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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