Fans of Kanye West have had quite the month: As we discussed in the last Darts & Laurels of January, the pre-release hype leading up to the Saturday release of his new album, “The Life of Pablo,” has been rife with petty Twitter feuds, grandiose promises and more fits and starts than college students begrudgingly trying to write their term papers. The PR campaign — if it could even be called that — reached its manic climax last Thursday, when the album premiered alongside West’s clothing line at the Yeezy Season 3 fashion event in Madison Square Garden. Unfortunately for those who spent their time and/or money on the show, the album was as half-baked as its promotion.
The event itself, wherein hundreds of models stood around pensively (some with tears in their eyes) while Kanye and friends passed around an auxiliary cord to play music, represents everything West’s work has been as of late: bold and blazingly self-congratulatory while ultimately hollow. The fashion-show-album-premiere-exercise in profound narcissism was simulcast to the Internet and in theatres across the nation, and 20 million people reportedly tuned in to see the fruits of Kanye’s apparent labors. From a raw numbers perspective, that is a ringing endorsement of the sizable impact West’s music has had on pop culture since the 2004 release of his debut record “The College Dropout,” to say nothing of its effects on the lives of listeners, many in the Alligator office included.
However, it seems as though Kanye’s fan base was much more invested in the new release than he was. Sonically, the new album (we really don’t like typing out a name as seemingly meaningless as “The Life of Pablo”; oops, did it again) is the sound of a man who stopped caring long ago: an hourlong collection of good-to-great ideas failing to coalesce into anything of consequence. Whether this was the end result of a lack of discipline or an abundance of narcissism, we may never know. We have a feeling it was a bit of both.
Everything since Yeezy Season 3, including the album’s actual release to Tidal and the accompanying “Saturday Night Live” performance, has possessed the urgency and drive of a snail covered in molasses. In spite of this, many disparate tribes in the Internet’s collective horde have been tripping over themselves to speak the album’s praises, with phrases like “GOAT” (Greatest of all time, for those of you who have never had the misfortune of reading select online hip-hop message boards) and “hype af” being thrown around like it ain’t no thang.
Art is, of course, subjective, but the talk surrounding Kanye’s new album and much of pop culture is just that: hype. In a quintessentially 21st-century fashion, Kanye West has managed to direct how listeners interact with and interpret his work purely on the merits of his ego alone. Given the… strong feelings aroused by his public persona, this has resulted in a polarization of opinion, where one must not merely enjoy or be disappointed by Kanye’s music, but either “LOVE” or “HATE” it.
When it comes to Kanye West, there is little to no room for nuance or discourse, and the same can be said for other public figures of importance, including our politicians and artists. In the past we have spoken extensively on the need for temperance and subtlety with regards to how the American public processes and dissects the issues of our time.
The Kanye fans in us wishes we didn’t have to use his new album as a populist example of this train of thought; the critical journalists in us know it’d be dishonest to do otherwise.
