Kanye West is a blizzard. He’s unpredictable, he seems to have little regard for social conventions, and he can send hundreds of thousands of otherwise rational citizens into hysterics—in the process, he worms his way into the thoughts of people who wouldn’t otherwise be affected by anything he does. The debut of Kanye’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion line at Madison Square Garden last Thursday doubled as the premiere of his seventh album, The Life of Pablo. Kanye simultaneously screened the event in movie theaters around the world and streamed it via Tidal, and whether because he wanted to disrupt American workdays or just because he’s heedless of the nine-to-five grind, he started it at 4 PM eastern time.
It should’ve dropped Friday, the day after crowds left Madison Square Garden. Impatient fans passed time creating memes based on its album artwork—a couple sites sprung up that allow anyone to insert their own words into the cover’s repeating blocks of text. The album’s track list, which had already grown since the end of the Yeezy event, grew again—and Friday evening, Kanye headed back to the studio with Chance the Rapper to finesse “Waves,” a song that had previously been cut. (Kanye made his own meme-ified T.L.O.P. cover, which said “Blame Chance.”) He performed two of the album’s songs on Saturday Night Live, and at the end of the supernatural “Ultralight Beam,” he hurriedly announced that his album was available to download on his site and to stream on Tidal. Except that the download option didn’t quite work. Soon Kanye took to Twitter to say he’d decided to hold off on selling his album to keep it exclusively on Tidal a little longer—oh, and that he’s reworking the song “Wolves,” and that he’s $53 million in debt.
Leor Galil writes about hip-hop every Wednesday.
