I’ve never had to wait a week before reviewing an album for fear that its creator’s endless tinkering might turn it into something completely different. Yet here we are, one week later, and I finally think I’m ready to talk about Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo.
First off, let’s be clear: this review isn’t about Kanye West the guy (some would say caricature). In a sense, it is, because The Life of Pablo is an intensely personal album, but too many conversations about Kanye are about his antics. People tend to forget about Kanye West the musician; you know, the producer who essentially designed the sound of Aughts hip-hop, the rapper whose debut single was recorded with his jaw wired shut, the man who made Jesus walk. You know, that guy.
As for TLOP, trying to compare it to anything else in Yeezy’s catalog is pointless: He’s reinvented himself on every album, so for each one, there isn’t really a precedent. But this one stands out because I’m not entirely convinced its an album at all. It looks like an album, sure. But inside it’s a collection of conflicting ideas that are constantly pinballing off of each other.
Basically, The Life of Pablo is a mess, the creation of a for-real, no-shit crazy person with unlimited capital. It is, however, a mess that’s sometimes beautiful — case in point, epic opener “Ultralight Beam,” a straight-up gospel song that features a star-is-born assist from Chance the Rapper. Seriously, Chano’s verse here paints him as the Eminem to Kanye’s Jay-Z on “Renegade,” destroying him on his own song. And Chance is just one of many in the murderer’s row of guests on the album, from Kendrick Lamar (“No More Parties in L.A.”) to The Weeknd (“FML”) to Frank Ocean (“Wolves”).
As a producer, Yeezy is unrivaled, but this album is a rarity for Kanye in that the production is the album’s downfall. And it’s not that it’s poorly produced — quite the opposite, in fact. It’s just that it’s so overproduced that it’s tough to tell where one idea begins and another ends.
Lyrically, TLOP shows us a side to Kanye West we’ve never seen. Long gone is the aw-shucks production geek of The College Dropout. Here, Yeezy is unapologetically megalomaniacal, simultaneously venting and dropping humblebrags about his lavish lifestyle; basically, it really sucks to be Kanye, but it’s also awesome. And for the record, he doesn’t give a shit that you can’t relate: People change, and he’s changed as well (see the retrospective “I Love Kanye,” in which Kanye proves to his listener that he’s aware of their criticisms and barbs about him, and that he’s actually in on the joke, too, for any further details).
The Life of Pablo is not the masterpiece Kanye West intended it to be. Instead, it’s a scatterbrained mash-up of the components necessary to create a masterpiece. Sometimes the pieces don’t quite fit together, but when they do, it’s magical.