Kanye West’s wildly impulsive ‘Life of Pablo’ embodies the social media era

The album: Kanye West’s “Life of Pablo,” a consciously anarchic masterpiece of megalomania as all-over-the-place as a cat chasing a laser pointer, knocking vases off dressers, clawing the furniture, thoroughly oblivious to the mess he’s made.

The song: “Real Friends,” a brooding confessional about trust issues and how family bonds can start to feel like handcuffs when money-starved relatives start seeing you as a meal ticket.

As with pretty much all things Kanye, though, there’s a twist: toward the end of the song, West acknowledges having paid a cousin $250,000 to return a stolen laptop that contained evidence of his philandering.

Now, two things: 1) Obviously, bowling-ball-sized gonads run in the West family if they’re willing to blackmail one another for 250K. 2). Doesn’t it seem just a tad counterintuitive to pay someone a quarter of a million dollars to help cover up your womanizing and then speak about it openly on an album that was streamed 250 million times during its first 10 days of release?

Seems like there’s at least a mild chance that might be self-defeating.

Here’s the thing with Kanye, though: The man has absolutely no filter. He can’t keep a secret — especially his own. He shares everything (It’s only a matter of time before he gives us his long-awaited “What I Had For Breakfast” mixtape. First track: “Fruit Loops, B!tch”).

In an era when plenty of us can’t wait to post pictures of that kickass tuna salad sandwich we had for lunch on Facebook, take selfies in the bathroom and breathlessly tweet our outrage when the Kardashians fail to invite Blac Chyna to their brother Rob’s baby shower (that’s his baby’s momma!), Kanye is all of us writ large.

“I am one with the people,” West announces on the track “Saint Pablo.”

That, he is.

And “The Life of Pablo,” his most chaotic, scattershot, head-spinning record yet, just may be the album that most embodies the blossoming of the social media era.

It’s a wildly impulsive album for these wildly impulsive times, a true distillation of the day and age in which it was created.

This is what social media sounds like, and West knows it.

“I’ve been woken from enlightened man’s dream,” he explains on “Saint Pablo.” “Checking Instagram comments to crowdsource my self esteem.”

In an era where information is conveyed in short, 140-character bursts, where attention spans are pulled in myriad directions at once and nothing lingers, where content comes at you like snowflakes in a blizzard, “Pablo” encapsulates the Twitter generation in both sound and content.

Sonically, it’s a marvel, an equally maddening and mesmerizing pastiche of samples, musical head fakes and dozens of guest spots (the album credits list over 150 contributors to the record in various forms).

Some songs sound like three-in-one, like “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2,” which opens with West singing over a clapping beat, his voice so heavily Auto-Tuned, it’s virtually unrecognizable, before segueing into a heavy-footed banger powered by 19-year-old Brooklyn rapper Desiigner. The song then downshifts into a stark, pensive hush interrupted only by what sounds like an inquisitive robot before ending with a gospel-like coda.

Give it a dozen spins and you’ll discover something new in the mix each time.

Lyrically, “Pablo” is equally dense and distracted, alternately repentant and ribald, with West’s id and superego warring for control of the mic from one track to the next.

At times, he can be at his most deliberately unlikable, like his Taylor Swift baiting on “Famous.” At others, he’s reflective and self-lacerating.

Within the span of a single song, he’s often an emotional pendulum, swinging hard between moods.

On “Saint Pablo,” for instance, he’s impossibly full of himself (“This generation’s closest thing to Einstein”) but also critical of the materialism that he’s often promoted in his songs (“Most black men couldn’t balance a checkbook / But buy a new car, talking ’bout how my neck look?”). By tune’s end, he sounds a note of contrition (“God, I have humbled myself before the court / Drop my ego and confidence was my last resort”). He then concludes everything by comparing himself to Michael Jordan.

Of course, Kanye’s acutely aware of how he’s perceived because of all this.

“I miss the old Kanye, straight from the ’Go Kanye / Chop up the soul Kanye, set on his goals Kanye,” Kanye rhymes about Kanye midway through “Pablo.” “I hate the new Kanye, the bad mood Kanye / The always rude Kanye, spaz in the news Kanye.”

What social media does is make everyone the center of their own universe.

At this, Kanye excels.

It’s both a skill, and a defense mechanism.

See, it doesn’t really matter if you admire West’s brilliance to the extent that he does.

You could never love Kanye as much as Kanye loves Kanye anyway.

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.