“The Life of Pablo” and the Mad Honesty of Kanye West.

All the superfluous alterations of the album title, the cover art, the track listing over the span of just a few months showed us that even Kanye wasn’t always sure of exactly what to have us expect from this new project. All bets were off on the kind of music he would be putting out. But like with most aspects of his artistic undertaking, the project’s constant state of revision turned out to be a genius marketing ploy.

Previously known as So Help Me God, then SWISH, then Waves, and finally The Life of Pablo, this highly anticipated LP has been on the foreground of music culture for the past year or so. It’s been a long and characteristically annoying wait, more so than any other recent release that comes to mind. There are a few reasons to why that is but mainly because of Kanye’s own madcap creative process, made largely transparent to us via Twitter.

With every little change came a tidal wave of new social media coverage. Some touting outrage and some just plain ridiculous.But for all the strange and confusing Twitter promotion, Kanye was still in control. So when the album finally dropped I wasn’t too surprised to find it to be just as bizarre as Kanye’s recent behavior itself.

The Life of Pablo is a spectacular mess. And I mean that quite literally. This album is for the most part a total reflection of Kanye’s own state of self, spectacular yet so very messy. In the face of being one of the biggest celebrities in the world, his actions constantly manage to get him labeled as crazy, erratic, offensive; the list could go on. And he may be all of those things but before being able to completely comprehend these implications, it’s important to know where Kanye West really comes from.

Kanye had previously worked with his contemporaries producing and programming, like on Jay Z’s The Blueprint, but yearned for his own career as a rapper to which the industry of the time opposed him in every way. Record labels wouldn’t back a rapper who didn’t make music about narcotics, fornication, and gangbanging. And Kanye wanted to rap about his own experiences. He wanted to rap about things anyone could relate to. Like family, and struggling with identity, and dropping out of college. Normal stuff.

Then after a near-fatal car crash he recorded his first EP and single “Through the Wire” aptly titled since he sang the whole thing while his jaw was still wired shut.  After dropping out of college he started breaking in the late 90s and early 2000s as a producer in Chicago, under the mentorship of hip hop and R&B producer legend No I.D..