The life of The Life of Pablo, so far: On Jan. 8, after months of teases and already one name change (from So Help Me God to Swish), West tweeted that his new album would be released on Feb. 11. Later in the month, it was confirmed that the album would be unveiled during the presentation of West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion line, via global simulcast. On Jan. 26, West announced that he’d once again given his album a new title, Waves. He began posting photographs of an ever-evolving piece of notebook paper, a track list in constant revision adorned with a growing collection of autographs from collaborators, like the world’s most impressive high school yearbook page. Then he changed the title again, to The Life of Pablo, a day before the album’s release, and a “final” track list was revealed, 10 songs long. Feb. 11 came, and The Life of Pablo debuted but didn’t come out, which sounds like an oxymoron: It was played at Yeezy Season 3 but wasn’t released to iTunes, Spotify, Tidal, or stores. It did, at least, get some official album art—before West tweeted “Another Cover” later the same evening. (It remains unclear which is the final artwork: Tidal is using one cover on its home page and the other on the album’s page.) The track list changed, too: First, it expanded by “a couple tracks,” which is apparently Yeezy-speak for swelling from 10 to 17. Later that night, it jumped to 18, as he added “Waves,” at the behest of fellow Chi-town deity Chance the Rapper (praise be to Chance, for this and all other things).
Then, finally, Sunday morning, after a stunning performance on Saturday Night Live, the album appeared on Tidal, where it’s remained since, not yet venturing to iTunes and certainly not to record stores (how quaint). West now claims he’s never going to sell it, that it will forever remain on Tidal and only on Tidal, available only to stream for Tidal members, at least until Tidal goes kaput, which thanks to Pablo may now be slightly farther down the road than it was last Sunday. Meanwhile, Kanye stays fixing “Wolves.”
Everything in the above two paragraphs has caused a lot of consternation, and Pablo’s rollout has been described as disastrous if not worse, more evidence of Kanye’s deteriorating social graces, or mental state. But I’m not sure that’s the only story. Last month, just a few days after Swish became Waves, New York’s Lindsay Zoladz wrote a review of Rihanna’s Anti in which she speculated that we might be witnessing “the beginning of the end of something we’ve been watching in slow motion for a very long time now: the death of the Big Album as a pop star’s primary means of expression.” In an aside, Zoladz mentioned West’s forthcoming album as another potential looming nail in this coffin, a prediction that now resounds as both prescient and understated.
The Life of Pablo is starting to feel like a full-scale attack on the very ontology of the album itself: its primacy in the music industry’s sales model, its status as the foremost object of music criticism, its presumed value as the supreme container for artistic expression, its existential legitimacy as anything other than a nostalgia-driven anachronism. As long as Kanye West is fixing “Wolves,” The Life of Pablo is never finished. As long as The Life of Pablo resides only on Tidal, as an inherently ephemeral form to be revised, added to, and subtracted from at its creator’s continual behest, it’s never quite the real thing. We might say that Pablo’s life hasn’t begun, but we might also say that Pablo’s life is currently in
Tracklist von THE LIFE OF PABLO:
01 Ultralight Beam [ft. Chance the Rapper and Kirk Franklin]
