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The revolutionary nature of black genius, and the pressures of sustained excellence, invite all manner of heresy.
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One might be quick to misunderstand his theories on self-value (“As a creative your ideas are your strongest form of currency”) or purpose (“Some people have to work within the existing consciousness while some people can shift the consciousness”) as total bluster, but West’s tweets sync squarely with his career-long artistic project: to create a new template with the hope that one might access a vision of untapped possibilities. She was going to lead the audience somewhere untraveled.Įxpression is also a matter of sight-the desire for others to see as you see. From the moment she materialized on stage as Nefertiti, it was clear: this would be no uniform benediction. It wasn’t so much a vision of black genius being born as it was black genius, thoroughly defined, doing what it does-stir, exclaim, surprise, fulfill. Her headlining performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this past weekend (she’ll headline again on Saturday) was genius in real time. The equally masterful work of Beyoncé conjures a comparable insistence on the senses. What secures the album as a chronicle of force and feeling is its sustained elevation, its mastery of self. He looks for a way out of it he searches through verse. “All worries in a hurry, I wish I controlled things.” He wants to make sense of the fog around him. “I’ll prolly die tryna defuse two homies arguin’/ I’ll prolly die 'cause that’s what you do when you’re 17,” he raps. A track like “FEAR.” charts the rapper’s private frictions-he wants us to see what he sees the pull of death, the despair that feels a crater wide. Lamar’s is a divine vision, and much of the album is filled with a linguistic searching. They are criticisms that wonder, dangerously: Just how should black genius occupy our world?Īccording to Billboard, the vote among jurors was unanimous in the rapper’s favor-since the inaugural music prize in 1943, recipients had exclusively been classical or jazz musicians-with one committee member citing the album for its symmetry of “melody, harmony, counterpoint, texture.” The album’s strength, though, lies in its insistence on sight. Has Beyoncé eclipsed Michael Jackson as the greatest entertainer of all time? Was Kendrick Lamar actually worthy of such an award? Is Kanye going on another one of his insane rants? Such misguided inquiries are fortified with an identical structural curiosity. Its ubiquity, too, inflamed the kind of lazy criticism that seeks to invalidate the precision, thunder, and totality of artistic exceptionalism (this is especially true when cultivated outside the white mainstream). Rendered through these three artists, the sweat and gristle of black genius-which is to say, the bone-tough work of black genius-was nearly impossible to escape, online and off. Or perhaps it’s best we start with Kanye West, who reemerged this week on Twitter with a meditative shortform treatise on human existence and the nobility of creative production. Or we could just as easily begin with Kendrick Lamar the Compton, California artist became the first rapper to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his searing album DAMN. We could begin with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter-the singer, mother, and pop maximalist who understands that music can, and should, be a kind of cinema-and her historically transcendent Coachella performance. If Kanye’s not your thing, the feature works with plenty of other music, including genre-based lists like Behind the Lyrics: Hip-Hop and artist playlists for Diplo, Pusha T and Tinashe.If one were attempting to define black genius in its modern form, the week of April 16 provides no shortage of starting points. To access the function, simply open the album in Spotify’s mobile app and swipe down on the the album artwork. Rather than offer all annotations from a track, the stripped-back “Behind the Lyrics” functionality offers bite-sized chunks of information, including information on samples, personal context and even relevant tweets. The partnership between the two companies was launched in January as a way of transmitting Genius’s vast database of lyric annotations direct to users of the Spotify app as they listen.
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Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo is the latest album to take advantage of Spotify’s integration with lyrics site Genius, offering commentary on the album from within the streaming service’s app. Now you can find out the story of ‘Ultralight Beam’ as you listen.