Pretty much everyone agreed that the rollout of Kanye West’s last album, the controversial The Life of Pablo, was a disaster. West just couldn’t seem to make up his mind about what he wanted people to hear.
West initially released the album via the oft-maligned Tidal streaming service and then proceeded to change and alter the album. Tracks were reworked and remastered on the fly and for a while there Pablo was this shapeshifting organic product.
But what was on the surface the latest West meltdown actually raised a lot of questions about the status of the artist album in 2016 and about artistry in general. After all, what would we say if a painter kept adding brushstrokes as his work hung in a gallery?
What’s perhaps most fascinating is that West was actually doing what many famous musicians have wanted to do for ages, including our very own Kevin Parker, who had conflicted feelings about what West was doing with The Life of Pablo.
“I hate that he’s changing stuff. I also feel his pain,” the Tame Impala chief recently told Nerdist. In fact, at one point Parker begged and pleaded with radio stations to play a different version of one of Tame Impala’s most famous songs.
“I also would definitely have done the same thing if I had the power, and I’m pretty sure every artist who is that meticulous about their output would absolutely kill themselves to be able to change the music once it’s out,” Parker explained.
“When ‘[Feels Like We Only Go] Backwards’ came out as a single, I argued until I was blue in the face with the radio stations, trying to get them to play a new mix I had done.”
“I was like, ‘I’ve done this new mix, it’s gonna sound better on radio. The album version sounds shit on radio, I got a better one.'” Things didn’t change this time around on Tame Impala’s latest album, the universally acclaimed Currents.
“I did the same thing on this album, and it sounded better. I tried to get them to play the new one, but they just said, ‘Dude, let it go.’ That’s another side of me, the ‘Dude, just let it go,'” Parker continued.
“People are going to hear the song, they’re not going to question how it could have been different. They’re just going to enjoy it. Kanye is doing what everyone wants to do. He just can because he’s Kanye.”
“On one side, I’m like, ‘Kanye, stop. It’s perfect. You don’t need to change it.’ I guess that is a sign that the whole roll-out release thing is a completely different beast these days, because you can just go back and alter the file that everyone is continually sourcing from, which is cool.”
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“I’m down for all that kind of stuff. I’ve never been one to dig in my heels and argue that the way it was ten or twenty years ago is better,” Parker added. “If people love music, they love music. There are still people that listen to Tame Impala from start to finish.”
“They still respect the medium that is an album. And if people don’t, that’s just the way it goes. If pop stars just release songs one after the other, that’s arguably a way that people could experience songs more in depth than an album.”
“I’m not saying this is my argument, but you could argue that if you throw an album at someone, it’s overwhelming, whereas if you give them one song every few weeks when it’s finished, they’ll digest each one individually.”
