![]() ![]() His career-long fixation on his own contradictions eventually consolidated into an aesthetic, one that gave rise to a generation of male artists, such as Drake and The Weeknd, who wallow in soft self-loathing and explain away their loutish behavior as the result of melancholy and bruised ego. But “beautiful” isn’t the most obvious word to describe West’s recent output. “I just want to bring as much beauty to the world as possible,” he added.Īs life goals go, bringing beauty to the world isn’t bad. West said that he hoped to become, one day, the creative director of Hermès. At one point, West unveiled a clip from Only One, a video game he helped create, which features his late mother ascending to Heaven on a winged horse. After “Pablo” concluded, West and his friends took turns plugging devices into the sound system and playing their favorite new songs. Rows of models dressed in West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion collection stood in formation onstage, doing their best not to acknowledge West’s album as it rang through the arena. The event was streamed online and simulcast to movie theatres in the United States and Europe. Last Thursday, he premièred his seventh solo album, “The Life of Pablo,” at Madison Square Garden, alongside a large-scale performance piece by the Italian conceptual artist Vanessa Beecroft. The main difference between then and now is that West has long since surpassed his early dreams. Whatever his world view in a given moment, he always wanted, desperately, to share it. With each new project, West was curious and questing: sometimes he seemed like a grad student fresh from an art-history seminar at other times, he spoke like an executive at a Silicon Valley management retreat. In 2008, following the death of his mother, he released “808s & Heartbreak,” a divisive, stripped-down masterpiece built around the strange, bluesy effect of singing against the grain of Auto-Tune. As fame came to seem increasingly like a game that could be rigged, West remained a man of erratic shifts and intense, flitting curiosities. ![]() He was never a great rapper, but he made a style of his enthusiastic clumsiness, surrounding his verses with proud soul samples, on “The College Dropout” (2004) high-res orchestrations, on “Late Registration” (2005) and arena-size triumphalism, on “Graduation” (2007). ![]() Puffing his chest one moment, self-scrutinizing the next, he seemed to offer a novel archetype: the grounded hip-hop star. When West débuted as a solo artist, in 2004, he came across as an Everyman striver whose petty arrogance masked a deeper set of insecurities. One of the reasons Kanye West inspires such a devoted following is that, despite all of the changes in his life and in his music, we can still recognize him as the same character he was when his story began. On his new album, Kanye West tells stories about the pressures of fame, and the madness brought on by having too much. ![]()
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