[Severian]

Originally Posted by Car Seat Headrest's Will Toledo on TLOP

The Life of Pablo is a repulsive album. This is obvious to anyone who listens to it, and must be acknowledged at the start of any discussion of it... It’s also one of the best albums I’ve heard in a long time — and one of the most beautiful. It’s very strange. ...

How does this album seduce? What is its power of attraction? In concrete musical terms, TLOP’s transitions most compel me. I might go into it intending only to listen to “Ultralight Beam,” but the experience of listening to that song feels incomplete until I hear the opening strains of "Father Stretch My Hands Part 1" ...
“You’re the only power/You’re the only power that can—” The phrase cuts off and loops, never finishing its thought; the chord progression ascends over and over, with no root chord in sight. Then, suddenly, we’re on to the Future sample and fully into “Part 1,” a song that is, of course, incomplete without “Part 2.” Then “Famous” comes on, and somehow feels like a summation of all that came before it...
I can turn the record off after “Famous” — “Feedback” isn’t my favorite — but I can’t do “I Love Kanye” without “Waves” or without “FML” or without “Wolves” or without everything through “No More Parties in L.A.” Everything on this album is interconnected to such a high degree that it’s impossible to pull any single track off of it to explain its potency. This effect is not simply a byproduct of the artistic vision that guided this album’s creation — it serves as a large part of the artistic vision itself.

I actually disagree that there's not a single song that can be used to exemplify the album as a whole. In fact, I think several of the songs can. And the one I'd choose is the one that Mr. Toledo (look at me, calling him "Mr." like he's not 12! lol!) ignores completely, and that's "Real Friends."

"Real Friends" was the perfect lead-in to the mind-and-emotion-fuck that is this album, and it's possibly the least controversial track. It's the most consistent, the most "traditional." But within the conversational lyrics, snow flurries of melody and startlingly poignant verses, there is a microcosm of Pablo's multitudes. A man and his ego, a man and his guilt and humility, a man and his pride, laid bare without gimmick or schtick. If Pablo were to be condensed down into one song, all of its extreme highs and lows leveled out, and offered up in a palatable single-serving version, that song would be "Real Friends."

Kanye is one of those artists whose works always serve as a mirror image of themselves, whose goal is to carve their own likeness as many times as possible, as accurately as possible, in as many angles as possible. This means he’s not simply singing about himself on his albums; the albums are him — a perfected version of himself, an ideal embodied in a body of work. All of Kanye’s actions are done in service of his art; all of his art is made to gratify himself. When we apply this symbiotic relationship to The Life of Pablo, reading its faults and fascinations in tandem with his actions during the album’s release cycle, we come to understand both his fractured persona and this chaotic “gospel album” more fully.

Kanye is the modern sinner, broken by sin, held together by the grace of God. He is Saul/the Apostle Paul in the process of conversion, always with scales falling from his eyes, always with new ones forming in their place. ...

What Kanye understands, what he was recently trying to convey through a somewhat muddled series of speeches on Donald Trump, is that there is no sin too great to be forgiven, no act so heinous as to make the man intolerable, either in the eyes of God or ultimately of the public. The Life of Pablo thus shines in its heinousness. The album encompasses simultaneously the contemplation of the crime, the crime itself, the repentance of the crime, and the granting of forgiveness. It would be a thoroughly despicable exercise, except for the fact that we do forgive it; we do see the beauty in it. ...

A human being is a repulsive creature, too, when broken down into parts. It is only upon glimpsing the whole that beauty can be found. Most of the time, we see a man’s faults, not his heart. The heart is likewise hidden on The Life of Pablo underneath a facade of faults, yet it shines through at the most unexpected moments.

Word, little indie guy. Word.