Thanks To His Mistakes, Kanye West Is As Relevant As Ever
By Chicagoist_Guest in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 25, 2016 6:00PM
Kanye at the album release party for "The Life of Pablo" on Feb. 11 at Madison Square Garden (Getty Images)
By Quinten Rosborough
By the time you’re reading this, Kanye West still might not have released a final version of The Life of Pablo, his seventh and most ambitious solo effort to date. Sia and Vic Mensa might have returned to “Wolves,” Andre 3000 might have submitted a verse for “30 Hours,” and Yeezy might have created yet another version of “Facts.” Basically, if you’re reading this it’s too late. But more on Drake later.
Kanye’s been telling us for years that this one would be a work in progress. The Life of Pablo was once Waves, and Waves was once Swish, and that’s important to remember when listening to the album. There’s an operational aesthetic at work here (like a restaurant with an open kitchen, or that see-through Clarissa Explains It All phone we all wanted in the '90s), and the way Pablo came to be is just as important as the album itself. With Pablo, unlike any rap album before it, Kanye’s pulling back the curtain to show us how the sausage is made.
It’s this transparency that makes Pablo more closely resemble My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy than it does any of Kanye’s other solo efforts. Fantasy is an album on which Kanye not-so-secretly assembled an all-star cross-section of the pop music landscape, asked them “What would Mobb Deep do?” and created the best rap album of the modern era.
At times, Pablo walks a similar path. The star-studded list of collaborators is here, though the guiding principle “What Would Mobb Deep Do?” has been replaced with flame emojis. In the rollout to Fantasy, Kanye offered a behind-the-scenes look at a finished product, but with Pablo the final product seems to be irrelevant—and surprisingly enough it makes Kanye as captivating as he’s ever been.
A “38-year-old 8-year-old with rich nigga problems,” as he raps on “Real Friends,” New Kanye’s a walking heat-check of a human being: willing to toss out any idea that comes into his head and deal with the repercussions later. That’s why his Twitter personality can so easily vacillate between charming insight and outright misogyny. It’s also why despite being unfinished, Pablo is soon to go platinum on The Pirate Bay, and could lead to a fifteen million dollar uptick in revenue for music streaming service Tidal.
On last year’s throwaway track “Only One," West sings “No you’re not perfect, but you’re not your mistakes.” New Kanye seems set on putting this axiom to the test, making mistake (after mistake, after mistake...). At this point he's got nothing left to prove, and he's battling his weaknesses in real time, in front of all of us.
He can’t help himself from taking shots at Taylor Swift, who just might be pop music’s version of Mean Girls’ Cady Heron (or Regina George, depending how you look at it). There might be an argument to be made that West’s drunken outburst at 2009’s VMA Awards contributed to her rise to mega-stardom, but making it the way New Kanye does on Pablo’s “Famous” doesn’t garner much sympathy for his cause.
New Kanye raps with his dick, sabotaging Pablo’s most powerful moments to throw in terrible one-liners about little Yeezy (“Sometimes I'm wishin' that my dick had GoPro.” Ugh.). New Kanye thinks Desiigner is a suitable substitute for Future, giving him not one, but TWO verses on the album. New Kanye takes “30 Hours”, Pablo’s version of College Dropout’s “Last Call,” and replaces eight minutes of creative nonfiction with three minutes of direction for Mos Def and Andre 3000 verses that don’t actually appear on the album—relegating two of hip-hop’s greatest storytellers to 18 characters in the album’s liner notes.
New Kanye is either a success or a sinkhole of schadenfreude, but either way, he’s the reason we’re still paying attention. New Kanye is Old Kanye working left-handed, intentionally taking himself out of his comfort zone to develop as an artist, and as a human being.
Kendrick Lamar and Drake (I told you I’d get back to him) are the closest thing Kanye West has to contemporaries, and while To Pimp a Butterfly and If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late might be more cohesive wholes, neither artist could create the potential energy of the Metro Boomin tag in “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1”. Neither artist could breathe new life into the recycled Sister Nancy sample of “Famous”. Neither artist has the music taste that would lead them to sample a house classic like Harddrive’s “Deep Inside.”
Let me double down on this line of thinking: Drake and Kendrick would never tweet “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!”; Drake and Kendrick would never proclaim that they might have sex with Taylor Swift. Drake and Kendrick would never publicly release the name of an album, change it twice, release it, un-release it, then claim that it would never be for sale.
Drake and Kendrick wouldn’t do those things because Kanye West operates on a creative plane that no one really understands. We’ve never had a musician like Kanye, and where Drake and Kendrick share screenshots of their thoughts, Kanye makes a live-stream. That above all else is why Pablo has taken the public consciousness in ways that Drake and Kendrick could only hope for.
Like Pablo, New Kanye isn’t always enjoyable, but that’s not really the point is it? Rarely, if ever, do we get to witness art being created in real time, and often it’s this process of creation that’s far more inspiring than the finished product ever is.
You can follow Quinten Rosborough on Twitter.