Last month, audio leaked of Kanye West having a tiny meltdown backstage at Saturday Night Live, and it included the following humble statement: “By 50 percent [I’m] more influential than any other human being. … By 50 percent dead or alive, by 50 percent for the next 1,000 years.” Among the individuals whose impact he has exceeded, West cited Pablo Picasso, the Apostle Paul and Pablo Escobar. He also mentioned Stanley Kubrick, twice. But judging from all the new versions of The Life of Pablo that keep surfacing, you’d assume Kanye’s true rival is George Lucas.
On February 14, The Life of Pablo—West’s seventh studio album—was released as an exclusive stream on Tidal. That afternoon, West tweeted, “Ima fix Wolves,” referring to a track featuring vocals from Frank Ocean. Last week, sure enough, two new Pablos appeared: one augmenting “Wolves” with vocals from Sia and Vic Mensa, another tweaking lyrics and tracks for “Famous.” Expect more, as West has called Pablo “a living breathing changing creative expression.”
Whether you need to keep up or not depends. As Jayson Greene recently noted on Pitchfork, “West is testing the shifting state of the ‘album cycle’ to see if he can break it entirely, making his album like another piece of software on your phone that sends you push updates. But here’s the thing: Who actually likes updating the OS on their phones?” Hardcore Kanye-philes will need to keep abreast of every cosmetic nip and tuck. The rest of us can pick whatever version from the ether and chill.
As a format, the album has been a bit rubbery since CDs arrived. All that extra recording room allowed for “bonus tracks” that weren’t included on LPs, some of which (“Excellent Birds” from Peter Gabriel’s So, for example) eventually were added to official tracklists. Double albums like Prince’s 1999 and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk were shortened so they could be squeezed onto one disc. Tusk also swapped the original “I Know I’m Not Wrong” with an inferior alternate take. (It’s one of my favorite Mac tunes, and I don’t care how many times they repackage that damn album, the original ’79 vinyl is the only Tusk for me!)
Controversy has caused many albums to change shape. 10,000 Maniacs removed their cover of “Peace Train” from In My Tribe after Cat Stevens converted to Islam and seemed to endorse the killing of Salman Rushdie. Michael Jackson changed the “Jew me, sue me … kick me, kike me” lyrics in “They Don’t Care About Us” after charges of anti-Semitism. Prince and Bruce Springsteen have replaced whole albums with entire new ones at the last minute. Smile, The Beach Boys’ notorious “lost” album, now exists in multiple incarnations.
Kanye, however, is the first to do this all in real time, from a glass studio. While the concept of an eternally unfinished album is intriguing, he risks losing our interest with each new primp and futz. Would we have fallen in love with Star Wars if the lightsabers changed each time we saw it? No, we had a 20-year affair before Lucas betrayed us with a facelift. Perhaps Kanye should just let Pablo, “the greatest work of all time,” exist as-is.
