Apart from being the best album of the year, The Life of Pablo is an encyclopedia of contemporary culture. More than any other album in 2016, it is about bourgeois subjectivity. It’s about religion, sex, family, friends. It’s about medication, entrepreneurship, loneliness, and fame. But more than anything, it’s about what it means to be human today. Over the course of the album’s 20 tracks, Kanye explores the far reaches of his conscious mind, ever teetering between faith and despair, confidence and suffering. It has become popular to dismiss Kanye as crazy when taking into account his social media presence and public antics; however, an analysis of The Life of Pablo’s contents show him not only as sane, but vulnerable, in-touch, and acutely reflective.Part of its vast cultural reach is the fact that The Life of Pablo is infused with with a heavy dose of popular music history, from Nina Simone to Desiigner. Its author’s impressive use of Arthur Russell’s “Answers Me” anchors one of the greatest beats on the album (“30 Hours”), while his rhythmic and thematic interpolation of “Jumpman” by Drake and Future is the lifeblood of “Facts (Charlie Heat Version),” a song completed by Kanye’s imitation of Future’s vocables and his use of sound bytes from Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. These references aren’t merely references—they’re so thoroughly woven into the music of The Life of Pablo that they could not be extricated without compromising the totality of the album. In this sense, the album is a monumental achievement.It’s difficult to excerpt any single song or reference as exemplary from an album that nods to everything from Lexapro to Albert Einstein, so the goal of this playlist is to highlight a few great songs on the album and to intersperse them with some of its most interesting samples and musical references.
