On The Life of Pablo Kanye West doesn’t just engage in sexual relations with bleach-bottomed models as he transcends the Yeezus persona to become something more than a son, his exploits showing a strange synergy with – alongside assorted other ‘P’ plosives – the painter Picasso and the apostle Paul.
He is artist and patron, seer and saint, a missionary beyond the confines of the bedroom as he utters still sometimes profanely music’s sacred name, traversing for our sake as much as his own the ups and downs of an embattled life through his lyrics, harnessing the mediums of rapturous gospel, heteroglossic electronica, and steely-eyed, bloody-minded beats to become not quite God, but a God dream, the frazzled wakeup comedown on the seventh day whose time is never now but tomorrow, muddled yet prescient, tangible but just out of reach.
The Life of Pablo contains moments of sudden and profound bliss, made all the more intense because they are always adulterated, at least in so far as they carry a sense of their own transience, and a keen awareness of perpetual burdens and nearing threats. It captures in short the ‘waves’ of life, the ebb and flow of our feelings, our grandest projections and most intimate concerns, all over 66 minutes and 20 songs that play out like filmic composites.
The prolonged release of the record garnered as much attention as the music itself, and Kanye’s penchant for controversy once again found a home in the surprisingly ample bosom of Taylor Swift. It is worth noting however that Kanye addresses his Tay Tay fuck fantasy on ‘Famous’ immediately to those ‘Southside niggas’ that know him best: precisely the same sort of people who, just a handful of songs later on ‘Real Friends’, he summarily dismisses owing to a lack of time and diminishing trust. In other words he’s just fronting, and when he adds ‘I made that bitch famous’, who knows in which direction he is pointing his stirring stick? It’s a non sequitur: it doesn’t necessarily follow.
What is clear and what does follow – through the record’s opening salvo, during the lucid tear that extends from ‘Waves’ to ‘Wolves’, punctuated finally by ‘Saint Pablo’, The Life of Pablo‘s belated starry night – is that highlights or lowlights, frenzies or lulls, through all the murk, even as we fix it upon him and as he tightens the screws, when Kanye hits the spotlight he bathes us too in some holy rays.
