When Kanye West breathlessly exclaimed the release of his new album, The Life Of Pablo, on this week's Saturday Night Live, he wasn't met with the gasps of shock that he was likely looking for. Online, the general reaction was one of relief; after a notoriously messy rollout that was beginning to threaten the convolution of Rihanna's Anti, the final product was here at last.
Well, not quite yet. On the other side of the screen, my friend and I spent a good half-hour desperately googling for a link or a sign of the supposedly-released stream. In typical modern West (and Tidal) fashion, the release was late and came with multiple misnamed tracks, seemingly as unorganized as they day it was conceived. One might expect a reaction here of frustration, but again, this wasn't the case. For us who had been following the rollercoaster of a release, such a drop was more than just par for the course - it was the only logical conclusion to the whirlwind ride that had caused Pablo to arrive two days late and stumbling into the light as though shaking off the hangover of an ill-advised night out.
On the road to its release, the album we now know as The Life Of Pablo saw many forms. It went through numerous title and track list changes, many of which were announced on a barely legible notepad autographed by the most lucrative of names. These updates were peppered with increasingly troubling tweets, from West's now-infamous Bill Cosby siding to his defense of an embarrassingly juvenile line about Taylor Swift to the admission just before SNL that he was $53 million in debt. What this very public descent into madness says for West himself is horrifying and another topic of discussion for another day.
What it says about the current state of music releases is another thing entirely. Through all the changes, all the confusion and all the middle fingers to the world at large, the public remained all-ears for West’s next opus. In fact, the constant flux of information created a curious effect; it actually became difficult to not anticipate the album. Even the biggest Kanye haters still found themselves refreshing their feed for a new morsel of half-baked opinion presented as ambrosia; the think-pieces on the ignorance and spectacle of the man only began to add into the hodgepodge of promotion for the release. West took the concept of “no press is bad press” to a whole new level - he actively curated frustration to fuel the hype.
Now of course, West would vehemently disagree with this assessment, but this was no revolutionary idea. Just a few weeks ago, the aforementioned Anti finally launched with a whimper via an accidental Tidal release to the chorus of millions of Rihanna’s Navy banging their heads against their walls. Besides the obligatory chart-fodder of the Drake-featuring “Work”, there was no clear hit on the album; even “Work” barely fit that bill. Remaining true to its name, Anti subverted all exceptions and hopes from both fans and critics alike, resulting a piece of work uniquely removed from realistic expectation. One could argue that this was Rihanna’s plan all along; one could just as easily argue that she truly stopped caring somewhere along the road. Either way, the album has been received mostly with surprised acclaim laced with bitterly conceded respect for its sheer irreverence to the structures that were once as integral to Rihanna’s star as her own voice.
Going against the grain doesn’t always work out as well, however. Nothing is more proof of this and relevant to the topic at hand than the case of Frank Ocean’s missing sophomore LP. The project had been rumored and hotly anticipated from just after the release of his debut channel Orange. The elusive R&B singer set the blogosphere ablaze early in 2015 when he posted a picture of what seemed to be his second album packaged as a magazine with a teaser hashtag of #JULY15. Well, as the sun set on the final day of July 2015 with no sign of an album much less an acknowledgement, fans began to crumble into hot frustration that sent Ocean’s name to the top of the trending topics. Unfortunately, there is yet to be a culmination to this story; his project (rumored to be called Boys Don’t Cry) still is nowhere to be found, with Ocean himself neglecting to even reference the stressful July of the past year. Fittingly, the only place we’ve heard Ocean since then is on The Life Of Pablo, soothingly closing the somber "Wolves" with a show-stopping verse that - again - brought him right back to the forefront of music fan’s discussions. With almost no promotion and little more than 20 seconds of total music released in the past year, Frank Ocean is once again the most anticipated name in R&B.
And likely, this is exactly what he was going for. In all three of these aforementioned cases, the collective anger of millions of fans and foes alike coalesced into something tangible. Trending topics, news headlines, thought pieces and condemnations all cobbled together create a fascinating whole: the modern promotion chimera. The days of traditional rollouts are slowly beginning to fade, and the proof is in the results; did anyone even blink when Coldplay announced A Head Full of Dreams, an album that bashfully released four weeks later to weak fanfare and middling reviews? No; it was Wilco’s release of Star Wars a day before their headlining performance of the whole set at Pitchfork Music Festival that turned modern rock fans' heads. Did Justin Bieber’s Twitter manipulation and use of famous friends to announce the release of Purpose light up the web? It did, but not as much as when Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late - a glorified mixtape - showed up on iTunes with little more than word-of-mouth leading up to it to become one of the biggest pop records of the year. Both in terms of initial impact and long-term retention, the modern music-consuming public is clearly showing their preference.
To return to West, did the absurd rollout process affect how the world received Pablo? At least in my opinion, absolutely. In fact, the context of his stream-of-consciousness public persona gave an essential level of detail to the amalgam of sound and statement that drives the album. Just as the irreverence of Anti’s release structure lent the same devil-may-care attitude to Rihanna’s art, the mania that is Kanye West in 2016 is perfectly emulated in The Life of Pablo. To think of the project as an aural representation of West spewing his thoughts out onto a blank canvas and handing it to the world with a cherry on top is not only logical; it’s almost demanded by the time one makes it to the end of the tracklist.
To say we live in a complicated world of music is an understatement. We’re in the midst of the shift from digital downloads to streaming, from the traditional industry patterns to an age of throwing things at a wall to see what sticks (and recoups investments). And in the midst of it all, the projects that stand out are those that embrace the chaos. “Pulling a Beyoncé” was just the start; in 2016, expect music releases to become even more convoluted, frustrating, and - most importantly - compelling. One could argue that the Kanye method of promotion and release - complete, utter insanity - could actually be looked at as an extension of the final work itself. I’d tend to agree; in such a scatterbrained world, focusing attention is an art all its own, and truly enterprising artists are starting to see the crafting of frustration toward an eventual payoff as a worthwhile pursuit. Where this path will lead for music’s future is uncertain, but it will certainly catch us off-guard again and again on the way.
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