This often seems to be the response when hip hop lyrics get called out. The claim is that people are only looking at the negatives, bit where, in this artist's case, are the positives?
There are plenty of hip hop artists I love a great deal, Common, Cunninlynguists, etc., so it's not like I hate the genre, I just find things like the majority of the lyrics on MBDTF to be quite distasteful, despite how strong the music is.
I just get so frustrated by the extremely simplistic view that hip-hop is all "suck my dick". It says far, far more about the OPs than it does about hip-hop. There are some atrocious and (to some people) offensive lyrics out there, but as iYup says that's not exclusive to hip-hop.
From MBDTF, take lines like
Hey teacher teacher
Tell me how do you respond to students?
And refresh the page and restart the memory?
Re-spark the soul and rebuild the energy?
We stopped the ignorance, we killed the enemies
Sorry for the night the demons still visit me
The plan was to drink until the pain over
But what's worse, the pain or the hangover?
Fresh air, rollin' down the window
Too many Urkels on your team, that's why your wins low
Is hip hop just a euphemism for a new religion?
The soul music for the slaves that the youth is missing
This is more than just my road to redemption
Malcolm West had the whole nation standing at attention
I hit the Jamaican spot at the bar take a seat
I ordered you jerk, she said you are what you eat
You see I always loved that sense of humor
But tonight you should have seen how quiet the room was
A few of my favourite lines. The whole album is a really interesting look into the mind of Kanye West.
What does that even mean?
And his ignorance in the difference between Romans and Greeks in one of his newer songs is inexcusable. As is his mispronunciation of Maybach
His mispronunciations are deliberate, I'm sure. And stupid as it may seem they become popular. "Francis Ford Cocopola" from To The World is another example.
As far as he goes as a lyricist, I'd check out "Family Business" or "Last Call" or "Gone" from his first two albums as tracks that best showcase the emotional content and playfulness that stretch over his body of work. I don't know what bellwether folks use to compare/judge lyrics, but for me the complexity of his backing beats and sampling are hard to judge as separate entities. Not that I'm against that level of dissection, hip-hop is the biggest musical genre I can think of where it's detrimental to remove the rhythm to judge the "words." They're inexorably linked.
Hell, lines like "Oh, I remember how we first met / Okay, I don't remember how we first met" in "Bound 2" or the "Nahnahnahnahnah-the fuck you sound" burst in "Drunk and Hot Girls" carry a fuck-all attitude and bravado that work part and parcel with the image that he cultivates. For a person who seems obtuse publicly, his work feels incredibly self-aware. Yeezy's constantly toying with the expectations one has of him as an artist or pop star in an astonishingly candid fashion.
That's my take at least. Haters beware.
Basically this.