HAPPY NEW YE

[Video]
[5.94]

Crystal Leww: I think this is what people were expecting when Kanye West got married and had a daughter. Kanye decided that he wanted to remain “unpredictable” and we got Yeezus. Now that we’ve firmly established that Kanye is an Artist or whatever, he’s put out a little piano ballad written from the point of view from his mother. It reminds me a lot of what Frank Ocean did with channel ORANGE, except better because we’ve known this narrative longer. It’s hard to separate the song from the story. Kanye re: his mom has always been heartbreaking: I cried when I got to “Tell Nori about me.” 
[7]

Alex Ostroff: “Only One” is the first song I played in 2015, shortly after midnight at a friend’s New Year’s party. I don’t know what I was expecting. It wasn’t this. The first piece of music writing I ever published was about the Glow in the Dark Tour and 808s and Heartbreak and how they reflected the isolation and depression that seemed to be the cost of Kanye’s ascent to fame. I don’t know if I ever really expected to hear him this content and loved and happy on record again. But here we are: Kanye is filtering The College Dropout through the sonics of 808s & Heartbreak, and the sorrow of the “Coldest Winter” has come all the way around to something warmer and maybe sadder and probably more beautiful. I’ve officially been tearing up during “Family Business” and crying about “Hey Mama” for a decade, so it was completely predictable that Ye channelling Donda asking him to “Tell Nori about me” would make me completely lose it. And yet with each successive listen, the heart of this is Kanye singing “You’re not perfect but you’re not your mistakes” to himself. On paper, it could come off as ego, self-absorption, and solipsism but it honestly feels like a moment of grace. In its specificity that forgiveness and that reminder are extended to all of us. I want 2015 to sound like this. I want 2015 to feel like this. It won’t, but for almost 5 minutes at a time, it can.
[8]

David Sheffieck: I expected, or I anticipated, that the follow-up to Yeezus would find Kanye pivoting on “Bound 2” to deliver an album of songs exploring territory that was the opposite of the dark themes he’d dug into previously. I would never have predicted he’d start with something as wrenchingly beautiful as “Only One.” This is a gorgeous song without context, and a heart-tugging one if you know the history, know the story and legacy of Donda West and the significance of Kanye singing in her voice. As a new father myself I’ve admittedly become a sucker for art that engages with these ideas, of loss and parenting and doubt and dreams (it was only a week ago that I was crying in a movie theater at the end of a flawed adaptation of Into the Woods) but Kanye really nails it here: the way we tell stories of the people who made us who we are to ourselves every day, the way we hope we can pass on to our children stories of the people who are gone. I’ve listened to this every day this year, and I’ve cried every time I hear “I just want you to do me a favor.” I’m crying now as I write this. I can’t even remember the last song that hit me this hard, and — ultimately? I’m with anyone who sincerely tweets that Kanye just gave Paul McCartney a career. This is the best thing he’s worked on in decades.
[10]

Alfred Soto: With a Beatle tickling the ivories (but not so’s you’d notice he’s playing), it’s inevitable that Kanye would write his own “All of Me.” Like Black Voodoo, the murk mitigates the sentiment in this quasi-demo, but if his idea of experimenting is a Macca collab in 2014 then he better get Pete Townshend on the next released track — or Steve Winwood to play the keys. The sentiment itself he’s expressed with more accuracy elsewhere, with the points of view shifted. But the cross-generational cynicism of assuming anyone gives a shit about McCartney working with Kanye — of McCartney, period — speaks to the shrewdest way of selling material in a streaming environment.
[4]

Rebecca A. Gowns: The Paul McCartney input is so slight! But if he inspired Kanye to return to more 808s and Heartbreak territory, I’d be pleased. Kanye can be quite a sweetie. Although, you know, Paul McCartney also has a dash of rebellious spirit inside that buttercream soul of his, so I’d love to see Kanye push his boundaries that way too. So much possibility for future tracks! This one, as it stands, sounds quite restrained, but it’s fitting for the lyrical content, which is simple, sincere, and touching. It’s a mere morsel of a song, but what a morsel it is.
[8]

Brad Shoup: A self-portrait from the reflection of a photo frame, “Only One” isn’t a glimpse at something different, despite the choice to have his mom narrate. Surprise: she’s proud of him, everyone needs to get off his back about his “mistakes,” etc. I’m sure that if I did this as an exercise, my imagination wouldn’t let me say anything different. It’s the return of the best bad singer, clustering his backing vocals so that they sound like on one of his MBDTF-era bass sunrays. He knows when it’s time to try a new phrase, to keep everyone’s attention from wandering. Because he’s dastardly smart, he does so while keeping one of rock’s great crooners off the mike, having him pump away at the electric piano like a much less affordable Jon Brion. Hey, he’s the Only One.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: The attempt to be understood clearly and perfectly is one of those marathons that can make you want to fold yourself up into a dresser when you realize you can’t stop failing. Shears and Yeezus, Macca and Mr. To The, both Geminis, the designation of Hermes/Mercury, are naturally obsessed with communication and comprehension, and the twin pairs of twins are here to talk about the fact that when people you love don’t get to communicate, its up to you to try and forge that bridge. Fellow medium Ty Dolla Sign and no doubt a multitude of others are here as Kanye attempts to channel his departed mother to sing to his daughter. Black Magic(k) is no problem for a guy who put The Beast on an album cover that supposedly celebrated his death, nor for the guy who filled a record with wheezes, gasps and hostile “aliens” who we learn every other week in our country, are not immune from dying. But you don’t want to scare a baby with the threat of death and dying, because that’s terrible and more importantly its mean. So you try and just get the love to her, on winged heels from Tartarus, or Heaven, or whatever you imagine, to bestow upon her brow while she sleeps. You can only do so much Kanye, but bless your heart.
[8]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Pinocchio Story” is the saddest song in Kanye West’s career. It’s sadder than the nihilism of “Handle My Liquor”, sadder than the dead-end job in “Spaceship,” somehow sadder than when Cyhi Da Prince’s verse starts on “So Appalled”. It’s improvised on stage in Singapore, capturing West’s grief over his mother’s death. Over a spare keyboard, he sings and screams and pants and eventually falls quiet to intermittent applause from a crowd that came for a good time, but left with concern. It lasts six whole minutes, and I can barely make it all the way through anymore: it’s too raw, the sound of a man thrashing against the universe to himself while an audience wonders when he’ll talk about Black Kate Moss. “Only One” takes the “Pinocchio Story” aesthetic (a keyboard, a Kanye, let’s see what comes out of this!) and captures a happier time in the West’s life, where raw grief is replaced by teary-eyed certainty that death is not the end. “Tell Nori about me,” he croaks over and over in the song’s most affecting moment, channelling his mother while thinking of his infant daughter. It lasts five minutes, and I can barely make it all of the way through: keyboard player Paul McCartney (ex-Wings) is over-humoured with a plodding coda and the austerity of West’s approach acts to hide the lack of songwriting within. Yet it revisits the grief of “Pinocchio Story” and turns it to hope, into new life. Both are emotional sketches as songs, but only one finds a smile in the sadness.
[5]

Madeleine Lee: I’m glad to hear that the robot from the end of “Runaway” is feeling better about himself, and I say this with full awareness that the robot is Kanye. The way his voice sounds when he-as-his mother sings “Tell Nori about me” — the weight of tears, the shape of a smile — is sublime.
[7]

Anthony Easton: John Currin usually paints these really grotesque paintings of female sexuality, his highly technical style subsumed into a stew of irony and disingenuousness. But a few months after his son was born, he painted a small, genuinely beautiful, genuinely historicist portrait of his son, fat and happy like a Holbein prince. I keep thinking about Kanye, who never had a problem with earnestness but whose best formal work functioned on the wrong sense of ugly, who felt comfortable with the modernist instinct toward the ugly or broken or conflicted. But he had a baby, he seems overjoyed with that baby, and he releases a song that is like Currin’s portrait of his son. Kanye is rich enough to know Paul McCartney, and McCartney is sentimental enough that I suspect that he does not understand either formal ugliness or the ironic slippage between sign and signifier that marks recent texts. But the thing is, in terms of writing, I also think that Kanye means what he says. So we have this mutually reinforcing chamber of earnestness, and we have a work that might have been arrogant or silly or syrup sweet. But we have the best piano work that McCartney has done in ages, and we have a simple, sung devotion for a father to his son, and I know how a listener can hate it, but I can’t.
[10]

Katherine St Asaph: The sentiment’s alternately nice and stunning — so much, you feel like an ass to say listening to it is a chore.
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Edward Okulicz: The complete sincerity with which Kanye has crafted this is totally admirable, and “Only One” is, in a somewhat charming way, childlike. Unfortunately in practice his singing voice is completely dead, and it’s not raw or numb, it’s just blank. Not feeling his feels here.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Rating this feels like giving marks to the lullabies a parent sings when they’re half-insane with sleep deprivation and up at four in the morning just trying to get the kid to stop wailing; it’s an intimate conversation, what business is it of mine? Most new parents, of course, wouldn’t have the luxury of singing it over the lo-fi electric piano chords allegedly played by the world’s most famous living museum piece, much less of releasing it as a single; but just because Kanye occupies a rarified economic sphere doesn’t mean his emotional one is unusual. Which is, as ever, his point. Splitting the difference between my endorsement of his actions and my desire ever to hear it again, we reach:
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Thomas Inskeep: Kanyeezzzzzzzz. When he’s “heartfelt” he’s the worst kind of maudlin and trite, Macca adds nothing discernable, and for someone who’s used Auto-Tune to such great effect in the past (cf. 808s and Heartbreak), his use of it here is grating and nearly unlistenable. His worst single ever, by furlongs.
[1]

Patrick St. Michel: An incredibly sweet song, but I’m going to forget about its existence whenever the next bit of new Kanye West music emerges so…
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: Kanye was candid from the beginning of his career about the admiration he had for Jay Z, how he wanted Hova’s approval before the two had ever met. As an outsider to hip-hop as it existed at the beginning of the 21st century — a middle-class rapper in a working-class genre — and an artist with more potential than natural talent, Ye craved to be embraced by rap’s mainstream. He was more successful than most people in his place would ever have hoped: he captured the attention of the best rapper alive, formed a tight personal and creative bond with him, and was incorporated so wholeheartedly into his genre that he has reshaped the entirety of hip-hop in his mold. It wasn’t so easy with the wider world though, and Kanye craves to be as embraced as completely by mainstream culture as he was by hip-hop. It’s why he fixates on snubs or status markers like award shows, particularly ones like the Grammys that have never been notable avatars of taste or distinction. Media in Australia, for instance, mocked the rapper when he declared while on tour here that he was “this generation’s Rolling Stones,” and Kanye knows that he is popularly represented as a meme and a punchline before a great because of racial and generational border-patrolling rather than considerations of achievement. Is it humorless to scowl about being parodied on Saturday Night Live or South Park? Sure, but Kanye knows the disrespect derives from something deeper. So Kanye, who has previously referred to himself as a black Beatle, works with Paul McCartney, a man whose biggest contribution to “Only One” is his name, the imprimatur of a respectability West longs for but with which he might never be fully permitted, even though he’s already bettered the Beatles a thousand times over. The song the two create together is stolid and sentimental, the same mush McCartney has been serving up since the days of “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Hey Jude.” Songs about children are always grim, even when they’re dressed up as songs about mothers — and no portion of this is as restorative as “Hey Mama.” The fierce love and loyalty Kanye publicly exhibits for his family is genuinely lovely, but the miracle of life only feels extraordinary when it’s your own genes being reproduced. “Only One” is like catching photos of someone else’s baby on Facebook. This time, it’s Uncle Paul tagged in the status update.
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