Songs to download: ‘Famous,’ ‘Freestyle 4,’ ‘Real Friends’

Music, more than most media, offers the temptation to hear certain works in the context of the creator’s personal life. This is particularly true with pop stars, or artists with a documented history of turmoil.

This tendency to read albums as biographies can overshadow the music itself. Ted Gioia accused modern music critics of turning the craft into “lifestyle reporting” in a 2014 article for The Daily Beast. He has a point. Music is not a purely literary medium; you have to engage with the sounds, which may or may not confirm any grand theses about an artist’s narrative intent.

The thing about Kanye West is that his music and life are inseparable—the sounds confirm it. His last four solo albums, including his most recent, “The Life of Pablo,” are about himself. They do not—with some exceptions—document specific events so much as use exaggerated versions of West to illustrate how he thinks and feels. They use sounds to the same end. “808s & Heartbreak,” recorded in the aftermath of his mother’s death, distorts West’s voice with Auto-Tune to simulate grief. “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” released after a year of public exile, argues for West’s importance to American culture by filling every empty space with sound to demonstrate the magnitude of his vision. “Yeezus,” released almost three years after that, stripped away the excess, distilling West’s frustrations from being temporarily shut out of the fashion industry with loud and pointed blasts of rage.

“The Life of Pablo” documents West being spread thin by the pressures of fashion (he debuted his most recent collection, Yeezy Season 3, and the album simultaneously at Madison Square Garden), music, family and celebrity. It is the first of West’s solo albums to resist consolidation under a single aesthetic idea, splintering within and between songs just as West finds himself split between his public and private obligations. The entropy that results is exciting, until there is too much of it.

In a Jan. 27 tweet, West referred to “The Life of Pablo” as a “Gospel album,” which is true, but probably not in the way he meant. A handful of songs (“Ultralight Beam,” “Low Lights,” “Waves”) use lyrical or vocal tropes associated with traditional gospel music, but if West is preaching anything, it’s the Gospel of Kanye West. Like in the New Testament, even small actions have high stakes. It’s an effective tactic that lends itself to the kind of grand self-mythologizing that drives West.

On “Famous,” West pits himself against former flings, contrasting his celebrity with their relative anonymity (“They mad they ain’t famous / They mad they’re still nameless” he taunts). It’s petty, but West doesn’t make it sound that way. The song’s beat is built on a metallic ring that repeatedly rises and dips in pitch, suggesting the entrance of a prizefighter. “Freestyle 4” uses a similar technique, setting West’s fantasies of public sex against the tense wail of a lone violin. His ranting is childish, but in the moment, it sounds like the fate of his soul hangs in the balance.

The delusion that each of his thoughts and desires carry life-and-death stakes is a constant throughout West’s work, and it is intoxicating. In the absence of a consistent aesthetic blueprint, it guides the album toward an internal logic.

The album’s other unifying force is instability. In the days preceding and following the album’s release, West staged a public meltdown on Twitter, mixing titanic—though not entirely inaccurate—boasts (“maybe I couldn’t be skinny and tall but I’ll settle for being the greatest artist of all time as a consolation”), cries for help (“World, please tweet, FaceTime, Facebook, instagram, whatever you gotta do to get Mark [Zuckerberg] to support me”) and assorted musings into a scattered stream of consciousness.

The album also operates on a fractured logic, beginning with a prayer before splitting down the middle. Some songs are dense and busy (“Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2,” “Highlights,” “Waves”) some less so (“Wolves,” “Real Friends”). Some are confrontational, others reflective.

This sort of disorder has its advantages. One is that it gives a fresh angle on the way West makes connections between disparate sounds and artists. His ability to see beyond genre is one of the defining elements of his genius. I can’t think of another artist who could feature Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Chief Keef on the same song (2013’s “Hold My Liquor”) and make you believe it’s not a cheap gimmick, or who would have the gall to sample a booming trap beat from TNGHT and a Nina Simone cover of a song about racially-motivated violence simultaneously (as West did on 2013’s “Blood on the Leaves”).

On “The Life of Pablo,” West makes room for classical composer Caroline Shaw, Atlanta rapper Young Thug, Chris Brown, gospel singer Kirk Franklin and R&B singer El DeBarge, who has released one album since 1994. West doesn’t just make order out of chaos, he makes the chaos an organizational strategy.

The strategy works, for the most part. Many songs make surprising hairpin turns or introduce elements midstream that reconfigure their surroundings. “Famous” ends on a manipulated sample of dancehall singer Sister Nancy. “Highlights” makes extensive use of sub-bass and Auto-Tune, but saves room for a stately piano interlude. “Wolves” moves from a synthetic wordless groan and processed samples of birdcalls to a spare outro featuring just Frank Ocean’s unaltered voice and a keyboard. There’s a manic quality to these lateral movements that simulates what you might imagine goes on in West’s head: a rush of fragments, loops and phrases that could be arranged in endless combinations.

But the sprawl becomes too much for the album to bear on its final stretch. West expanded a planned 10-song tracklist to 17 two days before the album’s release. (The album is currently 18 tracks. According to West, it is still incomplete.) Most of the last-minute additions—including “Waves,” “30 Hours,” “No More Parties in LA” and “Facts”—lack the frenzied inspiration of their counterparts. They slow the album’s momentum just when it should be hitting a peak.

I’m left to wonder, too, what may have happened if West had narrowed the album’s focus, using a single song as a center to build around. I wonder this because, for all the compelling sonic ideas that surround it, “Real Friends” has a tragic urgency that sticks. It addresses West’s struggles to stay connected with his extended family, and whether he desires the work that connection requires or the mere appearance of it.

The song is raw and intimate, doing away with the artifice West has opted for (albeit effectively) on his past three albums, wavering between self-indictment (“When was the last time I remembered a birthday?”) and self-defense (“Like I ain’t got enough pressure to deal with / Please don’t pressure me with that bill s—“). You sense a nagging ambivalence, and the song, with its faded, minor-key piano loop, won’t let it go. I’m sure there’s an album of similar, unresolved tensions in West. I’d like to see him let them out.

The closest thing “The Life of Pablo” has to a thesis statement is “I Love Kanye,” a brief spoken-word track in which West makes reference to his shifting public perception (“I miss the old Kanye, straight-from-the-‘Go Kanye…I hate the new Kanye, the bad-mood Kanye”) and sprawling, multi-directional career (“Now I look around and there’s so many Kanyes”). At one point, West asks, “What if Kanye made a song about Kanye?” which is funny, because just about every song and album he makes is about himself, in one way or another. “The Life of Pablo” is no exception, and it serves as evidence that, so long as Kanye feels compelled to make music, he’ll keep finding new and surprising ways to talk about himself.