better show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe\u2019s final word…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,569,75,5099,341,224747,1778,343],"class_list":["post-590003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-kanye-west","tag-music","tag-tap-in","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}