Kanye West & His Ever-Changing New Album

The release of Kanye West's new album, The Life of Pablo, has been something of a clusterfuck. Everything, from its title to its tracklist to its musical and lyrical content, has been revised multiple times, and quite a few of those revisions occurred after its official release date (14 February).

It would be easy to chalk this all up to a simple lack of planning, but many commentators have found a different angle on the whole thing:

Sources like The Guardian and The New York Times are suggesting that Kanye's recent activity represents a big, brilliant shoulder-barge to the boundaries of what an album can be. Your average LP is a finite work with a beginning, a middle, and an end; when it's released, we take it as read that the version we hear - the version sold in record shops, streamed on Spotify, and reviewed by critics - is the complete, definitive version, and that everyone who buys it will receive the same end product. The Life of Pablo - and all the conflicting takes, edits, leaks and bootlegs thereof - demolishes these norms, and whether by accident or by design, Kanye West may well have fundamentally changed the way we all think about albums.

I mean, the whole thing seems like kind of an awkward mess to me, but then it's easy for me to snark because a) I haven't heard the album, and b) all of this 'death of the album as we know it' talk is kind of terrifying for me.

Glastogate

Yesterday, during my lunch break, I logged into Facebook and was greeted by this little bundle of joy:

Here are some interesting numbers for you:

• At time of writing, that 'Cancel Kanye' petition has 36,058 signatories. That's a lot of people, but...


• ...a quick Google search suggests that the Glastonbury Festival has a maximum capacity of 177,000. Assuming (perhaps generously) that each and every person who signed that petition has a ticket for Glastonbury 2015, that's still only about 20% of the festival's total attendance.


• According to the Glastonbury website, the festival has 3 "main music stages", as well as 24 other "areas". Let's make a conservative estimate and guess that only 50% of those areas have something happening at any given time during the weekend - this still means that there will be 13 other acts performing at the same time as Kanye West, at least some of which will probably be rock bands.


• Judging by this Guardian article from last year, Glastonbury 2014 boasted a line-up of well over 2,000 acts. Assuming that Glasto '15 will hit roughly the same mark, Kanye West will constitute less than 0.05% of the total line-up.