![]() On The Life of Pablo, Ye fucks with the song structure, the album structure, hard and without reservation no longer spilling over the margins of the mansion walls, he’s excavating the foundation and laying the bricks out in Stonehenge-esque bricolage. The excess comes when Ye then splashes that shit everywhere. Where Ye’s excess once expressed itself through layer upon layer of production, here it has boiled then simmered down into an inch of dense reduction, nigh black with an oily rainbow sheen on top. Again, Ye’s process and Ye’s instinct overwhelm inhibition, even as the form of his art shapeshifts anew and anon. “I Love Kanye” has no place on a great record, and yet here it is on one, thrown in, fecklessly. On the acapella “I Love Kanye” a joke track becomes increasingly meta and strange Kanye is no longer capable of looking in the mirror without his brain writhing into an ouroboros. On “Low Lights” the preaching poem is offset by a melancholy use of staggered chords. It is a picture of one both possessed and anointed Looking for “more faith,” or something that is more than faith. He just does, following his prodigious intuition, following the ultralight beam that burrows inward to the God buried beneath endless strata of human shit. The thump of an intermittent drum and the synth horn that carries Chance’s incredible verse upward in its last few bars are Ye dabbing in masterstrokes I don’t think he fully comprehends. You can feel a million more voices beneath the surface. Dick, channeled in a Kanye West jam, a surrealist, drug-addled hymn that would pair just lovely with four, five tumblers of scotch and Valis: “We on that ultralight beam / we on the ultralight beam / this is a God dream…” It’s a track held together by the most simple of production foundations, but it billows outward towards the diaspora of voices it seeks to encompass: a gospel chorus, guest rapper, singer, sampled child, sampled pastor, Ye himself. Opener “Ultralight Beam” is primo Philip K. It is a picture of one both possessed and anointed. It’s a picture of Kanye, an honest and complete one, superimposing the halcyon, sample-bred nascence of The College Dropout (2004) over the decaying electro-bones of Yeezus (check when the Nina Simone loops drops in on “Fade”). ![]() Its confidence is supreme but also self-questioning, editing, revising constantly even as it changes, though, Ye always comes back with the tested answer that, yes, he is the greatest, always has been, and so is this record. It’s something intimate, and it shifts on the wind of Ye’s whimsy-for The Life of Pablo is as much the dynamic, mutable nature of its own process as it is an actual document. But this is a tapestry with dozens of artists commissioned: he’s got sub-producers all over it, from major assists courtesy of DJDS, Charlie Heat, Karriem Riggins, and Boi-1da to Madlib taking over indelibly on “No More Parties in L.A.” the vocals themselves are, at best, 75 percent Kanye, the other quarter an ever-shifting flux of guest rappers (Chance, Desiigner, Kendrick), singers (The-Dream plays Scottie Pippen), and sometimes people just saying shit, like on “Low Lights.” And yet what this entourage is weaving isn’t something grand. Here he produces, he curates, and, sure, he raps a lot. Here he stops trying to be a great rapper it is a boon. On The Life of Pablo that breaks to the next level. Kanye has always been self-possessed, but in a way that has always been disarmingly inclusive of others. For the self-proclaimed “greatest artist alive,” these may seem like surprisingly mundane concerns. I think Kanye is confused as fuck right now, slipping into the supposed contentment of domestic life, getting his church on harder than ever before, having kids, knowing who he should be for those kids, accepting these roles that are both what he wants and what he is not. If My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) was Ye trying to make a masterpiece, and Yeezus (2013) was him trying to make a statement, The Life of Pablo is something entirely more humble. It’s there that Kanye’s mind works in great, mysterious ways. But where his art distinguishes itself most is in the music. In content Kanye is cliche he recognizes that by deconstructing himself. ![]() And it’s elevated by the one thing Kanye is transformatively good at: music. But you can feel Kanye’s pride when he unveiled the thing recently, and while the game’s depiction of the afterlife is as rote as can be (if there’s a hell in the game, it’s sure to be a lake of fire with pitchfork-toting imps nudging in agents, lawyers, George Bush, and other people Kanye doesn’t like), the delivery is ethereal in a way that’s fresh. And make it look dope.” Then, like, he signs off on their designs and whatnot. Now, what that probably entails is Kanye approaching a group of game designers and programmers with, “Hey, nerds, make a game about my dearly departed mother entering the gates of heaven.
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