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Has there ever been an album rollout weirder than The Life of Pablo's? It’s been a mess. After two years of abortive singles and flaunted promises, Kanye suddenly whirled into a frenzy of action, giving us four different titles, editing the track listing three times and writing verses up to and past the eleventh hour. It’s a testament to his incomparable confidence that even the prospect of a launch party at Madison Square Gardens didn’t prompt him to finish the thing; he turned up, played some unmasterered tracks off of his laptop, and then chopped and rearranged the whole thing over the weekend.
His Twitter feed became a hive of controversy. There was beef with Wiz Khalifa, an alleged $53 million of personal debt and the uncomfortable proclamation: “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!”. Accompanying this chaos has been a mounting body of censure, even from Ye’s staunchest defenders – a liminal sense that he has finally gone too far.
This is completely baffling to me – such behaviour may be new to his twitter feed, but his albums have been a hotbed of misogyny and ludicrous opinions for at least a decade. I have couple theories why it’s taken so long for music critics to challenge Deus Kanye. Music critics probably stopped seeing Kanye clearly once they all agreed to give him the appellation “genius”, and consequently over-intellectualised everything he did. The second is that feminists have given him something of a pass due to his stances on racial inequality. They seem to look the other way because he’s black, working in a typically-marginalised art form and, you know, going through some stuff. When you think about this, though, this is deeply racist, as it holds black artists to a different moral standard than others (not to mention ignores Kanye’s manifest ability to be totally racist). This is par for the course in the increasingly confused, tangled world of identify politics, in which what you say matters less than who you are.
What both of these attitudes have in common is an inability to hold two possibly contradictory ideas of a person in one’s head; Kanye might be a huge sexist and a loving husband, a mother lode of moronic opinions and a hugely innovative producer, an arrogant megalomaniac and a caring father. This kind of ambivalence isn’t uncommon in everyday life, but the curse of celebrity is to be petrified as an idea, and Kanye is in most minds either Untarnished Genius or The Douchebag That Ruined Music. The result is a journalistic industry spinning its wheels every time Kanye does something that suggests the attendant, dizzying complexities of a troubled and troubling human being.
But, enough talk (or torque?) – onto the music. The Life of Pablo has been described by its creator as a “gospel album with a whole lot of cursing on it”, but in reality it encompasses a lot more, and achieves a lot less. There’s a reason I began my review discussing its bizarre, chaotic release schedule: it’s inseparable from the record, which is every bit as exasperatingly schizogenic as Kanye’s Twitter feed.
In the past Kanye albums have rewritten the rule book, introducing a new sonic landscape for every other rapper to imitate for the next few years. This time around though, Kanye wears his influences on his sleeve; the hip-hop of the Atlanta scene in particular, with its triplet-heavy sprechesang, murky trap beats and rapid-fire hit-hats, permeates the album. This is especially true on tracks like “Facts” and “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2”, where producer Metro Boomin’s hand is felt. The sprawling collage of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly seems to have had an effect too: there’s barely a track here without a lurching tempo change or abrupt beat switch.
Being Kanye, though, his greatest influence is of course himself, and the album is populated by artists who owe a musical debt to Kanye. When Chance the Rapper references Good Ass Job on the opening track, he’s referring not only to the 2008 track, but his own homage, 2013’s “Good Ass Intro”. This kind of meta, autocannibalism finds it’s way into the lyrics. On “I Love Kanye”, West archly raps: “I miss the sweet Kanye, chop up the beats Kanye…”, later asking “what if Kanye made a song about Kanye?”. He samples his own “wake up Mr. West” skit on “Famous” and, on a self-described “adlib track” within “30 Hours” he says “this the bonus track… all my favourite albums have bonus joints”. The results aren’t exactly fresh – the album feels diluted, too self-aware in its intention to be Another Kanye Masterpiece.
The production consequently takes us on a guided tour of Kanye’s various aesthetics. We get his early crate-digging days with samples of Pastor T.L Barett, and Nina Simone, right up to Yeezus-era agro in the dissonant synths of “Feedback”. The appropriately-titled “Highlights” moves through pretty much every Kanye style ever: there are liberal doses of autotune (courtesy of 808’s and Heartbreaks), slatherings of Late Registration’s strings, a brief Graduation-esque stab of anthemic pop. We’re barely a minute in at this point. With the menacing throb of a deep synth we enter the slanted vistas of Yeezus-territory, before a slew of vocal effects herald the arrival of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Lyrically, you’d hope this isn’t a recapitulation of his deepest concerns: it’s mostly just an aimless ramble about Kanye having sex, earning money, beating up a hypothetical basketball coach and, naturally, being a Christian.
TLOP’s opening track does a better job of handling this vein of dubious Christianity, which meanders awkwardly throughout the album. Based around a set of blossoming synth chords, decorated with some fiddly figures on bass, “Ultra Light Beam” is a modern gospel track: stripped down, delicate, mostly empty, ponderous space. A cast of featured artists take turn to prod at their faith, but Chance the Rapper steals the show, delivering what is comfortably the best verse on the album. It’s a huge moment for Chance, who has regularly touted The College Dropout as the reason he raps, and it’s a moment he entirely owns. “I’m just having fun with it!” he beams, showing the kind of triumphant positivity that made last year’s Surf such a joy.
Kanye’s best moments on the album, however, tend to be his saddest – nothing helps him focus quite like the harsh relief of misery. The most downbeat is “FML”, built around a lonely, distorted sample which may have been a piano in a past life, before it was processed beyond recognition, hollowed out and ghostly. The angry lyrics talk about being “off his Lexapro” (joining a growing roster of rappers who are admirably candid about mental illness), and his struggles to maintain marital fidelity. The song ends with the album’s most outré moment; an obscure sample sped up and shifted some distance from any recognisable pitch, becoming an atonal, mechanical whine to join Kanye’s autotune warbling. It’s a weird and totally inspired reminder that no one does avant-garde hip-hop quite like Kanye.
The flow to FML’s verse feels a little like a sped up version of “Heartless” and this sense of déjà vu does colour much of the album’s diminishing returns. The line on “Feedback” in which he feels like a “rich slave in the fabric store picking cotton”, feels like a paltry echo of “New Slaves”’ witty dig at the fashion industry, for instance. He doesn’t do a great job with his collaborators, either, overusing the tedious and underusing the talented. Caroline Shaw (who remixed Kanye beautifully last year) provides a gorgeous vocal melody on “Wolves”, but the track ultimately goes nowhere and says nothing, redeemed only by Frank Ocean’s closing fragment. Rihanna’s vocals on “Famous” feels like a phoned-in favour, and when the original Nina Simone sample appears in the track’s denouement – seventeen seconds of extraordinary nuance and nostalgia – you can’t help but think Rihanna just isn’t that interesting (as fun as it is to pretend otherwise).
Fundamentally though, the album never quite shakes off a whiff of arbitrariness and self-indulgence. The sense that if the album deadline had been a week later, we’d have a different beast on our hands. This results in some jarring, incongruous shifts in tone that are entirely indefensible. Particularly galling is “Father Stretch My Hands Pt 1 & Pt. 2”, which is probably the world’s first I Like Anal Sex And Also Miss My Estranged Father song (I can’t imagine this becoming a sub-genre anytime soon). Kanye has been oxymoronic before – Yeezus is essentially a collection of Racial Injustice And Fisting songs – but previously this has seemed knowing, playfully provocative. Here it just feels lazy, rushed and, to be honest it, pretty gross.
The panoply of samples doesn’t always gel, like when the slower Rihanna hook returns in “Famous”, puncturing the momentum and awkwardly deflating the track. The same thing happens three times in “Father Stretch My Hands”. There isn’t a track here that isn’t abundant with fascinating ideas, but they’re too often disappointingly disjointed. In the best songs, the disparate parts cohere into whole. “Famous” comes alive in its second half, beautifully seguing into an ingenious reworking of Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam” buoyed by a transcendent major-key chord progression. “Real Friends” is a perfect, forward-facing distillation of his past styles; Ty Dolla $ign’s vocals are interwoven beautifully, and the lyrics are struck with genuine pathos. The song is a sad reminder that a life of fame and riches can preclude normal, loving relationships, the nutrients that get most of us through our day. It’s not quite your standard Kanye self-pity though, as he admits: “I guess I get what I deserve, don’t I?”
So, The Life of Pablo doesn’t always work. Kanye is overshadowed by his peers, faces condemnation from critics that were once fans, and doesn’t provide enough moments of humanity to transcend the Twitter caricature. Despite a handful of brilliant tracks, you can’t escape the feeling that, for the first time, maybe the world is moving on.
