Kanye West: Balancing Subversion and Mass Consumption

Below is an abridged version of a longer paper I wrote on the ways in which Kanye West balances subversion and mass consumption for a class on the Philosophy of Art.

An interlude at 2 minutes and 22 seconds into “Ni**as in Paris,” the 2010 chart-topping collaboration between Kanye West and Jay Z, skips to an audio sample pulled from the film, Blades of Glory. The sample features a conversation between Will Ferrell and Jon Heder in which Heder challenges Ferrell about a musical choice that he dubs as meaningless. Ferrell responds, “No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative… Gets the people going.” The decision to include this sample is emblematic of a conflict within Kanye West’s discography, best exemplified in West’s most recent full-length studio album, The Life of Pablo. The contradiction exists in the framing of The Life of Pablo. That is, the conflict is exposed through the promotion, debut, symbolism, music videos, and media attention surrounding Pablo. Kanye’s album exists as a contradiction between subversive, radical art and mass-consumed music. Even West will acknowledge the two different spaces he occupies, as he states in a 2010 interview with XXL Magazine, “I am where art meets commercial.” To analyze the framing of Pablo through the scope of Theodor Adorno’s theories on music and culture, as well as Wolfgang Iser’s theories on hermeneutics, reveals how Kanye uses the power of interpretation to his advantage, allowing him to find the intersection of truly radical music and widely consumed media.  

Adorno, drawing from Freud, Marx, and Hegel, was at the forefront of critical theory and philosophy of aesthetics in the twentieth century. His education and work in the Frankfurt School as a critic of the “culture industry” is still widely influential as a piece of commentary on the cheapening trends in art and music that aim to appeal to the masses. Adorno’s culture industry exists as a system that ensures the longevity of capitalism by rendering works of art and music as aesthetically pleasing and agreeable. The pervasive popular music “[complements] the reduction of people to silence,” which creates a culture that aims to remove speech as a mode of expression, as it targets those “molded by anxiety, work, and undemanding docility.” Adorno rejected the notion that humans had a natural preference for light music and listened to “higher” music for social prestige, as he believed it to be an “illusion...based on [the] passivity of the masses which makes the consumption of light music contradict the objective interest” of the consumer. 

Adorno referred to this cultural push against “meaningful juxtaposition of extremes” as new music chose to incorporate the traditional musical idioms in order to appeal to wider audiences. The culture industry successfully manipulated the masses, as it identified popular culture as the best means to incite docility and blind contentedness in populations. It targeted consumers and imparted the notion of avoiding effort in leisure hours, which, according to Adorno, be spent consuming higher forms of culture. The culture industry spread through consumers by providing them with a constant barrage of advertising, services, and easily consumable products through the media.

Adorno discusses a potential source of hope in the otherwise bleak reality of popular culture: radical music. In his Philosophy of New Music, Adorno describes the genre as, 

“the untransfigured suffering of man[…]It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks[...]Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.” 

Radical music was developed to be a blatant antithesis and rejection of the culture industry, utilizing methods such as atonality to subvert the convention and notions of what was more marketable and pleasant to listen to. 

However, Adorno admits that radical music is not immune to the appropriation and assimilation encouraged by the culture industry. As long as artists continue to create and actually produce work that remains esoteric, they inevitably build their own “internal structure [like the one] they oppose and enter into opposition with their own intentions.” He posits that there is a duality between radical music and mass-consumed music, as the two seem to operate as two halves of a whole entity that do not add up. Adorno states that artists of his time had fewer liberties than in eras beforehand. And even as artists try to incorporate a wider range of materials and techniques into their art in hopes of realizing enlightenment, they end up watering down and cheapening the weak syncretisms that they produce.

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Wolfgang Iser’s Theories on Interpretation

Iser, another twentieth century German philosopher, focused his attention on literary theory. He developed his notion of reader-response, in which he posits that the “existence” of a piece of literature is derived through the interaction between the reader and the text. That is, the text does not become “whole” until there is a “dialogue” between the reader and the fixed text on the page. Iser presents the idea of a “written” and “unwritten” aspect of the composition of a text. The “unwritten” does not become active until it is engaged by the reader. The text incites specific expectations in the mind of the reader from the beginning, but the expectations are rarely met, as literature is “full of unexpected twists and turns, and frustrations of expectations.”

However, a work wherein the reader is left to bridge gaps created by unexpected directions of the fixed text is beautiful, as it gives the reader “the opportunity...to bring into play [their] own faculty for establishing connections.” Due to the subjective nature of finding meaning in text, Iser posits that literature should welcome an inexhaustible amount of realizations and interpretations within the interpretive limits set for it. Furthermore, as readers reflect on previous aspects of a text, new happenings and themes within the narrative will “assume significance [that was] not attached to them on a first reading.” This results in other parts to fade into the background, while the important aspects become clearer. 

For Iser, a work of art is more than an object, rather it is a subjective effect that needs to be explained and realized, as governed by the text. He gives the example of the constellations, which is helpful, not only to solidify an understanding of his theory, but also as a way to connect the theory to something outside of literature. Iser implores the reader to imagine two individuals looking up at the same constellation in the sky. Although they are both looking at the same collection of stars, one might see a plough, while the other sees a dipper. The star, representative of the fixed literary texts, and the lines that join them to create different images are variable, as they are dependent on the viewer and their mental states. 

Iser’s theory of interpretation can be applied to any work of art, be it literature, painting, or music. The emphasis on the individual is paramount for the argument, and contrasts Adorno’s generalizations about whole populations and the impressions that are made on them by art.

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The Life of Pablo

Kanye West’s music is self-conscious, subversive, and disruptive in a way that falls in line with Adorno’s theories, but The Life of Pablo, West’s latest full-length and large-scale piece of original art, transcends its tracklist. The artistry of Pablo is in the music (the lyrics, production, etc.), but it extends farther into media not often considered to be immediately linked to an album; rather, they are seen as accessories. For West, every aspect of the album is as relevant and important as the others. He employs visual tactics for everything from his cover art, stage design, fashion show, and music videos, as well as a variety of marketing strategies that involve impromptus events, shops, and fan-engagement, all of which has become synonymous with The Life of Pablo. His framing of the album is so radically different from what is considered standard in popular culture; it is a full affront at the form of the conventional album.  

On March 15th, 2016, in reference to the penultimate track on Pablo, titled “Wolves,” West tweeted, “Fixing Wolves 2day... Worked on it for 3 weeks. Life Of Pablo is a living breathing changing creative expression. #contemporaryart.” Although many considered this to be nothing more than another one of West’s infamous ego-driven online updates, it, whether or not he intended it to be, perfectly captures the ethos of The Life of Pablo.  The album serves as a paragon of beautiful and experience-driven mass-consumed music in a culture that generally tends to reward artists who adhere to the form of “what sells.” The Frankfurt School’s notion of true modern art breaks aesthetic conventions and values and rejects fabricated, widely-palatable cultural practices. Pablo’s rollout has been described as disastrous by many critics, citing all the unpredictability and volatility of West’s internet presence, if not evidence of Kanye’s deteriorating common sense, but it also represents the beginning of the death of the conventional album framework.

Kanye’s decision to alter a track on The Life of Pablo a month after it was released is abnormal, to say the least, but it emphasizes the ephemeral nature of the album. However, this update (not the first, nor the last one on the album since its release, though) to a song comes after months of teases, mystery, name changes, and mixed information regarding the release of Pablo, all from Kanye West. In March of 2015, West announced that he was working on his next album, So Help Me God. Two months later, he tweeted about the album again, this time announcing that the name had changed to SWISH, after which he let his followers know that they should expect future changes to the album name. Between May and January of 2016, a few tracks were leaked and teased at different events. In early January, West shared a release date of February 11, as well as a schedule to release new music, available for free, every friday until then. On January 26, he announced that he would host a “listening party” for the premiere of the album and the newest season of his fashion line in Madison Square Garden on the 11th, which would be livestreamed at movie theaters all around the world. That evening, he went back on twitter to alert his followers that the album name was changing again, now to WAVES. Throughout the weeks before its release, West was frequently changing and updating Pablo’s tracklist with pictures of an ever-changing legal pad, on which scribbles, signatures of collaborators and other celebrities, and cryptic track titles gave hints about what to expect. Two days before its release, Kanye announced the final album title’s initials, T.L.O.P. He promised a pair of his brand’s designer shoes and tickets to the Madison Square Garden premiere to the first person to guess the album title. The night before the premiere, Kanye finally reveals the title of the album: The Life of Pablo.

The internet blew up with theories of the title. Iser’s assertion regarding the breadth of possible interpretations proceeding a work of art proved to be accurate as millions of people derived their own meaning from the album. The most popular ideas conflicted with one another and fans were divided all over. Many thought the namesake of the album was the artist, Pablo Picasso, while others linked the title to the infamous drug smuggler, Pablo Escobar. Soon after the release of the (first issue) of the album, Kanye West finally broke his silence over his intent behind the title of the album and the meaning he wished to impart. When asked, he replied, 

“Which Pablo? Pablo Picasso, Pablo Escobar of course, Apostle Paul. [Paul] inspired and was the strongest influencer of Christianity. Pablo Escobar was the biggest mover of product, and Pablo Picasso was the biggest mover of art. And that mix between message, art, and product is The Life of Pablo.” 

As a self-proclaimed student of the three Pablo’s, Kanye West exists in a seemingly contradictory intersection, yet he continues to exemplify all three extremes.

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