2018’s SHOOT IT STRAIGHT INTO MY FUCKING VEINS List

I’ve wrestled with whether or not to include on this here Veins List every song Kanye released this summer across his five collab-albums.

Though each has its bangers — which is technically all that’s required to be shot into my fucking veins — they work best when heard as collected artistic units, and not as mere collections of individual singles.

No such mental jostling is required for his final collection, Teyana Taylor’s K.T.S.E. Whereas Kanye managed to seamlessly fuse his artistry with his guest’s musical signatures on the first four albums, a vast majority — 7/8 songs, to be exact — of K.T.S.E. sounds like an uneasy mashup of their respective sounds, her straightforward 21st century R&B and his ever-present, 21st century, digitally-manipulated (over)producing (that last parenthetical qualifier is in no way a pejorative, at least where Kanye’s concerned).

And yet, right when I was about to chalk up the album as forgettably enjoyable from top to bottom, that eighth spot, the closer, rocked my fucking EarDruMs. Departing from the preceding seven tracks’ conventional use of her genre, “WTF” (short for “Want This Pussy”, a sentiment that seems connected to the album’s evocative cover art; all of Kanye’s covers this summer have been some of the year’s best) delves into another form entirely, one that’s also known by a 3-character acronym: EDM.

But then, just like that, the album ends, with nothing left but prematurely-abandoned potential. If Kanye made it a six-part musical series, filling this imagined last entry with her sumptuous vocals over similarly-engineered bops and bombs, it could be my favorite of them all.

Basically, it’d be the fitting complement to this feminist-minded post’s other addition to 2018’s Veins List: