2” with the seams uncharacteristically showing. He stitches together samples on the latter half of “Pt. He answers a goddamn phone call while recording “30 Hours” and yet nothing feels out of place. There’s an overall air of incompleteness and sloppiness about the album that just doesn’t seem to matter. In just one week he’s publicly defended Bill Cosby, begged the founder of Facebook for funding via Twitter and turned his Madison Square Garden album listening session into a Kanye & Friends Show and Tell. While Kanye has a lengthy repertoire of music that raises red flags for mental health concerns, there’s something about his recent public behavior that has an element of genuine, bona fide craziness. In the first 10 minutes of the album we’re completely sucked into the schizophrenia that’s driven so much of West’s most dynamic and troubling work. Oh, and the song completely transforms into Brooklyn-emcee Desiigner’s “Panda.” Yes, a totally different song, which ’Ye had no affiliation with until now (though it should be noted that Desiigner has just signed to G.O.O.D. 2,” Kanye frantically drops pixelated raps about his 2002 accident, his mother’s death and his father’s financial losses in the market. The intro segues directly into two-part whirlwind, “Father Stretch My Hands.” The song moves at breakneck speeds, transitioning from stretched-out soul samples, to Metro Boomin tags, to lyrics about “bleached assholes.” By the time it doubles in tempo for “Pt. Point being, Chance is a “real soulful dude,” and his fingerprints are all over the feel-good soul of “Ultralight Beam.” He drops an absolutely show-stopping verse (arguably the best of the album), where he finally intertwines his narrative with Big Brother: “I made ‘Sunday Candy,’ I’m never going to Hell / I met Kanye West, I’m never going to fail.” You can practically hear how giddy he is to share the stage with ’Ye, and it’s great to see “Lil Channo from 79th” make the most of the occasion. The intro to his breakout mixtape, Acid Rap, even samples a soulful trumpet melody from an early Kanye tape.
Two years ago I was in the crowd with Chance at Kanye’s 2014 Bonnaroo performance, and I remember watching him spaz to every cut from The College Dropout. Clunky, mechanical drums pound away at growling synths while Kelly Price howls a melody as soulful as anything else you’ll find in Kanye’s discography. Even gospel singer and choir director Kirk Franklin makes an appearance on the intro. Pablo is as Black and unapologetic as West himself - divine album opener “Ultralight Beam” makes way for a sermon from a Black toddler. We get gospel, but we also get a reminder he’s “from a tribe called ‘Check-A-Hoe.’ ” Beware of the culture vultures who laugh along when he jokes as “ghetto Oprah” at the end of “Feedback,” but call him crazy when he wilds out at the end of an SNL performance. We’ve seen so many artists grow more reflective as they get older and produce increasingly autobiographical works much of Pablo juxtaposes a return to traditional Midwest values with the Blackness of Southside ’Ye. The biblical tone of the album seems a natural development for an aging West. When someone addresses the elephant in the room, it opens the floodgates. Where most are hesitant to act on impulse, what Pastor ’Ye ultimately preaches on this “gospel album” is to live fearlessly. Kanye is confident that they would, and he’s right. On Late Registration’s “Gone” he rapped “They say you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone / I know I got it, I don’t know what y’all on.” Fast-forward eleven years, and on “Freestyle 4” he drunkenly snarls “Y’all motherfuckers only live like half of ya level, half of ya life.” He considers the prospect of “fucking right now in the middle of this dinner table” and whether or not everyone else would follow suit. The Kanye West Experience inherently presents a challenge, and though the packages have varied over the course of his sprawling seven-solo-album discography, the message has remained the same. No one wants to be reminded how much work is left, or hear a Black man from the Southside of Chicago bridge the gap between actual self and ideal self. Records about self-actualization are always difficult, because no one wants to be set on their ass. You express yourself to the fullest extent, because there’s a heightened awareness that the same force will inevitably return, and next time it won’t miss. You fight your oppressors more aggressively, because the force that almost took your life is the great equalizer. You take your pursuits more seriously, because you know you almost had the opportunity taken from you. Near-death experiences have a funny way of realigning priorities you exit the other side more conscious of your privilege of just being here.
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