People love to shit on Kanye West on social media because he's rich and successful and that it doesn't seem to make him any happier than you or me. He has achieved the pinnacle of what is expected of contemporary human beings: become a celebrity by recording meaningful music, marry a celebrity and record more meaningful music while watching his kids grow up. Kanye has never seemed more agitated and incoherent prior to the release of his album The Life of Pablo though and people take great pleasure in that for some reason.
So, did Kanye West finally cracked under the pressure and growing disconnect and turned wayward and petulant child? I gave The Life of Pablo a couple spins because I always loved his music and wonder what the hell has been eating him and so should you.
The Life of Pablo is fucking awesome. I can't put it any clearer than that. It might not have the high moments of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but it is a much more consistent album that'll keep your head bobbing and your mind occupied for its entire duration. It's not as musically challenging as Yeezus, but it's bridging the gap between Kanye's more traditional hip-hop roots and his avant-garde ideas to created this "new" hip-hop sound that I think he's been looking for all these years. The Life of Pablo is not just Kanye being eccentric, it's a new and exciting direction for hip-hop to explore and develop.
Critics have called The Life of Pablo chaotic, but it kind of made sense to me lyrically and emotionally. He raps more consistently, in his old school, straightforward style that will remind you of College Dropout. Kanye still sings, still adapts his flow to whatever he's trying to say, but The Life of Pablo is very much a hip-hop record, where he's trying to connect back with his heritage. A lot of the album's lyrics refer to his exasperation with his own lifestyle, his quest for purpose and his place in the African-American struggle.
Epic banger alert!
One of my favorite track in the record is Famous, where Kanye teams up with Rihanna and Swizz Beatz to delivery an incendiary and contradictory rant on celebrity. He evens makes fun of people making fun of his name (For all the girls that got dick from Kanye West/If you see 'em in the streets give 'em Kanye's best), which I thought was hilarious. It's an irreverent song, yet it has this beautiful bridge sang by Rihanna taken from Nina Simone's Do What You Gotta Do. At the end of the song, Kanye uses a sample of Simone herself singing it, which was a nice and moving touch that really layered the song and clarified what he wanted to do with it: confront the ephemeral nature of how he's living with the timelessness he's trying to achieve through music.
I loved the following track Feedback almost as much, although it's a much more straightforward and old school hip-hop song. He raps over feedback loops about his roots and his ambitions, which I saw as a clear and honest answer to "feedback", criticism he's been getting. This is what I meant by this new way of making hip-hop I was previously referring to. We live in an era where everything is taken as face value, where people get outraged because they can't decipher irony or that they don't want to decipher irony because it serves their agenda, so Kanye offers this really raw and direct declaration over this wall of noise in Feedback, basically saying: he's what I'm going to do, not only you can't stop me but you're going to love me.
I'm probably reading too much into The Life of Pablo, but it's an album that spoke to me quite loudly. It's a quite dark, unhappy, yet unapologetic album, which doesn't have a dull moment from FML to the closing song Fade. No More Parties in L.A probably is the best song of the album and Kendrick Lamar may or may not have something to with it *. It's an absolute scorcher where Kanye and Kendrick express the underlying despair behind the decadence of the L.A lifestyle.Wolves also had these iconoclast moments where Kanye uses religious imagery in order to illustrate the vapidity of the world he lives in.
The Life of Pablo is so exciting conceptually that I might've overlooked some strange inconsistencies like the puzzling song length that range from under two minutes to over five, for some unexplained reason. Some might claim it's not that groundbreaking and that Kendrick Lamar did it better with To Pimp a Butterfly last year, which is not completely wrong but I thought The Life of Pablo to be much more intimate and on the edge, no matter what the naysayers might claim. I think Kanye West might be looking for something Kendrick Lamar always had, but ended up going in a new and slightly different direction in the process. The Life of Pablo is not the "album of the life", but it is excellent and it will definitely be considered for album of the year. One of Kanye's most memorable albums.
* He does. Kendrick can do no wrong.
