“(Yes, God)

We don’t want no devils in the house, God (Yes, Lord)

We want the Lord (Yes, Jesus)

And that’s it (Yes, God)

Halle- hand over Satan (Yes, Jesus)

Jesus praise the Lord (Yes, God)”

“The Life Of Pablo” is a mess. Upon first listening to the record, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Kanye mistakenly pressed the “let’s publish this worldwide” button while still recording the thing. But if you stick with it, you might find that it sounds fragmented because it’s a patchwork of all of Kanye’s prior incarnations, snapshots of his life and career arranged messily on a drawing table. It makes for a schizophrenic jumble that we’re left to arrange ourselves, and in this sense it’s more of an acquired taste than his other albums, asking us to go over it a few times in order to find the strands that tie its scattered pieces together. While his previous records – whether you liked their aesthetic or not – tended to have a relatively cohesive sound or theme, we’re not guided by obvious markers this time around. It’s a work where nothing and everything is gospel, where ridiculously oblivious lines are followed by disarming self-awareness, where soul samples are drowned out by piercing electronic arrangements, and where religion and blasphemy are constantly at odds.

The album opens with the above lines laying out the foundations for a holy war. It’s a view of spirituality characterised exclusively by a clash between light and darkness, and this is how Kanye sees his own experience: a constant conflict between his destructive side and the side of him that’s demonstrated, over nearly two decades, that he’s capable of near-boundless creativity and continual reinvention. His search for redemption started in 2004 with “The College Dropout”, with him asking for God to “show me the way because the Devil tryna break me down”, but on Pablo his journey has become more precarious. On “Real Friends,” he raps: “Fuck the church up by drinkin’ at the communion/ Spillin’ free wine, now my tux is ruined” in a sacrilegious intoxication. In February Kanye tweeted that Pablo was to be “a gospel album”, but his take on the genre is going to be, like himself, tortured, desperate, but also at times shining with transcendent brilliance. And so the opening lines set the scene for what is to be a back and forth between sin and godliness, and this split is part of what makes the album seem so fractured.

As the sermon progresses, the word hallelujah is interrupted midway by “hand over Satan”. This is when the melody starts: it’s helping to purge Kanye of his demons. He’s both sinner and Creator, making the music that’ll perform his own exorcism. If you think that even ‘Ye wouldn’t elevate himself to such almighty heights, look no further than his album Yeezus, where one of the songs is entitled (just a tad arrogantly) “I am a God.” This is all brought together in the hook: “This is a God dream/ This is everything”. He’s amping himself up, speaking to himself through various voices: “I’m tryna keep my faith/ But I’m looking for more/ Somewhere I can feel safe/ And end my holy war/ I’m tryna keep my faith”. A choir intermittently elevates the voices in the song and accentuates key words throughout, finally bringing it to completion with a long, ominous ‘War’.

The second song of the album begins with a sample of Pastor T.L. Barrett’s “Father Stretch My Hands,” which lends its title to the piece. The gospel tune is soon drowned out by synths, but continues in the background as Kanye sings “I just want to be liberated I, I, I”, then “If I ever instigated I’m sorry”: he wants to free himself from his past indiscretions, and the gospel sample provides a choral bed to his confessions. The sample then stops, making way for some of the most astoundingly bad lyrics Kanye’s ever penned. He’s never been the greatest lyricist, (“Chasin’ love, lots of bittersweet hours lost/ Eatin’ Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce” – which is bad but at least kind of hilarious) but here he keeps the graphic imagery up while offering no redemptive comedy: “Now if I fuck this model/ And she just bleached her asshole/ and I get bleach on my T-shirt/ I’mma feel like an asshole.”

While the quality of these lines is indefensible, what’s interesting is how the verse is so at odds with the message of the hook: he’s asking for redemption and then can’t help himself from steering towards artless controversy. The two sides of Kanye are laid out perfectly, his quest for salvation hindered by his attraction to sex and sin. This misplaced spirituality goes into full swing in “Pt. 2”, where he states “If you ask, lost my soul/ Driving fast, lost control”. Kanye now chases after redemption by “Taking all the stacks,” material wealth. His car, like the one he crashed leaving him with a broken jaw in 2002, is headed for perdition as he confuses his way to spiritual freedom. However, while his voice was audibly constrained in his debut “Through the Wire,” his mouth wired shut following the crash, we’re now listening to Kanye’s unrestrained ego.

This is the context of the song “Famous” and the lines “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous”. He’s retreading the path that made him notorious (if not popular) with the general public and, yet again, he can’t stay away from making thoroughly stupid comments, trying to take ownership of a career that was already in full swing before his interruption of Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. His behaviour, at times unforgivable, has nevertheless made him irresponsibly rich (“I just copped a jet to fly over personal debt”) and he feels invincible (“Young and we alive, whoo!/ We never gonna die, whoo!”).

His approach to religion here feels like prosperity theology, like he sees his wealth as a sign of God’s blessing, that he’s one of the world’s elect, and so that he’ll be granted some form eternal life. With that kind of divine backing, we can start to understand West’s arrogance throughout his career, which has always been present, but that has reached increasingly pathological levels with every album’s release. In an interview with rap radio legend Sway in 2013, he shouted: “I am Shakespeare in the flesh. Walt Disney, Nike, Google. Now who’s going to be the Medici family and stand up and let me create more?” and backstage at SNL he ranted that he was more influential, “by 50 percent, [than] Stanley Kubrick, Apostle Paul, Picasso… fucking Picasso and Escobar.” So when, on “Highlights”, he raps that “we the new Jacksons,” frankly, we’ve gotten off easy. This kind of megalomania is not only fascinatingly insane, it’s also what allowed him to steer hip hop away from gangster culture with “The College Dropout,” giving voice to an often ignored black middle class; to pave the way for the Drakes of this world with “808s,” to compose an operatic best-rap-album-of-all-time contender with “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”, and to introduce industrial electronic sounds to hip-hop on “Yeezus”.

While the outbursts would imply a narcissistically driven obliviousness towards history and his position in the world, Kanye lets out little hints throughout the record that he knows he may not always be thinking straight. On “Feedback”, a song whose strident sounds mimic, unsurprisingly, microphone feedback, he raps: “seem like more fame, I only got wilder,” continuing with “I’ve been out of my mind a long time.” The album is scattered with references to his own mental instability, saying “need to put up some goddamn barricades/ I be paranoid every time” on “No More Parties in L.A.”, screeching “I’m out here spazzin, all y’all get the message?/ On the field I’m over-reckless” on “Facts,” and explicitly on “FML”, where he declares that “you ain’t never seen nothing crazier than/ This nigga when he off his Lexapro/ Remember that last time in Mexico/ Remember that last time, the episode.” These lines paint a picture of a man who’s constantly jolted by an internal struggle that he needs to atone for, offering up a disclosure that feels like it’s delivered in a confessional booth, but spoken through a megaphone that then echoes through the aisles of a packed church. On “FML” he explains his intention: “I’ve been thinking/ About my vision/ Pour out my feelings/ Revealing the layers to my soul.” While true narcissism doesn’t need external validation, Kanye’s brand of self involvement is one that always tries to explain itself, a trend that started with the emotional upheaval and vulnerability of 808s.

A considerable portion of his confessions revolve around sex. “Freestyle 4” is this record’s dark twisted fantasy. Ominous strings form the backdrop to his “freak dreams” that sound as if they’re being yelled through a loudspeaker in an empty warehouse. He fantasises about having sex at a public event that eventually causes the party to break into an orgy: “What if we fucked right in the middle/ Of this motherfuckin’ dinner table?/ What if we just fucked at the Vogue party?/ Would we be the life of the whole party/ Would everybody start fuckin’?” Later on in the album, however, he makes a pledge: “God, I’m willing/ to make this my mission/ Give up the women,” realising that sexual indiscretions are what lead him astray. He eventually pleads “Please, baby, no more parties in L.A.”, a city where temptation might shake his will.

Kanye comes up with a solution to resolve the tension between these appetites. He tries to reconcile his lifestyle and religion by bringing biblical figures into a club on “Wolves”. He asks his wife Kim, presumably, to “let me know if I could be your Joseph,” and to create a child without sex in an immaculate conception: “let’s have a baby without fuckin’”. He continues: “what if Mary was in the club/ When she met Joseph around hella thugs?” He can only see himself in holy shoes once sex has been taken out of the equation. The pursuit of sex is empty, and Frank Ocean emphasises this with the following lines: “Burn out, cave in/ Blackened to dark out/ I’m mixed now, fleshed out/ There’s light with no heat/ We cooled out.”

The album ends with “Fade”, where we finally find out what this whole spiritual journey has amounted to. And it’s not good, at least for Kanye. While on “Wolves,”sex (or its absence) was holy, here we get a thoroughly carnal narrative that sits atop a classic Chicago house sample, Fingers Inc.’s “Mystery of Love”. There’s a constant refrain chanting “your love is fadin’/ I feel it”, while Kanye seems to be gearing up for a club, rolling joints, arriving at the club, and pouring liquor: “roll up, roll up/ Hold up, hold up/ Po’ up, po’ up”. He’s faded, both drunk and high. He’s ready for a sexual encounter, bouncing through the lines “I’ma rock the boat/ work the middle ’till it hurt a little,” and the song ends with a masterful work of sampling call-and-response mimicking sex: Barbara Tucker sings “Oh, deep inside/ Deep, deep, down inside” with a Rare Earth sample replying “I feel it”. They go on for quite a while – good for them. For Kanye, however, it means that the spiritual system he had set up to save him has fallen apart. Drunk, high, and promiscuous, the sexual narrative only leads to love that fades, as does any hope for salvation. The demons have not left this house.

I feel it’s fadin’

I feel it’s fadin’

I feel it

I feel it’s fadin’

This album isn’t going to make any converts. If you don’t like ‘Ye, you’re hardly going to be interested in his spiritual turmoil. If you do like him, this record will take you through layers of his psyche and through the years of his creative progression. If it’s a gospel album, it’s a gospel of moral failure – but it’s also a musical triumph.