He's content to just stand among them, both those of his own creation and their various devotees.
"See, I invented Kanye, it wasn't any Kanyes, and now I look and look around and there's so many Kanyes," he raps wryly on "I Love Kanye." The message seems clear: He's through creating new Kanyes, at least for now. He's changed the genre's DNA with every album, to the point where each has inspired a generation of direct offspring, and now everywhere he looks, he sees mirrors. It's probably his first full-length that won't activate a new sleeper cell of 17-year-old would-be rappers and artists. The Life of Pablo is, accordingly, the first Kanye West album that's just an album: No major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. In this formulation, Kim Kardashian is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso's final muse and the woman to whom he remained faithful (she even kinda looks like a Kardashian), and the record is the sound of a celebrated megalomaniac settling for his place in history. If Kanye is comparable to Picasso, The Life of Pablo is the moment, after a turbulent life leaving many artistic revolutions and mistreated women in his wake, that the artist finally settles down. The Life of Pablo's namesake is a provocation, a mystery, a sly acknowledgement of multitudes: Drug lord Pablo Escobar is a permanent fixture of rap culture, but the mystery of " which one?" set Twitter theorists down fascinating rabbit holes, drawing up convincing stand-ins for Kanye's Blue Period ( 808s & Heartbreak), his Rose Period ( My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), and his Crystal Period ( Yeezus).
Pablo Picasso and Kanye West share many qualities-impatience with formal schooling, insatiable and complicated sexual appetites, a vampiric fascination with beautiful women as muses-but Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
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