Kanye West’s announcement of new music from Pusha-T, Kid Cudi, Nas, Teyana Taylor, and of course, himself set the table to redefine the Event Release. It was a feat far more ambitious than The Life of Pablo’s Madison Square Garden album-party-meets-fashion-show of two years ago: a sequence of five seven-track albums by G.O.O.D. Music vets (and Nas), produced by West during his retreat to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, released on consecutive Fridays beginning Memorial Day weekend, and debuted via live-streamed release parties intended to induce major FOMO.

Before any new music was heard, the Wyoming campaign was stained by West’s support of Donald Trump and suggestion that remaining enslaved for 400 years “sounded” like a choice, as well as Kelis’ unaddressed accusations of physical and mental abuse during her marriage to Nas. There was an expectation that some of these matters would be clarified on record (perhaps because Pusha-T suggested they would be), but instead the music talked around the controversy and ranged mostly from inconsistent to infuriating in its slap-dashed quality. To make matters worse, the albums’ jumbled rollout relied just as heavily on the G.O.O.D. faith of fans as the prelude did.

How did someone who once nailed the serialized release strategy miss the mark this much? West’s G.O.O.D. Fridays series, the runway to 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, brimmed with vigor and purpose. But perhaps because West felt he had something to prove after his post-VMAs-Swiftgate exile, the strategy around one of the decade’s landmark albums was tighter from top to bottom. G.O.O.D. Fridays produced new music on a weekly basis for months leading up to (and even beyond) My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s release, generating excitement through previews of the album and stellar loosies. That was “dragon energy.” By comparison, the Wyoming rollout felt random and rushed. There was also zero consistency as to when the albums were uploaded to streaming services during release weekend, leading some to believe they were finished that last minute. While Kanye’s great Western oeuvre certainly won’t register as a commercial failure, it’s evidence that no one is too big to fail creatively.

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Pusha-T’s Daytona, the first release, remains the strongest of the Wyoming albums. At a breezy 21 minutes, it’s also the shortest—a brevity that works to Pusha-T’s advantage. His calm arrogance, razor sharp drug-dealer insights, and West’s sinister production never have a chance to grow stale, resulting in the most thematically cohesive album of the bunch. Daytona also received a dramatic boost after Drake took the bait dangled before him on “Infrared,” ultimately resulting in Pusha’s ruthless assault, “The Story of Adidon.” This was the most striking moment in the G.O.O.D. albums rollout, and, even inadvertently, it had Drake to thank for it. Kanye’s album ye soon followed, revealing the kinks in the experiment’s creative process.

In an interview with Big Boy, West explained that he overhauled the album following the TMZ incident that birthed the slavery soundbite. That was early May, and the resulting haste around ye is painfully evident. Much of the subject matter is acutely recent because, as West claimed in a New York Times interview, none of the lyrics were written more than eight days prior to release. The fact that Kanye saw Deadpool 2 twice with a deadline looming speaks volumes about his focus—as does the album’s cover, which he shot using his iPhone on the way to the listening party. West’s newfound clarity is supposed to be the album’s through-line, but everything between the red-flag bookends of “I Thought About Killing You” and “Violent Crimes” is mostly scrambled.

A little more clarity is found on the next release in the Wyoming saga, Kanye and Kid Cudi’s Kids See Ghosts. The album celebrates the rapport first established a decade ago on 808s & Heartbreak, rewarding a certain subsect of fans with the official Ye-Cudi collaboration they’ve yearned for in the years since. But Kids See Ghosts shines brightest when West lends the spotlight to his former protégé. Cudi, with his cache of warped melodies, serves as the foundation for West’s more baroque sounds and scattered production. Still, the album’s release wasn’t free of issue: the tracklist was delivered to streaming services mislabeled due to a “technical error.”

Released fourth in the rollout, Nasir is as much a victim of Nas’ inertia as Kanye’s. Part of why his previous album, 2012’s Life Is Good, excelled was its concept: the legendary rapper with the common man’s problems. Nas owned his mistakes, primarily in his marriage, and placed them front and center. For him, it was a fresh narrative—something Nasir lacks altogether. Here, one of the genre’s most vivid lyricists has almost nothing to say, drifting with little precision from ahistorical declarations, police shootings, yacht-rap bloviations, and The Godfather: Part ll. And he definitely does not address Kelis’ accusations. Moreover, Nas’ lack of chemistry with West’s production further renders Nasir incongruous and flat. Its release was delayed by nearly a day, and less than 24 hours after its arrival, Everything Is Love, the third act of Beyoncé and JAY-Z’s marital drama, devoured its buzz entirely. In the grand scheme, Nasir doesn’t just feel stale—it feels wholly unnecessary.

If the ordering of the Wyoming albums isn’t telling enough, then the mishandling of Teyana Taylor’s K.T.S.E. release should say it all. Her sophomore LP arrived a day late amid exasperation about its tardiness and a myriad of sample clearance issues. (West was supposedly hard at work on K.T.S.E. while aboard a flight from Paris, mere hours before its release.) According to Taylor, the samples prevented the album from being released as she intended. She initially said it would be unveiled in its true form this week, but later revealed an updated version isn’t coming. Unlike the established male stars of G.O.O.D. Music, Taylor doesn’t have the cushion of an outsized legacy to catch her after a tactical face-plant that wasn’t her fault. Ironically, K.T.S.E. works best when West’s vintage soul chops frame Taylor’s touching lyrics about resilience and the ways men have failed her. Still, it’s unrealistic to think K.T.S.E. could save this campaign when it was set up to be crushed by the weight of bad karma and an ill-conceived game plan.

This five-week grand opus feels like it was done on a whim, but this excerpt from a recent Def Jam press release suggests otherwise:

With his historic five album run—yielding an unprecedented four consecutive Top 5 chart debuts in as many weeks from Pusha T, Kids See Ghosts, Nas, and his own #1 album ye—Kanye has once again grabbed control of the culture and shifted the paradigm. By releasing five 7-song albums—including the most-recent, critically acclaimed K.T.S.E. from Teyana Taylor—in consecutive weeks, Kanye has changed the concept of the album rollout, at once impossibly shortening the runway and elongating the news cycle, while unspooling the narrative with each release. In effect, the five albums have created a 35-song “playlist” across multiple genres: old school, sample-heavy rap, progressive, melodic hip-hop, R&B, psychedelic rock-rap, and more.

Come on, now. Giving arbitrary deadlines, failing to meet them, then acting like you’ve reinvented the wheel didn’t change anything—at least not for the better. While it’s impressive that West made five albums that sound nothing alike, these are five separate albums—positioning them as a “playlist” is more disingenuous than Drake describing his sprawling More Life as such last year. Using that word attempts to justify the lack of glue holding the albums together. This is smoke and mirrors that treats something haphazard as calculated; something lackadaisical as dynamic; and, worst, of all, something uninspired as innovative. The rollout’s inertia- driven commercial success enables not only a lack of effort, but a lack of creativity.

Where Kanye West used to inspire through his recalcitrance, he’s reached a place where his controversy overshadows his artistry. The buck doesn’t stop with the allure of the initial idea, it extends to the execution. And since this was ill executed, neither West’s dominance on streaming nor his record-tying eighth consecutive No. 1 album can eclipse the comprehensive artistic failure. West’s well of ingenuity used to seem boundless, but the Wyoming sessions have shown what happens when that vision is wielded carelessly: you find yourself wishing the rodeo would end already.