Besides the sonic structure of the album, the lyrics in Yeezus are what sets Kanye West apart from his contemporaries in the mainstream – Kanye infuses his lyrics with political lines, that imposes onto the listener the inequities and racism Black people suffer in America. West is also aware of the commodification of hip-hop into the mainstream, and how the music industry (as well as culture) wants to culturally appropriate what they desire from Black culture. As Curry states, Yeezus is “an accumulation of this pessimistic rendering of the world. (…) [that] holds the government, the police, the prison-industrial complex, and the racist-capitalist-corporatism responsible for the commodification of commercial rappers accountable” This is perhaps…show more content… If Adorno’s definition of art’s autonomy in the simplest of terms is the freedom of any political, social, economic, or religious use, then Kanye West cannot be considered an avant-garde artist in the 21st century, or in any century for that matter. Paradoxically, although Adorno always took autonomous art as a precondition of the avant-garde, he has recognized that music, “contained social contradictions in its own structure (…) it was neither fully reflective nor fully autonomous” . By these means, if music and art can never fully be autonomous then what are the limits inside autonomy for the avant-gardists? It is predicted that Adorno’s anxiety regarding autonomy derives from his Marxist beliefs: the possibility of an exchange value around the work. His concerns were focused whether music had the characteristics of commodities, and if it was marketable and market-oriented or not. In a 21st century context, Kanye West’s Yeezus is seen in a complex situation regarding such autonomy. With Yeezus, he decided to have no campaign around it – no posters, billboards, advertisements online, not even an artwork. As seen in Figure 1, the album is composed of a clear cd case and a red sticker – no reference to Kanye West. In one of his mid-show rants, he