Kanye West's 'The Life of Pablo' through the lens of David Bowie's 'Station To Station'
Kanye West's "The Life Of Pablo", or at least the current version of it, has been out for over a week now, and though I know you've already read countless words about it, I'd like you to bare with me while I suggest that Pablo and David Bowie's "Station To Station" are -- in tone, function, and maybe even in form -- the same album.
In March of 1975, David Bowie moved to Los Angeles to continue the sessions for what would eventually be "Station to Station". He finished the album while in the vice grip of an "astronomic" cocaine problem, subsisting on a diet of peppers and milk, which he often took behind drawn curtains in mottled darkness. He would eventually escape the weeping and the gnashing of veneers by moving to Berlin, but not before he and his wife attempted to perform an exorcism on the pool of their Beverly Hills home, which Bowie believed to be possessed by the devil.
Bowie claimed to be so strung out that he didn't even remember recording the album, which really is something considering it's one of his most well-crafted, and his highest charting in the U.S.
It's bright and busy, but curiously sinister and full of angst. It's Bowie recoiling and being that guy at the party, though his gripes with the music and the company are indicative of a larger problem with the city's overly loud noises and colorful excess.
Fast forward 40 years and Kanye is off two xanny bars, sitting at home in Calabasas on a Saturday night, dreading having to eventually go out and participate.
West seems kind of over Los Angeles too. Since getting hitched and moving out here he's been slowly cooked by the oppressive sunshine refracted through the magnifying glass that comes with being the "greatest living rock star on the planet."
Trying to parse celebrity, being a stifled black creative who's $53 million in the red, and having a family life he didn't know would be this much work, Kanye has wandered back into the church, looking for some sort of reprieve. That much is clear from the onset with the gorgeous "Ultra Light Beam", a prog-mega-church-gospel record bookended by a 4-year old girl loudly rebuking the devil in West's stead since he seems to have forgotten how, and a reassuring altar call from gospel heavyweight Kirk Franklin. Kanye sways in his church pew while Chance The Rapper steals the show with what's arguably the best verse on the whole record.
Bowie gets similarly spiritual toward the end of Station's seat-gripping, 10-minute opener that builds from a surrealist film score to a disco romp, but he was talking about the kabbalistic tree of life, not the Godhead. He also drew the tree in chalk on the back cover of the album.
Pablo's cover has West's parents' wedding photo right next to a screenshot of an Instagram model's ample not-face, with the question "WHICH / ONE" over and over in large, emboldened font. It presents a conflictedness that shows up time and again throughout the record, from the subject matter to the production and to everything else. Soul and gospel samples that hark back to "Late Registration" days appear right next to jolting "Yeezus" synths and of-the-moment Metro Boomin drops. You can see the brush strokes in the finished work, and maybe that's the point.
"No More Parties in LA" finds West worried about his wife's happiness and cheating on her in the exact same verse. On "Low Lights", he cedes an entire two-plus minute song to a heartening testimony about how tough times aren't for always and the comfort you can find in the bosom of Christ. On the very next track, he riffs on new and inventive ways to shoot homemade pornos. We all knew that Kanye was comfortable with duality, but Pablo is that duality exploded to its logical extreme.
By the time Bowie put out Stations he'd already reinvented the wheel several times over. He turned left by plucking from his disparate styles to make a cohesive -- if at times -- schizophrenic whole that was different from anything heard before or since.
While we're at it there were all sorts of other controversies swirling around Station's release that threatened to eclipse the music, too. There was the Nazi salute scandal, obsessions with cults and suicide, and a bunch of other things you might hear during a montage on First 48.
Kanye's overdeveloped Twitter fingers have ruled the Internet in recent months and it hasn't all been good. There was the beef with Wiz Khalifa that he dragged his ex Amber Rose into. There was the sudden and unwanted "BILL COSBY INNOCENT" tweet. There was the time he asked Mark Zuckerberg for a blank check on Twitter when Zuckerberg, as the founder of Facebook, doesn't have Twitter. And of course there was that whole thing with Taylor Swift.
Put all of that in a box and put that box in a storage closet. Come back to it later. As with Stations, you're better served by separating art and artist, and by allowing yourself to fully experience this Homeric push-and-pull between guile and raw emotion. Pablo is frantic and messy and technically still isn't even "out" yet.
But hey, God's working on all of us.
Another Cover pic.twitter.com/WOwEmmmlHI
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 12, 2016
