The unstable geography of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo continues to shiver and sway. Since it erupted suddenly into the world, TLOP has endured lyrical tremors (see ‘Famous') and now some more serious tectonic movement on the track ‘Wolves’. With Frank Ocean evicted entirely from the track, it’s been reapolstered like a haunted church, with Sia and Vic Mensa’s harrowed voices swimming against some bare beats. It’s great. And Frank has been resettled into his very own song—an exciting prospect for a lot of us, even if it is only 38 seconds long...

And it seems that Yeezy is intent on continuing to use Tidal like a kind of High Definition Etch-a-Sketch, so we’re left wondering: What exactly is it that makes someone need to change something after its release date? It's not crippling perfectionism—which would have, Frank Ocean style, prevented him from releasing anything in the first place. If we take him at his word (or his Tweet) it's because TLOP is a “living breathing changing creative expression”, a fresh, glistening hunk of “#contemporaryart.”

Changing Room

But the “living, breathing and changing” that ‘Ye talks about is far from contemporary—this kind of artistic modulation has been a part of art and architecture since Altamiran cave paintings and Indonesian pumice stone temples. The modern artistic exemplar of intentionally changing artwork is Environmental Art—art brindled together from found materials, art that is elemental and is often sculpted by natural phenomena, a natural material, intentionally vulnerable to wind and water. Basically the opposite of whatever the fuck is on top of Donald Trump’s skull.

The Moment

But of course art doesn’t always undergo constant change because it’s meant to. Sometimes it’s just really hard you guys. Leonardo da Vinci began the Mona Lisa in 1504 and kept refining it in spells until around 1517—figures that he was the one to proclaim that “art is never finished, only abandoned.” But not for lack of trying, apparently. 

“Thus blew the Shepard’s horn today!” Exclaimed Brahms in a letter when he finally figured out the structure of his first symphony. I can understand his elation. He’d been writing/destroying it for fourteen years at that point and it would be another 8 until its premiere. Brahms seemed to be more like the Frank Ocean of the classical world, whose self-critique led him to destroy a lot of his early works. The College Dropout only took Yeezy four years to record, a long time by his recent standards but still…come on Brahms.

For God’s Sake

“I am a God” Kanye proclaimed on 2013’s ‘Yeezus’—continuing, in his own questionable way, the long tradition of entanglement between art and religious ideas. It’s an inextricability that has endured for tens of thousands of years—from Neolithic temples to Medieval tapestries and onwards past Caravaggio and towards true theologic masterminds like Lenny Kravitz and Creed. And ideas of ongoing and evolving work have similarly close relationships with God.

And this is certainly still ongoing. Catalonian architect Antonio Gaudi’s wildly ambitious Sagrada Familia church began construction 134 years ago and is now around 70% complete. Tragically a tram met with Gaudi at high speed when it was only around the 20% mark. When asked about the lengthy/arduous construction process Gaudi apparently replied (while, I imagine, blowing cigar smoke into the interrogator’s rumpled face) “my client is not in a hurry.”

84-year old Cecilia Giménez probably didn’t take to Twitter Kanye-style and say “ima fix Ecce Homo” before she turned a weathered Spanish fresco of Jesus into a yawning simian. In fact no one thought it was her. Most people, until she admitted to it, thought the circa-1930’s fresco had been vandalised. Giménez’s restoration—diplomatically referred to by Forbes as “uncompromised by schooling”—provoked a viral phenomenon that Yeezy would even find hard to match.

Maybe Kanye's latest opus was intended to change, or maybe it's a nagging Brahmsesque obsession that moves his hand toward the edit menu. Either way, 'Ye's audience seems more than happy just to watch it unfold around them.


-Paul Cumming

Simile is a new weekly series by Cool Accidents fave/regular Paul Cumming aka Wax Volcanic that unravels current moments in music and follows the threads to some strange and strangely familiar places.