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.
