He promised it would be an “album of the life” and sure enough, Kanye delivered a piece of work that was as true to him as it was to the spirit of 2016: volatile, unexpected and era-defining. Did this seem a stretch? The Life of Pablo wasn’t West’s most influential record (that was 808s & Heartbreak), nor his most coherent (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) or innovative (Yeezus), but it was as close to a perfect compendium of his career as there has been to date: an endlessly appealing hot mess, casually and frequently scattered with genius.
The Life of Pablo skipped through four name changes and three post-release edits in the three years it took to arrive. So Help Me God became Swish, and then Waves, before West arrived at the definitive title of his seventh album. He launched it in February with impressive audacity: at Madison Square Garden while unveiling the third collection of his fashion line. Fans paid $160 a ticket to hear the album played back from a laptop in an 18,000-seat arena. The event was simultaneously streamed in sold-out cinemas across the world. The hype was swapped for relief – the album was good, the tunes banged – before confusion set in about its conclusion: West said there would be no physical sales, that it would only be available to stream and that he would be adding more songs and “finishing” others already on the tracklist.
“Release dates is played out” he said the year before, and for all the criticism he faced for tinkering with Pablo – re-editing and refining it months after it was first premiered on Tidal – consider how much West achieved in what he called a “living, breathing, changing creative expression”. Thematically, he had promised cookout music with a gospel flow – a Sunday best, summer BBQ vibe under which Ultralight Beam, Waves, No More Parties in LA, easily rest. But then there were the jarring mood changes. The dense claustrophobia of Freestyle 4. The controversy of Famous. The wry, meta self-deprecation of I Love Kanye, in which he acknowledged the frustration he provokes even now: “I hate the new Kanye, the bad mood Kanye / The always rude Kanye, spaz in the news Kanye / I miss the sweet Kanye, chop up the beats Kanye / I gotta say, at that time I’d like to meet Kanye.”
Real Friends included a familiar nag about his epochal fame, of having a life his friends couldn’t relate to, a family he didn’t speak to, and of the cousin who stole his laptop, who he “had to pay $250,000 to get it from”. It was guilt, anguish, sadness straight from 808-era Kanye, followed up with the brutal Yeezus-ish minimalism of Wolves, AKA the song in which he recasts himself and Kim Kardashian as a modern-day Joseph and the Virgin Mary, neurotic and vulnerable.
Did such ambitious scope come at a cost? West’s hospitalisation last month occurred after an extended period of unravelling both in his work and in the public eye. To a degree, he courted the mania. As he rapped on Feedback: “I’ve been out of my mind a long time … name one genius that isn’t crazy.” It’s a difficult myth to keep operating under and you wonder how much mileage Kanye has left in putting his mental health under such strain. At this point, the argument about whether he can be the biggest idiot or most influential maverick in music is long played out; the two are not mutually exclusive and the genesis and journey of The Life of Pablo keep proving it. Here’s an album that is soulful, troubled, brilliant and, in plenty of ways, defines the tumultuous year we’ve had.
