Album Review: Various - Kanye West Presents Good Music Cruel Summer

GOOD Music, Kanye West's label, is named for its ambition: Getting Out Our Dreams. Here GOOD is no misnomer but, sadly, it's an accurate name for reasons West and his colleagues would rather not embrace. Good Music Cruel Summer is good – truly – but it is no more than that. Its quality doesn't match its creator's ambition. With 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye raised the bar on how rap albums could sound. Importantly, he raised the bar for how rap musicians could reach new heights through collaboration. After 2011's Watch The Throne, this compilation was to be a third step in that direction.

And… it's not. It's simply an above-average rap album. R Kelly's performance on To The World seeks to elevate it higher. And New God Flow is incredible: an ancient Ghostface sample punctuates a Pusha T cocaine-brag before Tony Stark makes a surprise appearance and rounds the track out perfectly. Thrilling. Thrilling, that is, until the mindless chant of “GOOD Music, GOOD Music, GOOD Music…” does its best to ruin the track. John Legend pops up on Bliss. His appearance begs the question: why he hasn't been able to make more of an imprint in a world that's embraced The-Dream, The Weeknd, and Frank Ocean?

Despite these heavenly triumphs we are dragged back to Earth so many times that Good Music Cruel Summer is overall a tiring, dispiriting experience. A verse from Common? Aptly named. Kid Cudi's Creepers? Confirmation that he showed us all his moves five years ago. Don't Like? Ugh. The list goes on. And West seems to have lost ground in his progress as a rapper. He's back to spouting lines like “Mitt Romney ain't pay no tax”; both inaccurate and irrelevant. So this thing is good; sure. But great? Yeah, nah.