He's still around he's just having a real deep snooze. Throw a beat in there, stretch it out a couple more verses, and no one's going to be missing the old Kanye anymore. It feels like a revival of the clever, junk-talking 'Ye from Gold Digger. chop-up-the-soul Kanye, set-on-his-goals Kanye / I hate the new Kanye, the bad-mood Kanye." He's baiting us here, playing off his critics' most common complaints: "I miss the old Kanye. FML, which features the Weeknd, starts a little dour and ends a little freaky, but the song's slick middle minute or so - the part where Kanye raps instead of sings - sounds like it could have been the genesis of a hit.Īnd then there's I Love Kanye, an a cappella ode to self-reference that lasts all of 44 seconds. He plays with ethereal tones and Gothic echoes on the chillout jams Real Friends and Wolves. However you feel about the drab, monochromatic sweat wear of his Yeezy fashion line, West has always excelled when applying the same less-is-more aesthetic to song. Pablo would work a lot better if West stripped more of it away. In fact, two artists directly influenced by West spit laps around him: Chance the Rapper on the gospelly Ultralight Beam, and Lamar on the six-minute, Wu-Tang-flavored No More Parties in L.A. Most of Pablo's highlights belong to his all-world feature cast, including names like Rihanna, Chris Brown, the Weeknd and Andre 3000.
Facts (Charlie Heat Version) is the hardest, most street-ready song on the album, but West's rabid yelping comes across like mugging, particularly when he's rapping about his wife's "Kimojis" and buying a "$10,000 fur for Nori." The spacey 30 Hours glides along pleasantly enough until midway through, when Kanye begins to half-freestyle, mostly ramble to a shambling, meandering, needless conclusion. 1, a satisfying soulful groove crashes to a halt with a cringe-worthy verse involving a model and some bleach (please don't ask). Too much of The Life of Pablo is messy and inconsistent, reeking of tracks half-finished (the 38-second Frank Ocean snippet Frank's Track, the spoken-word, Kanye-free Low Lights) or marred by some distracting over-embellishment (a too-roboticized vocal here, a too-grating sample squeak there). And when you hear lyrics like these blended with Pablo's bracing, spectral production, you can sense a pattern - a deliberate juxtaposition of lowbrow and highbrow, of vulgarity and religiosity - that could pass for the start of some grand artistic statement.īut I'm not buying it. He wants so badly to be taken seriously as a multimedia artistic visionary along the lines of "Steve Jobs mixed with Steve Austin" (another instantly quotable Feedback lyric). He knows exactly the effect these dumb, base, tossed-off barbs will have. He sounds conflicted and uncertain about his role in society on untitled 01, a vivid depiction of the apocalypse: "Atheists for suicide / planes falling out the sky / trains jumping off the track / mothers yelling 'He's alive!' " (He's a Gemini, he reminds you across untitled, his mind always in two places at once.) This is most evident on the angular untitled 03, a dextrous dissection of the forces pulling him toward spirituality, equality, women and money. "Stuck in the belly of the beast / can you please pray for me?" he raps in his dry rasp on untitled 02, sounding torn into pieces by all the attention he has received. "Pimp, pimp? Hooray!" he chants here and there, amid woozy samples, free-jazz interludes and ghostly meditations on race and identity that wouldn't sound too out of place on Butterfly. It's confusing and annoying, and it ensured the album would produce zero hit singles, though it does invite listeners to define each song for themselves.Īn odds-and-sods collection like untitled could only suffer in comparisons to Butterfly, and Lamar doesn't seem to deny it. All eight songs were dubbed "untitled" with a track number and date - the "get Top on the phone" song, for example, is untitled 02 |. Judging from Lamar's curious titling system, untitled was written and recorded during the same era as his 2015 masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly. On untitled unmastered., it's not clear why Lamar wants to get him on the phone, but it might have something to do with clearing out his notebook. The "Top" in "Get Top on the phone" is Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith, head of Lamar's label. Both release strategies were in their own ways self-indulgent - one clearly more so than the other - but these are the two most vital rappers in the game today (sorry, Drake), so there's no arguing both merit all the hype the music world gives them.
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