February 26, 20168:00 AM ET
FRANNIE KELLEY
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Kanye West reaching for his audience during 102.7 KIIS FM's 2015 Wango Tango in Los Angeles, May 2015.Kevin Winter/Getty Images For 102.7 KIIS FM's Wango Tango
We're about 300 emails and one month in. We started with seven people and swelled to eight, though the composition of the group has changed a little bit. We're considering an 18-track album, which we've had for two weeks now, a few loose releases and guest verses that have arrived since this time a year ago, an unending stream of tweets and a handful of images. While Kanye rides an emotional roller coaster in plain view of all of us, we are trying to ignore rumors and gossip, and finding it impossible. We bring to the table different histories, sightlines and attitudes. Our personal lives are not the same. The time zones and the weather in which we're doing this work varies. Some of us have never met in person. But we have found the time we've spent in conversation since January 15th intellectually exciting, and then emotionally rigorous, and, finally, necessary. I don't think that anybody is really trying to convince anybody of anything. There's been some flip-flopping. We're all trying very hard to figure out and then express what is happening among us and you and in ourselves because these songs and words and sights are here now, where they didn't used to be.
THE RECORD
Eight Writers On 'The Life Of Pablo,' So Far
THE RECORD
A Group Of Writers Listening To Kanye, Awaiting SWISH
What we've produced is unwieldy, in fairness to the jerky fits and starts and awkward landings of this release and the album itself. I think it's a credit to him that we're not able to responsibly publish anything definitive or concise. Everything about The Life of Pablo, from the invitation to its premiere, to its service through Tidal, to the Vine sample that kicks it off and to the frayed at the edges mix, is both a terrible idea and, looked at from another angle, ingenious. Everything was lifted from somebody else and was also previously impossible because he's an artist with the charisma an American audience makes a requirement for its attention. He's given us occasion to talk and write and think like this, and we needed it.
Instead of presenting our exchange in chronological order, we've separated it out, as much as we can, into three recurring themes: Kanye makes us talk about him (I'm The Only One In Charge), he makes us feel uncomfortable (I Be Saying What I Feel At The Wrong Time) and he makes us think about ourselves (I Love You Like Kanye Loves Kanye). When people speak about Kanye, they show themselves. I don't know if that means he's a superior artist or not; I do know that's why we are spilling all this ink.
JAV巨乳
I'M THE ONLY ONE IN CHARGE
[OR, QUESTIONS OF AUTHORSHIP]
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Kris Jenner, Kayne West and Travis Scott at the Vogue 95th Anniversary Party in October of 2015 in Paris.Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images for Vogue
Kiana Fitzgerald: The concept of TLOP is massive and sprawling — almost to a fault. As the kids say, there might could be too many cooks in the kitchen. It doesn't feel like one brain took control in engineering this, and I think that's what we're more or less used to getting from Yeezy. We expect him to be Geppetto, but this time it feels like he's the one being puppeteered. Kanye is in full-blown ouroboros-mode: he's being influenced by today's influencers while actively influencing influencers of tomorrow. I can't tell where he is in the timeline though. As much as he likes to portray himself as a visionary in a vacuum, he's constantly reaching out to us (social polls for album titles) and those around him (young Chano having the last say in the release date) for inspiration and final thoughts. He's always used the tools available to him, from samples to the help of other writers, but this time feels different.
kris ex: Is this the first time that Kanye is asking for legit feedback from the public? Whether with bruh or brah, or album titles, or whatever? I feel like he's usually a master of rhetorical questions and circular logic and this feels more ... "open." Which could simply be growth or transition.
Lawrence Burney: I find it interesting that this album has as many Kanyes as the bulk of his work but it feels more disjointed than ever this time, and that's where the challenge is for me as a listener. Like, it's hard to grab onto WTF is actually going on here. Reading the album credits is f****** exhausting. It's like he's in the room but I'm not feeling his presence throughout this whole thing. It comes in spurts. With that said, sonically, this is still a masterpiece. Kelly Price's verse alone in "Ultralight Beam" has me ready to reconvert to Christianity and I'm still stuck on that Chance verse. The Future/Metroboomin drop on "Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1" might be the best in history — maybe not, but I don't remember ever being so excited for a beat to drop. "Real Friends" feels like a continuation of the sentiment in "Welcome To Heartbreak" and the transition at the end of "FML" into the Section 25 sample is a great shift. Even with a minimal vocal role on a lot of TLOP's songs, Kanye's curatorial genius shines through the fragmented narrative and mostly weak lyrics.
Chanelle Adams: Kanye is telling us he has rich white man's concerns. That his prayers go to Paris, the city that holds his Fashion Week dreams. That he's able to make risky investments and know he'll end up fine, sitting on a Kardashian throne. It's all a trap. He is both a d*** and a swallower. There's no purity here. Or anywhere, really.
kris ex: F*** him and his silence. F*** everyone who champions his bullshit. I'm tired of him only speaking about s*** if it effects him personally. I'm tired of him fighting these holy wars about getting more SKU's and yelling at Sway but not saying s*** about dead bodies in the street; the mass police corruption in his own hometown. F*** him. F*** Paris. I am Charlie, but I am not Trayvon, because Trayvon is dead and Charlie is still around shooting that s*** and making commentary with blood on their leaves while Kanye is getting fed expensive fruit from women he doesn't realize are human beings because b****** love when we call them b******.
Ummmm, yeah. Where was I? Oh: How can we get deep about this guy's lyrics when his words are made by committee? Off Frannie's influence, I started listening to his old shit and Jesus H. Charlie ... the ghostwriting. F***. How did we let this slide? I used to say that I liked every thing about Kanye's music except Kanye. I liked the rhymes and the flows and ideas — just not his voice and delivery. Which we now know is the only thing he brings to the recording booth. Pray for Paris? Cute, n****. But who wrote that for you? (Yes. George Bush does not care about Black people. #neverforget. But still.)
Frannie Kelley: I've been thinking that maybe we could understand Kanye in our culture, in a reductive, elevator-pitch type of way, as a fighter with nobody to fight. Publicly he's maybe a little addicted to that feeling of wild-eyed, short term release, has a tendency toward manic, violent words and punctuation, some of which is merited/inherited and some of which is too easily misapprehended. You could read it as irresponsible. It's for sure inconvenient. But Kanye is swinging at the infrastructure of injustice. He's trying to take on something that not only has no public face, but persists because the responsibility for it rests on the shoulders of hundreds of millions of blank-staring averages who don't imagine that they have power. Taylor is not a person, Taylor is a flare up. Battling what we are extracts a heavy, heavy toll, we all know this, and Kanye doesn't make it look attractive.
But then he makes possible moments like Chance's performance of "Ultralight Beam" on SNL: without Kanye's days of insecure bombast for contrast, that shift in the room when Chance takes over, the relaxation on the faces of some of the choir, doesn't happen. Chance's artful dexterity, that turns The-Dream and Ye back into fans, over there on the sidelines, is hugely impressive, but he doesn't transcend without the dynamics set in motion by Ye's loose grip on reality. Chance is the straight man up there with Kanye; within Chance's own much younger circle, he's the auteur and his work is sometimes limp. And he made possible lines like, "I met Kanye West, I'm never going to fail," which is provably false and doesn't exist without "I made 'Jesus Walks,' I'm never going to hell," which is at least half a lie, thanks to Rhymefest's contributions. I don't get how people ever feel they've finished talking about Kanye.
Jav CensoredWhen we were watching the stream of the MSG show, kris was all what about Flint when we heard Kanye say "Pray for Paris." Point taken, but I think Paris is less abstract to Kanye, who lived there for at least a couple years, and is there all the time, than Flint, Michigan. That's progress, of a kind, and I don't think its wise to forget the allure of Paris for black expatriates, especially giants of culture, like Josephine Baker and James Baldwin and, today, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Plus an attack with assault rifles and homemade bombs is simply awful; a years-long conspiracy based off budget cuts and elected officials being p**** that results in injury to children, the extent of which won't be clear for decades, and the fact that this, too, has happened before, and will happen again — how do you even wrap your head around that? Who goes to jail for how long on that? What is recompense, never mind safeguards? I hear TLOP as emotional responses to s*** like that, but Kanye can't talk about it. Very few can. I've only seen this guy land it. I guess I'm wondering, if Chance is gonna ride with Ye now, will he become the new details man? Or the new Rhymefest? And where does Travis stand?
Jason King: Kanye is a brilliant, meticulous artist who has never put out a bad record and has always assembled powerful visual concepts to accompany his musical ideas. I liken him to the the Kubrick of hip-hop. But, like the Anti campaign, the TLOPcampaign has been (so far) a s***show. Bumbling. A shambles of a marketing stumble, starkly set against the brilliant (and traditional) marketing execution behind pop artists like Adele, Zayn, Beyoncé, etc. We may soon realize there was a master plan all along, but I wouldn't bet my money on it. Where it gets interesting, for me, is that it all still feels relevant if only because we're knee deep in the era of s***shows (NYTimes called this "the age of failure" a while back). And it's interesting because what Kanye's doing (or not doing so well) fits so perfectly into the history of what Jack Halberstam called, back in 2011, the queer art of failure.
Kanye may be a blustering, narcissistic, no-filter musician who uses his provocative sonic and cultural ideas like ammunition — and is also not afraid to mine the aesthetics of black suffering for commercial gain (as he first did on Yeezus). But he apparently dreams in his hearts of hearts of blossoming into a fabulously iconic fashion design visionary. For a variety of reasons both obvious and implicit, he can't go all the way there. But he entertains us because he tries to go there. What he ends up producing is the result of an artist split into pieces by a series of demands and life processes that he can't quite synthesize. I don't know if he's gone mad, but he's certainly unfree.
And so the MSG event — which you could read as basically another one of his WTF coming out parties — remains fascinating because it offers us camp in a really old-fashioned Sontag kinda definition: camp as failed queer ambition. It was weird, bizarre, trashy, ungainly, totally over-the-top and almost gleefully inept, very much in line with a long history of camp as failure that includes the likes of Ed Wood, Warhol, Jack Smith, Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, you name it. Ed Wood wasn't Cecil B. DeMille in the way that Kanye is not Valentino or Rick Owens. The great camp artists all made iconic works because of the gap between aspiration and execution, and because they implicitly embraced failure as a core principle. For Kanye to become the cultural icon he dreams of becoming, he has to court pop failure. In this light it is no surprise he's sampling Arthur Russell, a queer musician who knew more than most about failed ambition and dabbling.
Frannie Kelley: I can't figure out how much of it was unwitting on Kanye's part, but it felt like he set up his family as this overseeing monarchy. And the people on the floor are not having it. Except that they did, and nobody disobeyed, even though one smile would have made the person famous, and where does Kanye see himself in that hierarchy? I want to fault Kanye for using people's appearance like that. But I think it points out an uncomfortable reality that we're all giving our information and ideas to corporations for free pretty much all the time. We're irritated but convenience always wins. Maybe we're seeing the breaking point loom?
I worry that, since this whole group heard TLOP the first time while watching Yeezy Season 3 at the Garden, we've begun in a hole. The show is the only album cover we can acknowledge. I'm sorry I made everybody do that.
kris ex: And then there's this: [Time's post on the photo of a Rwandan refugee camp taken in 1995 that was used for the MSG invite and as inspiration for the staging.]
Kiana Fitzgerald: This is my first time hearing about this "inspiration." F*** everything about this.
Ann Powers: I wonder what Susan Sontag would have made of all this. I am risking offensiveness when I mention, viz. Sontag, that after her Aryan years Leni Riefenstahl published a book called The Last of the Nuba, which celebrates the "pure" beauty of a vanishing African tribe. Sontag writes that in fascist art, "The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around and all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force." Kanye has always flirted with fascinating fascism and the aestheticization of the abject. It is difficult to tell if he is critiquing it or or both showing and experiencing the lure of its fantasies of order and ahistorical hierarchies.
I tweeted about the hunger games while watching the stream — "OMG JUST REALIZED THIS IS A REAPING." With a young adult novel obsessive in my household, I know the series well, both books and films. The Hunger Games series is a critique of the 21st Century mediacracy's totalitarian tendencies. Its heroine Katniss Everdeen is not overwhelmed by media, but by being observed and by trying to read the signals thrown at her. She cannot find the truth. In the Hunger Games, the reaping is the annual ritual sacrifice of chosen children forced to participate in the story's central deadly spectacle. It's easy to imagine Kanye identifying with Katniss, a singular hero who is also a victim, who becomes an all powerful symbol while remaining trapped within others' perceptions of her. Yet, Frannie, you are right to observe that Kim Kardashian wore the wig of an overlord from the Capitol — she really did look like Effie Trinket, the stylist who plays both sides of the battle. Who knows if these allusions are deliberate? Many different narratives of totalitarianism are floating around in the popular consciousness right now. I sincerely doubt that Kanye would mind himself with anything but a protest movement. But he does seem to have a hard time resisting the rococo of the upper-class. What about Vanessa Beecroft, though how much of these ideas are hers??
