Kanye West -- The Life Of Pablo (he'll probably change it several times after it's released too)

It's funny, he can still rap when he wants, like on "30 Hours," "No More Parties," but the vast majority of his verses on the album are half-assed and gross.

have we considered that this album is great precisely because it is a mess, because after all isn't life itself a mess?

welcome to rockcrit

lol k3vin

I like the extended end shout out part of 30 Hours

I've loved, liked or at least appreciated every Kanye album before this one, but this is the one where I had to throw in the towel.

I remember liking very little of it, but there's one track that ensures I'll probably never bring myself to come back: "I Miss The Old Kanye." What a horrid thing to make listeners sit through.

that's the best track

I still like the album a lot, probably because I'm not a lyrics person. He still has a savant-like ability to throw samples together, and the album is impeccably sequenced--always moving forward. The tracks hang together so well that it can be disorienting when I hear a track in the wild and the next song doesn't immediately follow.

I really like "Fade" while I'm watching the video. My favorite part of the album was Kendrick, unsurprisingly.

i really struggle to understand how ppl supposedly don't pay attention to lyrics esp on an ablum like this, the vocals are super present in the mix and it's not like kanye is a young thug or rae s. type rapper, he's super plainspoken and in your face with how he says stuff

like does your guys' brains have circuits that switch off your hearing when asshole bleaching is mentioned or something?

I wish

testament to the album that everyone lists different favorites, although it's usually just three or four songs followed by "the rest is awful"

U just gotta roll with it ums

like does your guys' brains have circuits that switch off your hearing when asshole bleaching is mentioned or something?

― blonde redheads have more fun (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, December 8, 2016 1:18 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No, no, unfortunately that part still sticks out. It's almost funny how that line comes after such titanic buildup, though.

It's definitely one of the worst lines in music history. He seems to have a self destructive streak in this album, a kind of vandal's impulse, that is kind of interesting.

It's definitely one of the worst lines in music history. He seems to have a self destructive streak in this album, a kind of vandal's impulse, that is kind of interesting.

― Treeship, Thursday, December 8, 2016 6:29 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you see it's good because it's bad

In my opinion, self destructive streak would be interesting if it wasn't such a rock'n'roll cliché in 2016, reminds me of Lex saying that Kanye for all his supposed bravado cares a lot about stuff like McCartney and the Grammys.

oh it's not that bad, there are far worse. that guns n roses songs with the racial slurs?

One of the interesting things about him to me is how beloved he could have been if he just toned down the belligerence 10%. But he refuses, out of some perverse, quixotic understanding of authenticity. After ten years it's gotten a little stale, maybe, but i remain sympathetic to the personality who comes through on the records -- the guy who wants to shock us with his grotesquerie but in the end doesnt seem all thar bad. West 2020.

So yeah pretty much what whoever up there said. It's good because it insists on being bad -- or offsetting goodness with badness

it's not just the substance of the line that makes it so bad. It's the hideous sing-song cadence too

maybe he's like a jain and compulsively self-sabotages to punish himself for past wrongs. this album rules for armchair psychologists

oh it's not that bad, there are far worse. that guns n roses songs with the racial slurs?

― flappy bird,

or the Kanye song with the Taylor Swifts slur

It's good because it insists on being bad -- or offsetting goodness with badness

― Treeship, Thursday, December 8, 2016 6:36 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I WAS TAKING THE PISS ABOUT THIS IDIOTIC LINE OF THINKING good fucking god

One of the interesting things about him to me is how beloved he could have been if he just toned down the belligerence 10%.

what do you mean – the guy is still beloved by the public and by most critics because they've been conditioned to think incoherent art reflects a wounded, tortured genius, which is why TLOP will still place absurdly high

one of our local stations currently has Kanye in heavy rotation but (rather pointedly) only plays "All Falls Down"

I knew that lex xp

as a result of this thread revive my plan was to listen to this all day while working but i forgot and instead played some schoenberg xmas music bcz how the fuck did schoenberg write xmas music

The twelve tones of Christmas

is this album still coming out

lol i was just gonna say i'm bummed i can't get my mom this on cd for xmas. she loves kanye

Real Friends/30 Hours/No More Parties/Fade would have been my favorite EP of the year.

ts: "bleached her asshole" vs "sweet & sour sauce"

as a result of this thread revive my plan was to listen to this all day while working but i forgot and instead played some schoenberg xmas music bcz how the fuck did schoenberg write xmas music

The Twelve Tones of Christmas

The caps really make it

a lot of great music/art is made through specific intersections of bad taste and good taste. imo this album is kanye yelling bullshit over some decent incomplete collages

i am (evidently) quite alright with horseshit speculative gilding of rubbish music it's just that this is literally the most basic unimaginative example you could possibly apply it to. kanye kulture is abysmal and ur all headass drear hoes of the apocalypse

ranking the Kanye albums I like:

1. 808s & Heartbreaks
2. The Life of Pablo
3. The College Dropout

Good tracks across Late Registration, Graduation, MBDTF and Yeezus, but I've never enjoyed listening to them as albums

But anyway I'm grateful to see people itt explain how I don't know what I like and also thanks for suggesting I have any sympathy for Kanye's public persona or the hyperbole surrounding MBDTF and anything Kanye-related

I get dissociating public persona from on-record art to an extent but I don't get how that's possible with this album, which is entirely about and filtered through that public persona, and pretty much requires the listener to empathise with it (or "find it interesting")

I like that Kanye has enough juice to get "Fade" on the radio, it's generally welcome there as a respite from all-Drake-all-the-time. No use for the album or interest in the ongoing Kanye drama apart from that.

I think it's an enjoyable record, musically. Don't find the lyrics amazing, but they work within the context of the album and I am not too offended by the persona - kinda like how I feel abt Drake.

I know what would've really pissed me off years ago would be the shameless samples, just reusing popular hooks without much creative input, but for some reason I've been desensitized to this.

Also, it's perhaps a bit of a letdown that with all the studio money and input from other artists that Kanye wasn't able to make a 'great' record, maybe it's even a bit offensive, wasted opportunities, but again, I can't truly be bothered, I enjoy the record (okay there's a few tracks I skip, but I've seen other posters say they like those)

the only people I know who haven't been thoroughly turned off by Kanye for damn near the past decade are music critics. obviously there are communities that still have love for him, my own cohort of friends/colleagues is hardly representative of America as a whole, but it's still been a weird disconnect. little wonder that he gets (mostly jokingly) likened to Trump, they both manage to be simultaneously widely hated and yet "popular."

it's weird was talking with a young guy at work and i forget that i think of kanye as the great roc-a-fella rap producer who's gotten kinda goofy in recent years, but now there's a whole bunch of kids who don't know anything but kanye the "outrageous" "controversial" dude (basically post 808s)

i (tried to) listen to 808s yesterday and while it may be in many ways the most influential rap album of the last decade what a fucking dismal slog that is to listen to now, especially as many of its stylistic autotune quirks are now lingua franca of the hip hop industry

yeah I was a huge Kanye stan for the first few albums but 808s is where he started to lose me. I've liked scattered songs/appearances since then but nothing more.

I'm grateful to see people itt explain how I don't know what I like and also thanks for suggesting I have any sympathy for Kanye's public persona or the hyperbole surrounding MBDTF and anything Kanye-related

around here it seems like anyone who likes any post-808s Kanye is seen as a hype-dupe

ha, I've long thought I came off as a crusty old curmudgeon for feeling the opposite.

i loved 808s but despair at its influence via drake resulting in shit like gnash

guess who just walked into trump tower

pablo

Donald Trump?