Forget the Drake and Travis Scott feuding and the upsetting tweets about mental health for just a moment, and recall (or learn for the first time now) that at the end of last week, Kanye West extended an open invitation to Bob Dylan to collaborate. “Let’s get together,” the guy who wrote “Love Lockdown” proposed to the guy who wrote “Like a Rolling Stone.” One wondered what might have inspired the suggestion, and our very own Andy Cush speculated that perhaps West had been listening to Dylan’s landmark Bootleg Series release of this year, More Blood, More Tracks, which collects the entirety of the singer-songwriter’s storied New York sessions for his classic 1975 album Blood on the Tracks.
Andy? More like Andy-damus! For indeed, this morning, it seems that Kanye was enjoying his morning coffee, smoothie or God-knows-what to the strains of “Up to Me,” a song that missed the cut for Blood on the Tracks and is one of the biggest revelations from the new box set. Kanye tweeted one of the song’s many fascinating and idiosyncratic stanzas:
If I’d thought about it I never would’ve done it, I would’ve let it slide
If I’d lived my life by what others were thinkin’, the heart inside me would’ve died
I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity
Someone had to reach for the risin’ star, Its up to me— ye (@kanyewest) December 17, 2018
Of course, this still kind of sucks because Kanye is clearly attempting to apply Dylan’s oblique sentiments to recent events in his own career. It would be a bridge to a far to assume Kanye would just quote some Dylan lyrics just because he thought they were beautiful in their own right. West followed up the tweet with a clarifying comment: “Bob Dylan.” It’s hard to know how to feel about this, exactly, but Kanye going through something of a public breakdown and then finding solace in muted, sentimental Bob Dylan songs feels, at least to this writer, strangely relatable. The real question is: “Up to Me” or “Shelter From the Storm,” Kanye? More Blood, More Tracks is in stores now.
