The Life of 'The Life of Pablo'

Kanye West’s most recent album, “The Life of Pablo,” is his most amorphous release yet. The LP roves through different registers and is characterized largely by a frustrating aimlessness. The rollout of the album was maddeningly noncommittal as well; for months it was unclear whether it would sound more like a follow up to 2013’s “Yeezus” or like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” While this uncertainty is exhausting, it’s also exactly the point. “The Life of Pablo” as a phenomenon is focused on the possibilities of what it might—and could—be.

Let’s just take a moment to take stock of the different media involved in the rollout of Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo.” Months before the album saw the light of day (and long before it was finished), back when its name was still “Swish,” there were already rumors of backroom listening sessions in the form of some late-night tweets from freewheeling Yeezy protégé Theophilus London and a Seth Myers interview with the Kanye-parodying Seth Rogen. We had the slow continuation of Kanye’s unraveling in the public sphere through what could be termed a month-long Twitter rant. Punctuating that messy Twitter chaos were glimpses of his studio, largely through a legal pad scrawled with celebrity signatures and an ever-changing, always-messy tracklist. We had the multiple SoundCloud singles, which, though normally a standard element of the album rollout process, nonetheless kicked off with the seemingly disastrous, confusing, petty, myopic track “Facts.”

And then there was the Madison Square Garden premiere, perhaps the most dense convergence of the disparate elements of West’s creative vision thus far in his career. While he had debuted new music at a fashion show before (for this same album back when it was called “So Help Me God,” no less), this event was on another scale completely, on every front, the models for his new fashion line covering a giant structure in the center of the stadium floor. Moreover, the album’s publicly live-streamed premiere was more direct and more widely available than the projections and grainy recordings that preceded “Yeezus.”

It wasn’t just about Kanye’s music and his fashion line, either; he announced an upcoming video game focused on his mother’s ascent to heaven and debuted two new songs from Vic Mensa and Young Thug. Both Vic Mensa’s “Danger” and Young Thug’s “With Them” mark important stages in their respective careers. “Danger” sees a continued intensification of Mensa’s image as he moves steadily away from the easygoing demeanor of his 2014 hit “Down on My Luck”; “With Them” continues the relentless pace at which Young Thug is expanding his masterful body of work, as it’s the lead single for his fifth full-length release in 12 months. “With Them” is part of Young Thug’s own vision, but it’ll always be linked to that momentous Madison Square Garden debut. Are “Danger” and “With Them” part of “The Life of Pablo”? Kanye has recently updated the album itself, notably “fixing” the track “Wolves”—where does the album start and where does it end? Every one of the album’s borders is permeable, from its relationship with his fashion line to its relationship to other artists to the relationship between its different iterations. Kanye isn’t the only artist with a creative vision that’s so diffusive, but of these he’s likely the most high-profile.

The murky cloud of mixed media surrounding Kanye’s most recent album is not coincidence or collateral; it’s deliberate. At its core, “The Life of Pablo” explores the mutable form of the album in the present environment of music consumption. That’s not to say it’s impossible to release an album in the classic sense nowadays; it’s just to say we take the fixed-medium form of past for granted. The release and form of TLOP takes into account many more aspects than only musical expression. He challenges the structured way in which we currently consume music with the album’s exclusive streaming on Tidal. He gently stretches the notion of what’s musical, as he confidently begins the album with a sample from a YouTube video of a four-year-old fervently praying in the back seat of a sedan. It’s not even quite clear where the album ends; he proclaims the track “30 Hours” to be a bonus track, but it’s placed right after a an interlude that’s titled as an intermission. West even uses the album’s liner notes—posted on his personal website—as a device for relieving suspense: “Facts,” which seemed to bitterly parody Drake and Future’s track “Jumpman,” was co-written by Drake himself.

As West’s album wanders through different corners of the Web, just as the music cycles through different registers, the album takes advantage of the diffusive nature of the internet to facilitate its own creative diffusion. “The Life of Pablo” focuses itself on permeable boundaries, ever-changing relationships, and an uncertainty of form. In that sense, it strives to be a musical expression of the internet’s form itself.

Staff writer Michael L. McGlathery can be reached at mlmcglathery@gmail.com.