The Life of Pablo: Kanye West's Madness Turned into an Album

 

It's been ten years since Kanye West released The Life of Pablo, and I think no one has fully understood his creation yet. West threw himself into the void with no plan other than blind faith in himself, and that shows in every second of the album. After several monumental musical works behind him, he was fully confident in his genius.

He changed the title so many times that no one knew what to expect, and many doubted the album would ever actually materialize. First it was going to be called SWISH, then Waves, and later So Help Me God. The recording process was as chaotic as West's mind: sessions in Mexico, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris, dozens of collaborators coming in and out of the studio until suddenly the letters "TLOP" appeared on social media and West set the internet on fire again, his characteristic way of promoting the album.

West was already known for his extreme sonic journeys. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (originally going to be called Good Ass Job) had been a maximalist masterpiece in which he used everything at his disposal. Then came Yeezus (whose working title was Thank God for Drugs), another masterpiece, but this time West stripped away almost everything except synthesizers and samplers, embracing distortion fearlessly. In MBDTF, West sounded human, in Yeezus, he had stopped being one. For The Life of Pablo, he was now just a ghostly mind inhabiting the space.

The Life of Pablo was an open, unfiltered entry into his mind. Both maximalism and minimalism were left behind. Now it was about fragments, interruptions, loose words, and pure improvisation. The sounds came before the music. The foundations were still hip hop, and increasingly gospel, but West had assembled and disassembled them to deliver his personal version, reinventing them and making them collide chaotically instead of harmonizing.

I doubt many of his collaborators fully understood what Kanye had managed to create. Yet I'm sure that, deep down, they knew it was pure art, beyond immediate comprehension. You either accept it or reject it, but you don't look for a logical explanation. The Life of Pablo was as ambiguous in its sound as in its name. Was it a reference to the life of Pablo Picasso, Pablo Escobar, or the apostle Saint Paul? No one knows for sure because West never fully clarified it, though his great admiration for Picasso is well known, in fact, there are videos of Picasso improvising drawings, just as West improvised his new musical creation.

One of West's obsessions at the time was eliminating anything accessible. He wanted the album to be his most experimental work. He asked his collaborators to make it as strange as possible, to stray as far as they could from traditional hip hop. Moving from one track to another was a challenge: the changes were abrupt, the jumps jarring. There is no restrictive structure, only the unlimited flow of ideas connecting without asking permission. West was no longer trying to innovate within the confines of hip hop. Now it was about innovating the entire musical universe.

For West, the main goal of TLOP was to make the album sound like a gathering of friends talking about their beliefs and personal fears while listening to their favorite music. Several tracks carried striking titles like Freestyle 4 or FML. The idea was to generate more dissonance by using titles that gave the feeling of unfinished ideas rather than completed songs.

On February 11, 2016, while presenting a new clothing line from his brand at Madison Square Garden, Kanye decided to release TLOP to the world. Straight from his mobile phone, he connected to the venue's sound system and the album's tracks began to play. TLOP had apparently been finished just hours earlier, and it would be officially released three days later, on Valentine's Day.

Before the date, West returned to social media to announce that he would tweak a couple of tracks before release. "Living art," Kanye would say. It never fully finishes; it's always in constant evolution. He kept adjusting the album for several days: modifying mixes, changing verses, adding and removing elements at a frantic pace. The Life of Pablo was finally released to the public.

Ten years later, The Life of Pablo remains one of the most misunderstood, and at the same time most fascinating, albums of the decade. West delivered a manifesto about boundless creativity, about art that refuses to stand still. He showed that perfection doesn't exist when the creative process is, in part, honest and chaotic. Madness is the only real way to make art that matters.