For years, rock bands have used gospel choirs as a source of organically gritty joy. But West doesn’t use gospel the way other artists do. It has gospel.Īgain and again, West has referred to Pablo as a gospel album. But Pablo has elements of all his other albums: The underestimated-striver exuberance of The College Dropout, the expansive reach of Late Registration, the nonstop-bangers immediacy of Graduation, the wintry and desolate Auto-Tune blues of 808s & Heartbreak, the regally monomaniacal self-obsession of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and the trollingly discordant transgressiveness of Yeezus. More than maybe any other working artist, West is deeply conscious of the album as a holistic statement, a closed system, and every new album marks some new stage of his development. In a weird way, The Life Of Pablo is a landmark within West’s discography because it’s the first album that isn’t really a landmark.
![kanye life of pablo reiew kanye life of pablo reiew](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/a6e/f95/d96c5edcbea10089109baf287aa3c6c9c8-14-kanye-yeezus-review.rsquare.w700.jpg)
But before this weekend, West had released six truly great solo albums. For most artists, we’d be treating all this the way we treat B.o.B.’s flat-earth conspiracy theorizing: As evidence that he’s completely lost it, that he’s floating off in some rarified coked-out delusional-celeb space, that we’d never have to take him seriously again.
![kanye life of pablo reiew kanye life of pablo reiew](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/10CD7/production/_88232886_kanye_season3_getty.jpg)
And perhaps more intriguingly, he’s existed in a state of absolute chaos lately, working on Pablo up until the very moment of its release and then even after. Just in the past few weeks, West has pulled some deeply concerning nonsense: The Cosby tweet, the Taylor Swift line, the publicly badgering Mark Zuckerberg for a billion dollars.
![kanye life of pablo reiew kanye life of pablo reiew](https://i1.wp.com/beardedgentlemenmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Kanye-West-Innocent-The-Life-of-Pablo-Cover.png)
“Name one genius that ain’t crazy.” That’s Kanye West on “Feedback,” delivering the single most quotable line of his new album The Life Of Pablo and maybe the clearest defense of his decade-plus legacy of bullshit.