0.5 STARS
Amongst the Cosby-defending nonsense and bizarre self-aggrandising that has been littering Kanye West’s Twitter profile recently, there lies a single nugget of truth.
A few weeks ago, West described The Life Of Pablo, his new record, as the “album of a life”. He’s right. But it’s not the album of your life, or my life; it’s the album of Kanye’s life, the culmination of years of self-promotion and paranoid delusions.
More than anything it’s deeply, unavoidably misogynistic. By now most will have heard about the deluded couplet at the centre of ‘Famous’ (“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous”) but that’s the tip of a very large iceberg.
This is a record in which women are relegated to the position of objects (“Big booty bitch for you!” on ‘Feedback’); in which Kanye discusses the various states of the female rectum more than any other aspect of feminine personality or form (on ‘Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1’, the first instalment of a song that Ye wrote while in tears, apparently); in which women are painted as fellatio-hungry airheads (on ‘Wolves’, ‘Feedback’, and ‘30 Hours’.)
Some have argued that in order to enjoy the work one needs to separate the man from the record. But that’s impossible: Kanye is Pablo and Pablo is Kanye.
This is a vicious mess; the sound of a very sad man screaming misogynistic slurs into a cave, growing dizzy from the sound of his own voice.
Pablois due out on Def Jam/Universal, but only through Tidal.
