I was reminded of the scene in Ex Machina when Oscar Isaac’s character and his “servant” perform a disco dance as his house guest looks on, terrified. It challenges the listener, and I know, for me at least, it made me uneasy. This is not the voice you throw at the end of a rap song. Robotic, ethereal, it’s the voice of a nightmare. And then the outro comes … and this voice enters. In it, Kanye bares his heart, laying out his struggles with relationships, depression, friendship, family, the death of his mother. Then there’s FML, the emotional climax of the album and a song that has dug its way under my skin. Waves would be a career-defining song for another artist and it’s like the fifth best song on the album. 2, and both Lowlights and Highlights bang. Desiigner comes in and drawls his way through a killer verse on Pt. Much will be made of Ultralight Beam but the album doesn’t slow down from there.
(You can’t get notes if you finish the album one minute before you release it.) He’s not worried about getting notes from anyone. He’s going to take what is in his head and his heart and put it down. He doesn’t care if what he’s doing will be perceived as derivative or insane. It’s almost childlike in its presentation, but that is what separates Kanye from other artists. It’s got a very similar vibe to Sunday Candy, a song that Chance the Rapper recorded with the band Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment. It’s as if he saw Chance the Rapper perform Sunday Candy on Saturday Night Live, decided he liked it, then recorded the greatest possible version of Sunday Candy … then had Chance come on the track and then perform it on Saturday Night Live. What makes me laugh so much about Ultralight Beam is that it isn’t original. Ultralight Beam is the most beautiful song West has ever recorded, and he’s recorded his fair share of beautiful songs. The album shows West using every producing trick he’s learned and attempting to bring them together in one wild album, and listening in real time, the results are thrilling. It has the bleak minimalism of 808s and Heartbreak, the bombastic excess of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and those stabbing synths of Yeezus. This album has the gospel and soul samples of College Dropout, the orchestration of Late Registration, the bars and couplets of Graduation. If Yeezus was Kanye using aggressive synths to alienate the Middle America who learned about him through his relationship with Kim Kardashian, The Life of Pablo sounds like West trying to bring every stage of his career into one coherent statement. It has references to Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna dating - a relationship that’s, publicly at least, a few weeks old - and at the same time, musically, is a throwback in a way to College Dropout, when West was a fresh-faced kid with some snazzy sped-up soul samples and a weird, stilted flow. The Life of Pablo manages to be at once immediate and all-encompassing, a snapshot into West’s life on February 14, 2016 and a summation of his entire music career.
If you can’t handle the hypocrisy of a man rapping about his personal relationship with God in one song and cheating on his wife with a model in the next, nothing I write will change your mind.īut if you can get past that, and you can separate the man and his art, and just listen to the thing … you will get to hear a stunning album that is a few superfluous songs away from being West’s masterpiece. If you want to hate this album, you will. I know this will prove impossible for some people. Ignore the Taylor Swift tweets and the idiocy about Bill Cosby. The album isn’t even finished yet, not really. TLOP was released a day after it was supposed to come out, and lots of people who pre-ordered it (including me) haven’t gotten it yet because it’s only available through Tidal, at least for now. Kanye has said a lot of stupid things in the lead up to this album, and he says some stupid things on the album itself. It’s hard to listen to The Life of Pablo without the hype and circumstance surrounding its release clouding your vision. The video is spiritual and earnest and silly and heartfelt and, like everything Kanye, packaged for the Internet. The video not only provides us the audio sample for the first few seconds of album opener Ultralight Beam but works as a pretty neat little metaphor for everything that’s going on in the album. That may be a small distinction but it’s an important one when you’re thinking about Kanye West’s new album The Life of Pablo. This is the video in question: It starts with a viral video of a prayer.