On his new album, Kanye West tells stories about the pressures of fame, and the madness brought on by having too much. Illustration by Michael Cho

One of the reasons Kanye West inspires such a devoted following is that, despite all of the changes in his life and in his music, we can still recognize him as the same character he was when his story began. He is his own muse. When West débuted as a solo artist, in 2004, he came across as an Everyman striver whose petty arrogance masked a deeper set of insecurities. Puffing his chest one moment, self-scrutinizing the next, he seemed to offer a novel archetype: the grounded hip-hop star. He was never a great rapper, but he made a style of his enthusiastic clumsiness, surrounding his verses with proud soul samples, on “The College Dropout” (2004); high-res orchestrations, on “Late Registration” (2005); and arena-size triumphalism, on “Graduation” (2007). As fame came to seem increasingly like a game that could be rigged, West remained a man of erratic shifts and intense, flitting curiosities. In 2008, following the death of his mother, he released “808s & Heartbreak,” a divisive, stripped-down masterpiece built around the strange, bluesy effect of singing against the grain of Auto-Tune. With each new project, West was curious and questing: sometimes he seemed like a grad student fresh from an art-history seminar; at other times, he spoke like an executive at a Silicon Valley management retreat. Whatever his world view in a given moment, he always wanted, desperately, to share it.

The main difference between then and now is that West has long since surpassed his early dreams. Last Thursday, he premièred his seventh solo album, “The Life of Pablo,” at Madison Square Garden, alongside a large-scale performance piece by the Italian conceptual artist Vanessa Beecroft. The event was streamed online and simulcast to movie theatres in the United States and Europe. Rows of models dressed in West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion collection stood in formation onstage, doing their best not to acknowledge West’s album as it rang through the arena. After “Pablo” concluded, West and his friends took turns plugging devices into the sound system and playing their favorite new songs. At one point, West unveiled a clip from Only One, a video game he helped create, which features his late mother ascending to Heaven on a winged horse. West said that he hoped to become, one day, the creative director of Hermès. “I just want to bring as much beauty to the world as possible,” he added.

As life goals go, bringing beauty to the world isn’t bad. But “beautiful” isn’t the most obvious word to describe West’s recent output. His career-long fixation on his own contradictions eventually consolidated into an aesthetic, one that gave rise to a generation of male artists, such as Drake and The Weeknd, who wallow in soft self-loathing and explain away their loutish behavior as the result of melancholy and bruised ego. As West’s fame has grown, he has seemed uninterested in moving beyond this narcissistic stance, apologizing only intermittently, and halfheartedly, for the persistence of his asshole ways. His previous album, “Yeezus” (2013), was a brilliant collection of prickly, squelching songs that seemed designed to vet rather than expand his fan base. It was paranoid and resentful, its harsh textures partly inspired by a range of frustrations with the music industry and with the insular world of high fashion. While touring the album, West rapped and sang from behind a crystal mask, often launching into long, seemingly free-associative rambles about creativity and genius, comparing himself to Steve Jobs and Alejandro Jodorowsky, criticizing members of the fashion industry, name-checking the Nike executives with whom he had fallen out.

On “Freestyle 4,” a “Pablo” highlight featuring instrumentation that sounds like a fingertip being rubbed around the rim of a wineglass, West raps, “Name one genius that ain’t crazy.” Perhaps his recent behavior was meant to underscore his status as slightly crazy and, therefore, a genius. A little more than a month ago, West imposed a February 11th release date for his album. (As of late afternoon on February 12th, it was still not available to stream.) He documented his long workdays on Twitter, breaking occasionally to squabble with the rapper Wiz Khalifa—an exchange that ended with West’s distressingly sexist smear of the model and actress Amber Rose, whom West used to date and from whom Khalifa is currently separated—and to tout Bill Cosby’s innocence in the face of dozens of sexual-assault allegations. At a time when major albums are rolled out in secret and social-media accounts are carefully managed—a time when saying very little earns you the benefit of the doubt—West’s tendency to overshare, in songs and online, often in spectacularly tone-deaf ways, makes him seem more human and, sometimes, troublingly misogynistic. On “Pablo,” this latter trait is especially evident on the track “Famous,” in which West speculates about a sexual encounter with Taylor Swift and takes credit for her renown. It’s a throwaway boast on an otherwise good song. And yet, as West began taking heat for besmirching Swift, he doubled down, invoking, on Twitter, the familiar defense of the misunderstood artist who should be free to do as he chooses.

The vision of a life free of responsibility is one of the great drivers of pop music. But we are also drawn to stories about the pressures of fame, and the madness brought on by simply having too much, even if few of us can relate to such tales. On “Real Friends,” one of the strongest tracks on the new album, West raps about swooping in for a family reunion, then wondering why it doesn’t feel right. “When was the last time I remembered a birthday? / When was the last time I wasn’t in a hurry?” He deserves the spoils of his success. But maybe, he thinks, he also deserves the disappointed faces of old friends and family, having time for nothing more than a quick photo at a party. It’s not quite regret that peeks through his rhymes, but there is a worried awareness of just how much things have changed.

On the glorious “Ultra Light Beams,” West is joined by Chance the Rapper, The-Dream, and Kelly Price, who help him try to keep the faith: “This is a God dream / This is everything / This is everything,” West sings. Later, we hear the voice of the gospel icon Kirk Franklin: “Father,” he intones, “this prayer is for everyone that feels they’re not good enough. This prayer’s for everybody that feels like they’re too messed up.” A choir picks up where Franklin leaves off. But, minutes later, as West contemplates a model’s bleached nether regions on the gorgeous “Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1,” he has returned to a place that’s “not good.” On “FML,” he grouses, over tiptoeing synths, “You ain’t never seen nothing crazier than / This nigga when he off his Lexapro,” as he tries to make sense of “the layers to my soul.” West has built a career toggling between the light and the dark. But the poles seem more drastic on “The Life of Pablo,” from the arching euphoria of West’s Auto-Tuned vocals on “Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 2,” which pays tribute to his parents, to the desperation on the stunningly emaciated “Wolves,” which reaches its climax with a note of disgust: “We surrounded by the fuckin’ wolves.”