{"id":296796,"date":"2026-02-13T23:41:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T23:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/296796\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T23:41:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T23:41:09","slug":"the-crumbling-facade-of-the-life-of-pablo-10-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/296796\/","title":{"rendered":"The crumbling facade of The Life of Pablo, 10 years later"},"content":{"rendered":"

2016 marked the beginning of the end for Kanye West. The formidably talented rapper had been courting controversy throughout his career, with his inflammatory behavior always teetering on noxious and alienating, but his creative genius, madcap sense of humor, and command over the culture immunized him from reputational ruin, as did the public rationalization around his fraying mental health. Much of the discourse around West started to change for the worse, though, following the release of his seventh album: The Life of Pablo<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The record immediately stood out as West\u2019s messiest and most excessive work, as well as his most fascinating and naked. In contrast to the conceptual rigor of 2013\u2019s masterful Yeezus, The Life of Pablo was thoroughly anti-concept, distilling West\u2019s most distinctive traits\u2014gospel-inflected hip-hop, braggadocious lyrics, soul samples, ad-libs, and hooks from a stacked rotation of game collaborators\u2014into one delirious, id-driven elixir. Just as notable was West\u2019s obsessive tinkering around The Life of Pablo, informing the many months of hype and delays around the album and the multiple tweaks made right before and after its release. <\/p>\n

Random as it sounded then, The Life of Pablo was the most fitting title for a record unable to stick to one singular, cohesive idea, gesturing at a trio of prominent figures who each reflected West\u2019s conflicting identities: the devout Christian (Paul the Apostle), the boundary-pushing artist (Pablo Picasso), and the infamous provocateur (Pablo Escobar). The cover was equally chaotic, a mesmerizingly hasty Photoshop job that juxtaposed West\u2019s yearning for groundedness and hedonism with two drastically different images (an old family photo and a shot of a model Sheniz Halil\u2019s scantily clad ass), both superimposed over a Fanta-orange background and bold, black lettering that spells out the title and the enigmatic phrase \u201cWHICH \/ ONE.\u201d The album was, in essence, 2016 in a nutshell: a year marked by some fantastic strides in entertainment as well as tons of grief, death, confusion, and foreboding omens for what was to come.<\/p>\n

A few elements from The Life of Pablo show their age\u2014Chance the Rapper saying \u201cI met Kanye West \/ I\u2019m never going to fail\u201d is bound to elicit a disappointed \u201cawww,\u201d and the belabored feud between West and Taylor Swift prompted by his line about having sex with her now registers as a fuzzy memory\u2014but the album still plays rather well a decade later, all things considered. It remains charming in its unpolished, freewheeling energy; disarming in its emotional honesty; and amusing in its gleefully irreverent songwriting, which comes off as almost refreshing by today\u2019s hyper-sanitized standards. However, in the years since, The Life of Pablo has taken on a more mythological quality, now standing as the definitive end to a hot streak for a once-great artist who\u2019d go on to heed his worst impulses to an irreconcilable degree. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to talk about and listen to this album\u2014and any other music made by West, for that matter\u2014without thinking of the many awful, wrongheaded things he\u2019s said and done over the past ten years: there was his endorsement of Donald Trump for president; his smug declaration of slavery as \u201ca choice\u201d; his troubling, MAGA-pilled rant to a captive Saturday Night Live audience and cast; two failed runs for president of his own; his opening of a private Christian academy that closed after accusations of fraud; his concerning threats against his ex-wife Kim Kardashian and their family; the string of sexual<\/a> assault<\/a> allegations against him; and of course, his anti-Semitic screeds and embrace of Nazism, an ideology he\u2019s allegedly<\/a> been interested in for over 20 years. The list goes depressingly on. Though he recently apologized<\/a> for his right-wing beliefs, chalking up his bigotry to his longtime struggle with mania and an untreated head injury from a 2002 car accident (which inspired his breakthrough single \u201cThrough the Wire\u201d), West has burned far too many bridges to undo or forgive his actions. <\/p>\n

As a longtime Kanye fan, it was difficult watching him gradually crumble under the weight of his own self-sabotaging decisions, but such a demise seemed inevitable. West\u2019s career has been defined as much by his ability to make gorgeous music out of the pain of the past\u2014his own and that of the Black musicians whose work he frequently referenced\u2014as it has been by his inability to censor his thoughts, no matter how outrageous they were. His voice<\/a> was his greatest weapon, but it was only a matter of time before it transformed into a tragic flaw. Being surrounded by nonstop adulation, boatloads of wealth, constant media scrutiny, and sycophantic enablers only seemed to propel West deeper into psychosis, and having a celebrity also known for his brazen, logorrheic personality become the leader of the free world emboldened West\u2019s narcissism to an ugly point of no return. <\/p>\n

West himself seemed to know what kind of unruly behavior he could get away with and how terrifying possessing that kind of power could be. On The Life of Pablo, West directly contended with these exact feelings, opening up about all the gifts bestowed to him and the curses, both external and self-imposed, that threatened to take them away. The tension between these incongruous temperaments matched the album\u2019s sonic overflow as well: A Metro Boomin beat and T.L. Burnett classic could exist on the same song as a desperate plea for liberation and a bleached-asshole joke (\u201cFather Stretch My Hands Pt. 1\u201d). The trill of Desiigner\u2019s \u201cPanda\u201d could act as an urgent springboard for West\u2019s stunning speed-run through his traumas (\u201cPt. 2\u201d). Frank Ocean could interpolate Sia (\u201cWolves,\u201d \u201cFrank\u2019s Track\u201d) and Rihanna could interpolate Nina Simone (\u201cFamous\u201d). <\/p>\n

Rihanna, or rather a lifelike wax model of her, is featured in the infamous tableaux of naked celebrities (Donald Trump, Caitlyn Jenner, George W. Bush, Taylor Swift, Amber Rose, Bill Cosby, Anna Wintour, Chris Brown, Ray J, and Kim Kardashian) sleeping in the same bed in the \u201cFamous\u201d music video<\/a>, which used demented visuals to bring our culture\u2019s voyeurism into unsettlingly sharp focus\u2014albeit also warranting legitimate discomfort and discourse around sexual harassment and showing someone\u2019s naked body without their consent for art\u2019s sake. It\u2019s technically not his final album, but considering the dystopian implications of the \u201cFamous\u201d clip, the desperately packed footnotes, and sporadic allusions to brushes with death, The Life of Pablo plays like one. And knowing the kind of persona non grata West would morph into, it does, in a sense, feel like the last gasp of the old Kanye, something West would self-reflexively comment on in the acapella interlude \u201cI Love Kanye.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the sweaty execution, there are still glimmers of brilliance within the patchwork-like, densely layered designs that shine through: the spiritual swell and Chance the Rapper\u2019s infectiously giddy (if now slightly dated) verse on \u201cUltralight Beam\u201d; the gobsmacking carnal candidness and sinister Swizz Beatz production on \u201cFamous\u201d; the Ray J diss on \u201cHighlights\u201d; the heavenly stuttering instrumental on \u201cWaves\u201d; the wild turns of phrase on \u201cFeedback\u201d; the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy throwback vibe on \u201cNo More Parties in L.A.\u201d; and the bitter grit and ghostly bounce of \u201cReal Friends.\u201d That last track in particular is one of West\u2019s greatest achievements and best articulates the album\u2019s themes: a lucid and sad chronicle of his exhaustion dealing with opportunists and desire to maintain some semblance of authenticity in his relationships. \u201cSaint Pablo,\u201d a late addition to the tracklist, is a haunting bookend, operating three-fold as a blistering critique of institutional racism, a sincere confession of his addictive money spending, and a harrowing self-fulfilling prophecy, in which West documents the public\u2019s obsession with his mental health while dismissing his need for help: \u201cI\u2019m not out of control \/ I\u2019m just not in their control.\u201d<\/p>\n

West\u2019s inability to be in control, of course, would ultimately be the very thing that led to his undoing, and despite the slight sadness of the Kanye we all once knew no longer existing, his current exclusion from the cultural spotlight is for the best. Most, if not all great artists are terrible, deeply wounded people forever tethered to their trauma, exploiting their pain while trying to make sense of it. For all of its rascal-like trolling and scatterbrained nature, The Life of Pablo is not only a testament to that contradiction, but a glimpse into a fraught psyche struggling to keep up the facade at a time when the world was struggling to keep up its facade before both inevitably collapsed. <\/p>\n

Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in\u00a0The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress\u00a0and\u00a0Metacritic.\u00a0You can find him on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"2016 marked the beginning of the end for Kanye West. The formidably talented rapper had been courting controversy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":{"0":"post-296796","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}