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. 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. His joy is palpable, and it's clear he has waited his entire adult life to be featured on a Kanye album. 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. 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. 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. Albums are his legacy, what he knows, deep down, will endure after the circus of attention he maintains around him subsides. His devotion to the craft of album-making remains his greatest talent. Thankfully, he's bringing a Kanye album, and Kanye albums make pretty goddamn good gifts. 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. "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. Like a lot of new parents, Kanye feels laser-focused on big stuff-love, serenity, forgiveness, karma-and a little frazzled on the details.
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. He's content to just stand among them, both those of his own creation and their various devotees. "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 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. It's probably his first full-length that won't activate a new sleeper cell of 17-year-old would-be rappers and artists. 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. 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.
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. 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). 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.
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