I’m a white boy from the north suburbs of Chicago with little knowledge of hip-hop and rap—I am also new to Kanye’s discography. I have no memory of his first three albums despite having lived through their releases. The only release of his I’ve actually waited for was Pablo, and when I listen to The Life of Pablo I hear something that responds to my own lifetime of listening-to and loving music. I am only momentarily disappointed by a number of songs that are arbitrarily jeopardized by distractingly obscene lyrics, but there is still something else there. It is an undeniably innovative release, perhaps his most innovative yet.
Pablo has, however, made it clearer that Yeezus was the last “album” Kanye made. If The Beatles invented the thoughtfulness and care associated with the recorded masterpiece (Sgt. Pepper's was the first commercial album made with no intent of ever playing it live), Kanye bade the “album” farewell in our era of playlists, genius, shuffle, and Spotify. While Yeezus’s statement about the fate of albums is heavily written on, it isn’t so often mentioned that Yeezus was a perfect album damned to never be played as an album should be (perhaps because critics are among the few who presumably still listen to “albums” as wholes). The packaged, time-constrained, complete nature of an LP has been under attack since Limewire, and the music industry has struggled with nostalgic dedication to keep this dead medium alive. Kanye’s Yeezus was, no doubt, an album but it was also out of place in 2013. Yeezus was the forced confession of the consuming public that the CD is dead and with that any trace of the LP whose constraints defined said CD (i.e. Kanye’s “open casket” statement). Slate Magazine claimed that, with Pablo, Kanye has invented something different to take over for the album, but they did not make clear what that was.
Kanye’s music has been moving towards something altogether experimental since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The song forms are cellular, the choruses and hooks are disguised. With every release, the “chops” of samples become more abrupt and self-referential to the “chop” itself. But Kanye experiments with more than musical form. Among a few other artists, he is a leader in exploring the possibilities for releasing music in a world where album sales are evermore irrelevant. A sense of composed distraction, a synthetic ADHD, is present in the construction of Pablo. That he samples Arthur Russell on “30 Hours” is no doubt a direct nod to the world of experimental music, albeit to an experimental musician who was undeniably interested in mixing his genre with what he himself called “bubble-gum” music (e.g. “That’s Us/Wild Combination”). While Yeezus was executed with the confidence of a God-given duty, Pablo seems to explore the world for something left to believe-in after the wake and funeral of pop-music’s greatest vessel. On the opening track Kanye sings “I’m tryna keep my faith” like it is a call from the edge of purgatory (the first of many names for this album was So Help Me God). The interface of creative integrity, commercial art, a sense of being post-everything, and Kanye’s unrelenting pursuit of celebrity make him a true musician of our time (Perhaps, like he claimed, he is our aural Andy Warhol; his career path at least mirrors Warhol’s own). Hailing from the world of the purely commercial, Kanye has become that world’s sharpest critic—and he has gained a new legitimacy in the process.
Listening to Pablo I am struck time and time again by the extent to which his music sounds like today’s cultural noise filtered down to comprehensibility. But it is the feeling of understanding, not comprehension itself, that Pablo gives me. In being so of its time it has no opinion, no finale, no point. It exists to coexist, but it does so in a conscious, even hyper-aware, manner. Because it feels so designed to be mixed (chopped?) into the pop market, it doesn’t suffer from the same isolation and pretension that producers’ trademarks, vocalists’ hooks, studios’ imprints make on most of the tracks out there—the tracks that rarely have the luxury of being contextualized and strengthened by their albums. Every track on Pablo can stand by itself, which is not unusual in the pop market, but this release’ tracks can stand by themselves and be Pablo.
Kanye changed the name of this album at least four times, the last time being the day before release. He put out an album cover and then put out “another” cover, no more or less legitimized by any material release. This makes it ever more clear the extent to which The Life of Pablo expresses a deep disregard for the formalities of album-making. But it is also this disregard that shows us Kanye hasn’t finished his quest for the post-album pop vessel yet. While The Life of Pablo is a big step away from the tradition that the sixties put in place in ways of album-making, this release has only managed to not conform. It does play more like a playlist (which could be the direction we’re heading in), with a wider spectrum of genres represented and an impressive crew of featured voices and inputs, but it still feels like Kanye hasn’t invented whatever it is that comes next.
With the many religious references on Pablo (and the mysterious “St. Pablo” ft. Sampha), maybe Kanye expects to be compared to Saint Paul in the post-Yeezus era. Anglicized, “Saint Paul,” who attacked the beginnings of the Christian movement, was later transformed into one the movement’s most fervent supporters. The death marked by Yeezus and the living Kanye behind the album’s makings have left West with nothing to do but to begin writing a new chapter.