Shortly after the messiest, most drawn-out, most brilliant album release in human history finally came to a close, Kanye West tweeted that it wasn’t over.
Ima fix wolves
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 14, 2016
Yesterday, after leaving us with an inferior version of “Wolves” for more than a month, Kanye finally came through on his promise.
Fixing Wolves 2day… Worked on it for 3 weeks. Life Of Pablo is a living breathing changing creative expression. #contemporaryart
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) March 15, 2016
Vic Mensa and Sia are back on the track—they were featured on the original single before being conspicuously absent from the version Kanye presented at Yeezy Season 3—and Frank Ocean’s outro is now a separate song entitled “Frank’s Track.” “Wolves” 2.0 also features some harsh drill sounds and runs almost a minute longer than its previous evolution. Is it better? That’s a subjective matter. We might have to bring our Ryan Reed back to evaluate.
But Kanye’s description of The Life Of Pablo as “living breathing changing creative expression” is actually pretty revolutionary. By refusing to release a physical version, not only has he pissed off anyone who likes LPs/doesn’t like Tidal…he’s challenged our very notion of the “album” as a static snapshot of an artist’s mind during a given period of time.