Imagine you have the most anticipated album in the world about to drop. There's a release date planned that everyone knows about. There's a big listening party at Madison Square Garden that's being simulcast around the globe. There's a Saturday Night Live appearance booked. You would want that album to be set in stone and everything to go exactly according to plan. Or else you'd have a heart attack.

But look at Kanye West during the whole messy process of naming and renaming the album finally titled The Life of Pablo—messing around with its track listings, adding new songs on the fly, and apparently figuring out its distribution plans entirely by improv, and grinning the entire way through. He was so excited to end a breathtaking SNL performance of the TLOP opener "Ultralight Beams"—which culminated in the striking image of gospel legend Kirk Franklin, dressed in bleached denim and Yeezy boots, delivering a blessing over West's prostrated body—with the surprise announcement of the album's day-late release that he looked a little kid OD'ing on birthday cake.

Chaos is risky, and most people instinctively avoid it. But it can also be a powerful tool if you can channel it properly—throw shit in the air, trust that the universe will do something cool with it, and you just might end up with something singular and amazing that the logic-bound parts of your brain involved in the creative process might never have come up with. That's never been more apparent than in the rollout for The Life of Pablo. While West is certainly still a control freak, he's also embraced the potential for chaos as a creative engine.

It's the least surprising thing in the world that the line that keeps popping up in reviews of Kanye West's seventh album, The Life of Pablo, is the one from "Feedback" where he goes, "Name one genius that ain't crazy." In just six short words, it affirms the two major critiques that have been hurled at West for ages: that he's an egomaniac and that he's mentally unwell. Others substitute the line from "FML" where he goes, "You ain't never seen nothing crazier than this n***a when he off his Lexapro." More than a few have cited both.

The album's baked-in uncertainty even extends, Schrödinger's-cat-like, into the realm of metaphysics.

As a professional music critic and not a trained mental health professional (and as someone who thinks armchair psychiatry via thinkpiece is more than a little irresponsible), I'm not about to make any guesses whether West is "crazy" or not. But I suspect what scans as "crazy" to a lot of people is just a much greater tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty than the average person, topped by a fat dollop of narcissism that isn't even really that abnormal for 21st century America.

Most of the best parts of The Life of Pablo come from a willingness to bypass the filter of rationality, and not too closely interrogate the creative process. This isn't to suggest that he isn't in total control of the whole thing—just that he's figured out how to remove the obstacles to the kind of daredevil mental leaps that constitute what we call genius, and to trust that if he throws together a bunch of seemingly unrelated ideas, greatness might follow.

On paper, for example, the two-part "Father Stretch My Hands" doesn't even begin to make sense: It begins as a gospel song about fucking models, transitions halfway into a soul-baring confessional dance track, then drops in two entire verses of an entirely different song about drug-dealing and cars by an 18-year-old Brooklyn rapper before resolving into a meditative piece for vocoder by a contemporary classical composer and ending with a snippet of the sampled gospel song that the whole thing started from, just to remind you how far we've traveled from there in the span of four minutes. (As far as complicated, medley-like compositions go, 'Ye seems to have surpassed the form's previous champ, his occasional creative partner Paul McCartney.)

West's willingness to not stop and ask the questions most producers would have asked is also responsible for the album's greatest weaknesses.

The album's baked-in uncertainty even extends, Schrödinger's-cat-like, into the realm of metaphysics. What does it mean to call it a Kanye West album when there are whole stretches of it where West doesn't even appear—like the lifted bits of Desiigner's "Panda," a phone conversation between jailed rapper Max B and fellow Kardashian love interest French Montana, and "Low Lights," which is mostly the uncredited vocal part of a Christian house music track with its beat replaced by synthesizer noodling that somehow involves the dance music duo DJ Dodger Stadium?