The Life of Pablo is my favorite album by Kanye West. It is also the album that culminated in his first major, public crash in 2016. Months after this album was released, Kanye found his way into anti-Semitic circles and publicly supported extreme-right causes. From my vantage point, this moment was an enormous turn for him. He had previously garnered attention (or notoriety, depending on your own views) for first speaking live on TV during coverage of Hurricane Katrina with a short, direct statement: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” A few years later, in a surreal choice, he interfered with Taylor Swift’s reception of a VMA award, arguing–also live on TV–that Beyonce should have received it instead.

If it had been, say, Shia Labeouf saying these things, we could write it off as performance art. But, in Kanye’s case, it was not.

The Life of Pablo speaks to this shift in character. While there is no mention of Hurricane Katrina on the album, Kanye throughout relies on the southern black gospel tradition in generating new, creative music. “Ultralight Beam” is the best example of this. Kanye also speaks to his past experience with Taylor Swift in “Famous” (which led to a spat between Swift and Kanye’s then-wife Kim Kardashian), generating creative potential for Swift’s Reputation.¹

For me, the most important piece of the Kanye puzzle is “Saint Pablo.” Lyrically, the song discusses Kanye’s disillusionment with 21st century society, culminating in him calling for a mystical experience. Now, mental health needs to be taken very seriously, especially when it causes us to decline so badly that we cannot see the world “out there” for what it really is. There is no disputing any of this. However, I do not think that Kanye, at the time he released the album, was “insane.” In fact, I think he was on the right track. From the perspective of an American, living through the 21st century is like experiencing a hall of mirrors funhouse. No matter where we look, we see a world that is increasingly distorted. I think many of us understand this, and I believe that we are living through a hypernormal situation.

The core issue is one of constant mediation by the entertainment and tech industries. Rather than live through our own experiences, or stories heard from others, we experience the world more through television and the algorithmic internet than we do from personal contacts or forms of content that promote reflection (in my view, most often books, but the category is hardly limited to the written word). Kanye’s challenge was exacerbated by the fact that he is embedded in the media ecosystem: he is a core node in the music and fashion industries; this is a fact that he cannot overcome. In this way, he is almost a tragic figure.

The sort of mystical transcendence that calls out to him is, in my view, something real. It is about connection with the divine and recognition of the unity of all things. To reach this point, we learn from Abrahamic, Vedic, and Sinic traditions, we must focus on everyday, embodied experience. We must escape the confines of our own thoughts. Some traditions offer easier pathways to this point through Zen koans or contemplation of the cross. Other traditions look to music, trance, or dedicated, manual labor as a way of breaking out of our cognitive abstractions. Kanye is a religious man, and the spirit speaks to him as much as it does to any of the rest of us.

In some way, we might think of conspiracy culture as the diametrical opposite of mystical experience. Mysticism is the culmination of a mindful existence; it requires a refusal to turn all information “out there” into abstract ideas. Conspiracy culture, on the other hand, demands total abstraction. The problem of conspiracy theorizing is that many people are too prone to connecting phenomena that have little in common. We humans do have a pattern instinct; it’s how we make meaning. Conspiracy culture is a pathology produced by the human brain’s maladaption to the technological society.

Yet, Kanye did not seek out a mindful existence. He did not look closely at the world through his own perspective–through his body, through his own mind, through his own personal experiences. Instead, he turned to the ecosystem he knows for direction: He is at the center of celebrity culture and has close connections with very powerful movers and shakers. Unfortunately, they, too, are a part of the entertainment industry.

Thus, in late 2016, Kanye broke. Instead of contemplating the nature of his life and what it all means, he seems to have fallen further into a mediated existence and decided that the Jews were responsible, falling fully into the conspiracy trap.

I believe it morally wrong to scrutinize his life too closely; he is a person like you and I. There is a deep social ill with the way we probe into celebrity’s lives, poking at them like rats in a laboratory. They also have the right to privacy, and I cannot even imagine how unpleasant it would be to live each day knowing that I’m being surveilled by those examining the world through their parasocial gaze.

At the same time, I cannot help but be fascinated by Kanye’s story and trajectory. Surely the seeds for who he is today were planted long ago, but how? And why? I simply want to know how someone goes from a little guy at the bottom of the pack, producing some incredibly original music, and pushes his way to the top of the music industry. When he became dissatisfied with music, he worked his way from the bottom of the fashion industry (his already-existing status gave him a pass, but he did intern in Milan and sought to go through the necessary steps). This man has so much drive, so much vitality, and so much creativity. When I listen to Kanye’s music, I can’t help but try to figure out Kanye as an individual. This is very different from my experience of other musicians–I am less interested in the individual members of the Clash or Radiohead, for example. I do know that some fascination in a creative figure is a normal part of interest in a domain (my father, for instance, loves to learn about the Beatles, various Bluegrass figures, and other musicians that he engages with), but it is not something that comes naturally to me.

Kanye, unlike many other musicians, does not appear to me as a mere human. His life is different in that he is a symbol of cultural drift in a highly contentious age. In this way, he may indeed be very much like the Beatles, who epitomized the drift from slightly-rebellious-but-still-largely-conformist musicians in the conservative 1950s-60s (best illustrated by their performance on the Ed Sullivan Show) to countercultural icons (as seen in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). He, then, may be fascinating to me because he represents the transformation taking place in my own time. It isn’t Kanye-the-Individual that makes me wonder, it is Kanye-the-Symbol. If the Beatles’ arc traced the 1960s countercultural turn, Kanye’s traces the 2010s collapse into conspiracy and cultural fracture.

Albums like The Life of Pablo force me to stop and think about Kanye beyond the simple category of “artist” or even “celebrity.” The album puts together some major points in his life, and–quite frankly–I see Kanye as more the incarnation of the Hegelian Weltgeist, just as Hegel himself saw Napoleon or many saw Trump in the wake of his November 2024 election success.² My viewpoint must absolutely not be understood as advocacy: I am profoundly opposed to both of these contemporary men–I find both of their perspectives repellent, boorish, and malicious. It seems, then, that the Weltgeist is dragging us through a perilous epoch. We may have to confront still worse savagery in the years ahead.

In spite of Kanye’s increasingly noxious actions and rhetoric, The Life of Pablo has serious artistic merit and represents a serious shift in his career. It is, in fact, my favorite Kanye album, and I’d say that it is required listening for all who want to try to make sense of the 2010s.