Why the third Ye release this year might be more Kar-krashian than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

The task of pinpointing precisely when Mr Kanye West’s crown began to slip is the perfect parlour game – divisive, prone to lead to arguments, pretty much impossible to achieve consensus on. The permutations become infinite if you tweak the question to: has the crown in fact fallen off entirely? The gift that keeps on giving, Mr West is a tireless supplier of new twists to this already immersive game. Whether high-fiving President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, or feuding with Ms Taylor Swift (et al), or comparing himself to Michelangelo, Picasso, Mr Steve Jobs (et al), or appalling fellow African-Americans with his statements about slavery and the 13th Amendment, or putting out patchy or just plain substandard albums where once he would release era-defining, envelope-pushing records almost as an afterthought, the life of the man who now goes by the name Ye can sometimes seem like a perpetual car crash in slo-mo, a 24-hour news cycle of Twitter rants, hubris, provocation and self-pity. To think, we once merely reviewed his music.

Ah, yes, his music. Track back to 2010, and the producer and rapper – still just those at this juncture – had recently released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, his fifth masterpiece in a row. The 10-minute film that accompanied the single “Runaway”, in which a ballet troupe in black tutus danced among decadent dinner guests straight out of a movie directed by Mr Peter Greenaway, as Mr West himself played the song’s central motif on an upright piano, portrayed an artist at the absolute peak of his game. We’re still two years away from Ms Kim Kardashian; his Twitter habit has yet to become compulsive (he’d only just, belatedly, joined the conversation); his musical output is still almost universally acclaimed, and generates huge sales. While it would be wrong to suggest that Mr West’s mental wellbeing was not already a cause for concern (his mother’s premature death at 58 from multiple post-operative problems after undergoing cosmetic surgery in 2007 had stirred ghosts that seem to have stalked him since childhood), the Chicagoan’s position as a troubled genius appeared to be just that: a multi-platinum pop superstar with issues.

That was then, this is now. On the eve, if rumours are to be believed, of the release of a new album (Yandhi, his third this year), Mr West as an artist now operates in a world that is less inclined – or too busy and distracted – to pay him the attention it once did. In 2018, his music is greeted more with mild curiosity (or even indifference) than acclaim and awestruck disbelief. Commercially, he has been eclipsed by Drake; musically, by Mr Kendrick Lamar, who to his followers increasingly seems like the Jesus to Mr West’s John the Baptist. A once unthinkable scenario is now a simple statement of fact: Mr West is running to stay still, where once he led the pack.

I’ve met Mr West many times, and interviewed him twice, at length. Face to face, you catch qualities, and aspects of his personality, that are all too easy to miss when the headline stuff is all about his bombast and bragging, his wife, his latest clickbait outburst, his messiah complex, or another iffy album. Up close, you become immediately aware of his impish sense of humour, his extreme sensitivity, the chips he carries on his shoulder like trophies of war, the hyper restlessness of his mind, his kindness and warmth – and his oddness. Small wonder, you conclude, that music alone was never going to contain Mr West; that fashion, design, film, politics and philanthropy were among any number of alternative avenues that were always likely to distract him. Can he get back to musical greatness? With luck, Yandhi will provide us with an answer, and wipe the slate clean of his post-genius years. But perhaps he needs to get back to wellness, too. Auteur, autodidact, innovator, game-changer – Mr West has been all of those, and has perhaps paid too heavy a price in the process. We need him back to his best. Jesus walks, he once sang. Well, look what happened to Jesus.