Pablo Picasso and Kanye West share many qualities—impatience with formal schooling, insatiable and complicated sexual appetites, a vampiric fascination with beautiful women as muses—but Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. Kanye, specifically, toasted them. The Life of Pablo’s namesake is a provocation, a mystery, a sly acknowledgement of multitudes: Drug lord Pablo Escobar is a permanent fixture of rap culture, but the mystery of “which one?” set Twitter theorists down fascinating rabbit holes, drawing up convincing stand-ins for Kanye’s Blue Period (808s & Heartbreak), his Rose Period (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), and his Crystal Period (Yeezus). If Kanye is comparable to Picasso, The Life of Pablo is the moment, after a turbulent life leaving many artistic revolutions and mistreated women in his wake, that the artist finally settles down. In this formulation, Kim Kardashian is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s final muse and the woman to whom he remained faithful (she even kinda looks like a Kardashian), and the record is the sound of a celebrated megalomaniac settling for his place in history.
The Life of Pablo is, accordingly, the first Kanye West album that’s just an album: no major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. It’s probably his first full-length that won’t activate a new sleeper cell of 17-year-old would-be rappers and artists. He’s changed the genre’s DNA with every album, to the point where each has inspired a generation of direct offspring, and now everywhere he looks, he sees mirrors. “See, I invented Kanye, it wasn’t any Kanyes, and now I look and look around and there’s so many Kanyes,” he raps wryly on “I Love Kanye.” The message seems clear: He’s through creating new Kanyes, at least for now. He’s content to just stand among them, both those of his own creation and their various devotees.
Kanye’s second child, Saint, was born in early December, and there’s something distinctly preoccupied about this whole project—it feels wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy. Like a lot of new parents, Kanye feels laser-focused on big stuff—love, serenity, forgiveness, karma—and a little frazzled on the details. “Ultralight Beam” opens with the sound of a 4-year-old preaching gospel, some organ, and a church choir: “This is a God dream,” goes the refrain. But everything about the album’s presentation—the churning tracklist, the broken promises to premiere it here or there, the scribbled guest list—feels like Kanye ran across town to deliver a half-wrapped gift to a group birthday party to which he was 10 minutes late.
Thankfully, he’s bringing a Kanye album, and Kanye albums make pretty goddamn good gifts. His devotion to the craft of album-making remains his greatest talent. Albums are his legacy, what he knows, deep down, will endure after the circus of attention he maintains around him subsides. His ability to package hundreds of stray threads into a whole that feels not just thrilling, but inevitable—at this, he is better than everyone, and he throws all of his best tricks into The Life of Pablo to remind us. He picks the right guests and gives them idealized settings, making people you don’t care about sound fantastic and people you do care about sound immortal. Chance the Rapper, a spiritual heir to backpack-and-a-Benz Kanye if there ever was one, is given the spotlight on the opener “Ultralight Beam,” and uses his dazed, happy verse to quote both “Otis” and the bonus track to Late Registration. His joy is palpable, and it's clear he has waited his entire adult life to be featured on a Kanye album. On the other hand, “Fade” pits Future knockoff Post Malone, of all people, against a sample of Chicago house legend Larry Heard’s “Mystery of Love” and a flip of Motown blues rock band Rare Earth’s “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and rigs the mix so that Malone, somehow, sounds more important than both of them.
This moment is also a reminder of Kanye’s audacious touch with huge, immediately recognizable pieces of musical history—his best work as a producer has always drawn from iconic songs so venerated most sane people wouldn’t dare touch them, from "Gold Digger" to “Blood on the Leaves” and beyond. He doesn’t just sample these songs, he climbs in and joyrides them like the Maybach in the “Otis” video. On "Famous," he does it twice, first by matching up Nina Simone’s “Do What You Gotta Do” with Rihanna, who sings the song's hook before Nina does, and then with Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam,” which gets flipped so it sits atop a chorale-like chord progression. It sounds like a dancehall remix of Pachelbel’s Canon, and it’s the most joyful two minutes of music on the album.
“Waves,” a song that made the tracklist at the last second at Chance the Rapper’s insistence, has a similar energy. You can hear why Chance, specifically, might’ve wanted it back: It is a throwback to the Rainbow Road maximalism of “We Major,” and it is so warmly redemptive it even makes Chris Brown, who sings the hook, sound momentarily benevolent. “Waves” is hardly the only last-second change made: The Kendrick Lamar collaboration “No More Parties in LA” is back on here, as is an inexplicable minute-long voicemail from imprisoned rapper Max B, granting Kanye permission to use his popular slang term “wavy.” Such last-second fidgets seem to say something about The Life of Pablo itself. After years of agonizing over how to follow up the conceptually triumphant 808s & Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Yeezus, he seems to have settled upon eternal flux as a resting place, and the album plays like Kanye might still be remixing it furiously in your headphones while you listen.
“Father Stretch My Hands” tosses a sample from Southside Chicago icon, activist, and one-time fraud convict Pastor T. L. Barrett into a gurgling trash compactor alongside some pigeon-cooed backing vocals and an entire undigested verse from another Future knockoff, Brooklyn upstart Desiigner. It’s the least-finished-sounding piece of music to ever feature on a Kanye album. This is the logical endpoint to the sort of obsessive perfectionism that led West to make 75 near-identical mix downs of “Stronger,” and in the song’s lyrics, Kanye admits that the same workaholism that made his father a distant figure in his childhood now keeps him from his family. On “FML,” he name-checks the antidepressant Lexapro on record for the second time in a year, and alludes to something that sounds an awful lot like a manic episode. The life of a creative visionary has dark undercurrents (“name me one genius who ain’t crazy,” Kanye demands on “Feedback”) and it’s possible that The Life of Pablo title serves as much private warning as boastful declaration.
The album’s most humane moments come when he reaches for his family: “I just want to wake up with you in my eyes,” he pleads at the end of “Father Stretch My Hands.” On “FML,” a bleak song about resisting sexual temptation, he sings to Kim, “They don’t want to see me love you.” “Real Friends” reprises his “Welcome to Heartbreak” role as the unhappy outsider at his own family events, squirming through reunions and posing for pictures “before it’s back to business”; it’s maybe the saddest he’s ever sounded on record.
Tuning into the humanity in Kanye’s music amid bursts of boorish static can be difficult, and the most prominent example of assholery on Pablo comes from the instantly infamous jab “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” which feels like a piece of bathroom graffiti made to purposefully reignite the most racially-charged rivalry in 21st-century pop. But there’s lots more where that came from, sneaking in behind the headline: “If I fuck this model/And she just bleached her asshole/And I get bleach on my T-shirt/I’ma feel like an asshole” is maybe the most unforgivably stupid thing Kanye West has ever rapped. And on the bonus track “30 Hours,” he takes a moment to sneer, “My ex said she gave me the best years of her life/I saw a recent picture of her, I guess she was right.”
At moments like this, you sense the airlessness of super-celebrity closing in around him. Even when he was being loathsome, Kanye’s behavior always felt rooted in something messy and relatable. During the wild scrum of The Life of Pablo’s press cycle—when he tweeted “I own your child!!” at Wiz Khalifa in response to a minor misunderstanding, or his “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” tweet, for instance—there was a prevailing sense that Kanye had entered such a consequence-free zone that we can never truly relate to him anymore. Once upon a time, he was The Asshole Incarnate, the self-described “douchebag” that we couldn’t look away from. But there are moments here where he just sounds like another asshole.
And yet, as it always does in Kanye’s essentially crowd-pleasing, deeply Christian music, the light wins out over the darkness. A madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography. Somehow, it comes off as both his most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes. “It was my idea to have an open relationship, now a nigga mad,” he jokes on “30 Hours,” sending up his own masculine fragility. “I need every bad bitch up in Equinox/I need to know right now if you a freak or not,” he jokes on “Highlights.”
And with The Life of Pablo, this humor isn’t just in the verses, it’s in the rollout, too. Somewhere between the record’s several title changes, it started to feel like Kanye had decided to turn his troubled-blockbuster-syndrome into performance art. “We still don’t have a title,” Kim Kardashian tweeted, days before the announced rollout. The day after he rented out Madison Square Garden so he could plug in his laptop, it was suddenly unclear, again, if the album was coming out at all; the mess was so profound that a tweet noting “young thug claimed on periscope that it’s coming out after snl tomorrow” suddenly seemed like solid intel. Chaos reigned, and as the twists and turns mounted, it was hard to keep from laughing helplessly.
Around this point, the joke became clear: This whole thing—album cycles, first-week sales, release dates, the album-as-statement, the album itself—is ridiculous. The only other recent marquee star to allow something this messy to bear their name was Rihanna, whose Anti was released into the world last month in a similarly slipshod manner. Both stars are jewels in the late-period Roc-A-Fella dynasty, their careers forged in the dying embers of the old-school music industry where promotional campaigns were telegraphed months in advance, where singles and video rollouts were executed with airstrike precision, where release dates loomed like skyscrapers. In the ensuing industry free fall, Kanye and Rihanna have weathered every absurdity imaginable—platinum plaques handed out by Samsung, biometric suitcases carrying leakproof records, artist-owned streaming services that put up their records for a few minutes by accident. Watching the sea of confusion and despair on news feeds and timelines, you can almost hear them chuckling: None of this matters, because none of it is real.
If there was a larger message behind all this impulsive last-second lurching and heaving, that was it. “We on an ultralight beam/This is a God dream” reads like an affirmation that we live in a world touched by divinity—but it could also mean the universe is a trick of the light, and we’re nothing but a figment in a higher being’s imagination. Nothing is as it seems, nothing is safe from revision, and nothing lasts: In one last rug pull, Kanye claimed that the “Pablo” of the title was neither Escobar nor Picasso, but St. Paul of Tarsus (“Pablo” in Spanish). The claim slots neatly with his assertion that The Life of Pablo is a “gospel album,” and on “Wolves,” he offers a resonant, lonely image: Kim and Kanye as Mary and Joseph, alone in the manger and surrounded by the void. “Cover Nori in lamb’s wool/We surrounded by/The fuckin’ wolves,” he raps. If Pablo is indeed St. Paul, Kanye might have a passage on his mind from 1 Corinthians 13:2: “If I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
CORRECTION: The original version of this review misinterpreted a lyric from “Highlights" as a reference to writer and comedian Bridget Phetasy; it has since been removed.
