It’s possible that we didn’t, in fact, want the old Kanye. Bully, the 12th studio album from Ye, né Kanye West, feels in some ways like a greatest-hits compilation: There are soul samples flipped with the alchemic acumen that made Ye one of the main architects of the past 20 years of popular music. There are crisp, stadium-ready melodies and polished, albeit just serviceable, hooks. Yet the project feels lifeless overall, as though the Ye whom fans might remember, like the times he represents, is indeed never coming back.
Bully arrives after the much embattled Vultures, which Ye struggled to get on streaming platforms while still managing to deliver a Number One song in “Carnival.” Vultures saw Ye fully on the defensive, following his setting fire to every personal and professional bridge he had with a spree of antisemitic tirades and antics — all of which is documented in the documentary In Whose Name?, no less. After going on to release a song with the hook “Heil Hitler” (which incidentally played a role in the recent viral fame of “looksmaxxing” proponent Clavicular), and getting booted from Shopify for selling merch with swastikas, Ye had successfully shut himself out of mainstream conversation. He continued touring internationally to muted fanfare, and existed as something of a pariah in the States.
Over time, however, the culture on the ground became just as noxious as Ye’s most unhinged instincts. Appalling as they were, Ye’s rants now match up to everyday commentary on Musk-era Twitter. And he’s been on something of an image rehabilitation tour. In January, in an interview with Vanity Fair, Ye described ongoing complications from the 2002 car accident that famously left his jaw wired shut — the impetus for “Through the Wire,” and arguably Ye’s entire career. Coupled with a well-documented battle with bipolar disorder, it was enough for some to squint and almost begin to see Ye sympathetically.
This is a blessing and a curse for the music on Bully, which is easily some of the best-sounding Kanye has made in years. The album opener, “King,” is a standout and sounds something like Yeezus with smoother edges. Ye raps almost convincingly about the past few years of controversy, falling just short of saying anything impactful. Just before the song can reach any kind of emotional crest, we’re thrust into the lackluster “This a Must,” which rides a forgettable trap beat with even less inspired lyrics.“Father,” with Travis Scott, offers another bright spot, the pair’s longstanding chemistry still intact, delivering a pitch-perfect 2010s banger sure to scratch the itch of those yearning for the days of 2016. Elsewhere, like on “All the Love,” Ye delivers some of his most melodically impressive work in recent memory, landing somewhere between his 808s-era melancholy and Life of Pablo extravagance. “Punch Drunk,” “Whatever Works,” and “I Can’t Wait” all lean into the soul-sampling ethos of Ye’s early releases, to admirable effect, and a red-hot Don Toliver arrives on “Circles” for a clear-eyed attempt at the kind of radio hit that once defined Ye’s oeuvre.
Last year, demos from Bully were leaked online featuring “Bully,” “Highs and Lows,” and “Preacher Man,” which is the album’s most recognizable single. The track takes Ye’s flair for cinematics — think of the music videos for “Runaway” or “Bound 2” — and fires on all cylinders. So much so, in fact, that rumors began swirling after the Bully leaks that Ye had been using AI to construct the album. The rumors became so widespread that, upon releasing the album last week, Ye himself had to clarify that he had not used AI.
The specifics, however, matter less than the feeling. Whether or not Ye used AI to make Bully, the album nonetheless feels like decades of his music fed into a computer program. While fans would have surely loved to get any of these songs over the past five years in lieu of the chaos of 2020s-era Ye, there’s still an emptiness at the heart of Bully. The lines are all too clean, easily traceable, the opposite of what has made Ye a compelling artist for so long. In a way, it is his most human album to date, inasmuch as it proves that even stars as bright as Ye begin to dim with time.
Chappell Roan performs onstage at the YouTube Brandcast event at Lincoln Center on May 13, 2026 in New York City.
Singer Karol G during the Monaco Grand Prix at the Circuit de Monaco, Monte Carlo. Picture date: Sunday June 7, 2026. 
Marcello Hernández attends the 2026 Met Gala celebrating "Costume Art" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 04, 2026 in New York City.
Albritton’s early sketches of Beatles George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo StarrJames Brosher/Indiana University
In the 2000s, Albritton used molds to make copies of her art to fund a nonprofit for struggling artists.(Photo by James Brosher/Indiana University)James Brosher/Indiana University
The original Plaster Casters of Chicago suitcase that Cynthia made in the 1960s is now housed in the Kinsey Institute archives in Indiana. (Photo by James Brosher/Indiana University)James Brosher/Indiana University
Albritton came up with the concept of making intimate casts out of dental alginate — and it became her calling card for years.© The Baron Alan Wolman Collection, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Albritton displays some of her artwork in her apartment in Chicago, where she spent most of her life.Jim Newberry
Later in her career, Albritton casted the breasts of female musicians.Richard Bellia
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?