Art is (un)Dead: The Life of Pablo as a microcosm of Leaves of Grass

Kanye’s latest album, The Life of Pablo, has received a mix of critical attitudes, as its most prominent structural features are cited in polarizing reviews. Considering the album title has changed three times over the course of three anxious years (anxious for his fans, at least), the resonating motif for anyone paying attention to its delivery has been “change.” Reviewer Jayson Greene from Pitchfork Magazine describes the album as “wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy.” He cites the tracks “Father Stretch my hands” (parts 1 and 2) as “the least-finished-sounding piece of music to ever feature on a Kanye album,” and sums the album as “ridiculous.” Greene’s review is understandable in light of the messy lead-up to the album’s delivery; Kanye released four different track lists on twitter and hinted at several possible release dates before it was finally premiered at the Yeezy Season 3 fashion show, which amounted to the world’s biggest listening party.

What the article discounts, however, is the statement The Life of Pablo makes about the expectations we put on artists to produce and release completed works. In this reading, we see Pablo as a project fueled by evolution, in a constant state of flux. These sentiments aren’t unlike those offered to Walt Whitman’s lifetime work Leaves of Grass, where the multitudinous Whitman has reorganized and reimagined his collective poetry in through several published editions. In his book The Evolution of Walt Whitman, Roger Asselineau writes, “critics tend to forget that it (Leaves of Grass) represents forty years of assiduous experimentation”(5). I find that the assiduous nature of Kanye’s investment into Pablo is also forgotten in reviews such as Greene’s. I don’t mean to argue that these two works share a point-for-point procedural evolution that we could fit into parallel timelines, but I do find that the structural changes advertised before Pablo’s release share the central spirit of Whitman’s work as expressed by Asselineau. Perhaps the best advocate for this argument is Kanye himself, who tweeted “Life of Pablo is a living breathing changing creative expression.” We can draw this comparison by first taking a look at the previewed track lists as manuscripts of the album’s development.

This list was made during the album’s SWISH era. The tracks are unnumbered and there doesn’t seem to be any deliberate attempt to reveal organization. At this point, “Wolves” was the only track heard by the public, as it premiered during the Yeezy Season 1 fashion show. This document can be best understood next to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s first. The text did not include numbers or titles for its poems, instead naming every poem “Leaves of Grass.” Asselineau describes this edition as a “river of lava” due to its flowing qualities (7). Although Kanye doesn’t go to such lengths to make the album ambiguous, the fact that only one track was release offers a very limited idea of what the tracks could be. Thus, the blending quality created by the lack of titles in 1855 Leaves of Grass is instead created by the spare nature of Kanye’s list.

Asselineau calls the 1860 Leaves of Grass Whitman’s “first attempt at organization.” This edition groups the poems into titled sections and assigns each poem a number within each section. Here, at the beginning of the WAVES era, Kanye makes his own attempt at organization, showing handwritten edits to the original list, splitting the tracks into “Acts,” and including a chaotic display of doodles and what appear to be notes written by others. We also see the rubricated “Ultra Light Beam” added to the list. The use of Acts makes a particular connection to Dennis Renner’s analysis of the 1882 edition of Leaves of Grass. Here, Renner claims “Whitman envisioned the overall organization of his poems in dramatic terms, with a protagonist and a narrative divided into acts.” This note makes sense of how we understand Kanye’s track list, as well; our rapping protagonist tells a story contextualized by the people who are active in his life, including “Swizz” (producer Swizz Beatz), “Kim” (Kanye’s wife), A$AP (rapper A$AP Rocky) and more.

Three tracks were removed and three were added, but the real “highlight” of this list is the fresh sheet of paper. The aesthetic has been completely reimagined; now entering the Pablo era, it seems our protagonist has been named, but which Pablo are we talking about? That seems to be what Kanye is asking in green ink, anyway. Green dots are also placed next to five tracks, as well as between the parts 1 and 2 of “Father Stretch My Hands.” These dots aren’t insignificant when we offer this list a retrospective reading; each marked song delves into the detriments of the lavish lifestyle celebrated in the unmarked songs. It therefore appears these tracks contribute to the album’s story in a way the others do not, expanding the “Act 3” portion of the previous list. This idea resonates well with the ordinatio of the 1867 Leaves of Grass where various sets of titled poems are packaged under the book’s cover name. Like the marked tracks, these poems tell Whitman’s story as a poet consuming the American Civil War and the themes associated with it. This edition only adds six more poems, so it seems to pay special attention to its ordinatio, reimagining not only its new poetry, but also how poems from the previous additions inform Whitman’s contemporary narrative.

The first feature that stands out about this list is the increase in total tracks relative to the previous lists. When we look at the overall expansion of Pablo and Leaves, we see the former jumps from an original ten tracks to seventeen while the latter jumps from twelve to 400. This comparison may seem lofty by the numbers, but it’s important to consider the timeframe each artist is working with; Whitman made his changes over the course of a forty year career while Kanye made his over the course of a month. One feature their “final” editions share is the selection of items which inflate their respective lists. Many of Whitman’s “new” poems in the 1892 edition come from formerly published works, including the 1888 collection November Boughs. Similarly, the final four tracks of this list were previously released on Kanye’s Soundcloud. This list also shares a feature with the 1856 edition of Leaves. In this edition, Whitman concludes the book with a letter from critically acclaimed poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as Whitman’s long winded response. This exchange serves as an affirmation of the self-promotional assertions he makes in his original edition, using Emerson as testimony for the greatness Whitman assumes of himself. In Kanye’s case, his consideration of WAVES as his album title stirred controversy with rapper Wiz Khalifa who tweeted “Max B is the wavy one. He created the wave. There is no wave without him.” He refers to Max B, a rapper who produced a unique sound he called the “wave.” In track 13, we hear a phone conversation between Kanye and the incarcerated Max B, who gives Kanye his endorsement saying “You a wavey dude anyway, so you already know ain’t no problem, man.”

So from these track lists we can draw some parallels between The Life of Pablo and Leaves of Grass as exceptions to the rules of artistic expectation. But more is at stake here; what meaning can be drawn from Pablo as a microcosm of its nineteenth century sister text? Again, the comparison contributes to our understanding of both positive and negative reviews of the album. On one hand, compressing moves Whitman makes over a 40 year period into less than a month makes for a product that seems unsettled and frustrates its prospective listeners. On the other hand, we get a sense that these edits are made in the moment, as Kanye explicitly stated the first, third and fourth track lists were “final” versions, just as Whitman asserted his work was complete following a number of his book’s publications (Asselineau 5-8). Even Jayson Greene admits this quality about Pablo, saying “the album plays like Kanye might still be remixing it furiously in your headphones while you listen.” If we are to take seriously that the changes in Whitman’s work are legitimate, we may want to reconsider our criticisms of Pablo’s chaotic delivery and grant Kanye those same deliberations.