Switched on Pop - Pablo And The Wolves

Episode Date: April 22, 2016

The Life Of Pablo is Kanye West’s latest album. Despite its lack of hits, it has been at the fulcrum of pop music for months. With its gradual online release and its changing track lists, this shapeshifting album is difficult to grasp. We recruit Andrew Marantz from The New Yorker Magazine to break down Pablo and the “Wolves,” a song that embodies the multiplicities of West’s larger project and connects his work to the classical past of Bach and Prokofiev. Featuring: - Kanye West: Wolves - Jay Z: Where's Th e Love - Kanye West: All Falls Down - Kanye West: Gold Digger - Kanye West: Heartless - Kanye West: All Of The Lights - Kanye West: Black Skinhead - Gary Glitter: Rock N Roll Part 2 (Hey!) - Kanye West: I Love Kanye - Bach: Canon Perpetuus - Prokofiev: Peter And The Wolf (narrated by David Bowie) - Paul McCartney: Driving Rain - Drake: Jumpman (featuring Future) - Missy Elliot: Work It - R. Kelly: The Zoo - Justin Timberlake: Give Me What I Don't Know - DJ Snake: Birdsong - Pink Floyd: Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And we're really lucky to be joined again by Andrew Morantz from the New Yorker who's going to help us deconstruct Kanye West's The Life of Pablo. Hey, hey, what's up, guys? Andrew.

So good to have you back, ma'am. Yeah. So, Andrew, last time I saw you, you were egging me on to tackle this beast of an album, Kanye's new Life of Pop. I was. I was egging you on pretty hard. And in fact, if I remember correctly, the analogy I made was Kanye is the Beatles of our moment. Bold choice of words. What I meant by that is, Kanye is the thing in pop music right now that it would be irresponsible to ignore. Kanye is the musician who is in the popular realm right now who you are not cultured if you're not paying attention to what he's doing. Okay. So basically you're accusing us of not doing our job. if we pass over this essential album. Yeah. There are certain people who are big, big stars

who are sort of unmissable, who are important in their own way, but you can kind of miss an album here and there and be okay. Like Rihanna dropped an album recently. You can ignore the Rihanna album and still get what Rihanna is all about, get what you represents in the culture

and appreciate her as a singer, as a star, whatever. When Kanye drops an album, that's a moment. You've got to stop what you're doing and listen to that album. I find that very persuasive. I have to say, Andrew, I feel like you've just given us this totally Sisyphian task, right? Kanye's body of work is probably only outmatched by the size of his personality, right?

And the criticism of him ranges from Kanye, the genius producer on one end, and Kanye, the misogynist media agitator on the other, who's been known for speaking out off-kew about issues ranging from George Bush's presidency to Taylor Swift at the VMAs, and more recently about Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Kuh. Cosby. Totally. And that duality you describe is maybe more explicit on this record, Life of Pablo, than maybe any other Kanye album. You read the reviews of this album and they run the gamut from the negative like dead end hip hop calling it nothing short of confusing to the laudatory where the New York Times is so bold as to claim that maybe the unfinished nature of this album is the new finished.

And even though we usually try to ignore the personalities and the media hype behind a song or an album, I feel like we have to make an exception here for the enormity of the personality that we're dealing with and look a little bit into his history. Yeah, I think that's a good call. So why don't we proceed like this? First, let's get sort of a crash course on this history of Kanye as a producer, as a media persona, Andrew, our esteemed expert, maybe you can help us out with that. And then with that context, let's focus in on a single track from Life of Pablo that might express some of these

themes. And I think it's got to be wolves because the duality of Kanye's personality is all over this one. Okay, first things first, Andrew, this is where we need you. You are unbelievably knowledgeable about Kanye's entire history. Can you give us and our listeners just like the three-minute Kanye 101? Yeah. Well, so Kanye was originally known as a producer, right? And when we say producer in hip-hop and like pop music more generally these days, the producer makes the music. So when Kanye started out his career as like Jay-Z's favorite producer, that meant that he was the guy who made the songs that Jay-Z fans knew as hit. Then as he got more and more well-known as a producer,

he started rapping over his own beats. Those became his solo albums. The first three had a college theme. She's so self-conscious. She has no idea what she doing in college. That major that she majored and don't make no money, but she won't drop out of parents. I'm telling you.

He did his first few albums that were just sonic gold, like dripping with Soul Sam. and like really like that drums and just like he was like you know you want to like danceable hip-hop smash I can do that and then from there once he proved he could do that he departed in all kinds of interesting directions so then came 808's in heartbreak which was a very divisive album it's like a really sort of minimalist cold machine sounding Then my beautiful dark twisted fantasy, which is just an insanely ambitious, amazing album with some just really bizarre beautiful stuff on it.

And then Jesus, which, you know, a lot of people really couldn't handle. It was like his metal machine music. You know, he sort of alienated some people with that. But I think by that point, he just trusted that like, look, people know, people know. People know that I know how to make music. They'll either like it or they won't, but they'll at least know that I didn't just mess up. Like, this is what I meant to do. So that brings us to now.

Yeah. So now we're at The Life of Pablo, which is his most recent album that we kind of got to watch him make. And it was kind of like, I guess, a response to what the album means. Life of Pablo is much more of like a living in public kind of like live streaming of the album process. It's very, he was like very transparent. time of who he was working with. He was like constantly tweeting about where his head was at when he was making it. Who was in the studio with him while he was making it. He was very transparent about the whole process. He tweeted the album's going to be called so help me God. And then he changed

his mind to swish and then he changed his mind to waves. And then the whole time he's making the album, you're kind of like in on the process. And then by the time he puts out the album, he's not really putting out the album because he's just using it as the background to his fashion show. And he's streaming it off his laptop in the middle of Madison Square Garden. And then after that, he, like, changes the track order and remasters a bunch of stuff and then includes a bunch of songs that he wasn't going to include. And then there's, like, a title version of the album and a Spotify version. And, you know, I'm sure it'll keep changing.

I mean, it's kind of like, it mimics the form of the way music exists on the internet, much more than old albums that were just an object that you can buy in a store that never changes. Beautiful. Andrew, thank you for that clinic in Kanyeology. That was very informative. Anytime. Cool.

And, Andrew, why don't you stick around with us? And you're welcome to jump in. And if you have anything you'd like to add, please do. We'll check in with you at the end as well to see how we did in our analysis. How about that? Cool. I'm here. Okay.

So Charlie and I have done our homework. We are up to speed. We've listened to this song a thousand times read the think pieces. and I think we are as ready as we can be. Charlie, you ready? Yes, I am ready, and I think we can now use our approach and look specifically at his music.

I'm really excited to listen to Wolves and see what it has to say about Kanye's larger project. And for those paying attention, we're listening to the version of Wolves that has just been released on Spotify in April. Let's check it out. Wunderbar. Nate, what do you hear?

The first thing you hear about this piece, which actually makes a lot more sense to me now with this idea of sort of the fragmented personality in mind, is that this track is made up of different musical elements that fit together and interlock in constantly changing permutations. What? Well, there's a word for this that might be a little, a little more facile in the classical tradition, you'd simply call this counterpoint.

Yes, of course. We studied 16th century counterpoint together in college. Basically, it's where lots of different melodies are all playing independently on top of each other. So let's listen to those different elements of wolves. So the first thing you got here going on is the very first thing you hear is this baseline, right? Right. And it sounds like this. Baseline. Yeah.

Meaty, dirty, down. low, incidentally, the same baseline as Gary Glitters Hay. Really? Yeah, I don't know what that means, but I couldn't get that out of my head when I was listening to it. Maybe it sounds a little bit different when you add the next voice in. Let's hear it. All right. So to differentiate from Gary Glitters, hey, here is the top voice encounter point with the bass.

Yeah, that is such a striking melody. that just gets burned into your brain by the end of this song. It's the main hook. And then what's the final element, Chuck? So the final element would be Kanye's voice. And yeah, so with these three, I guess, all three on top of each other, you would say that they are in counterpoint. Precisely.

And what is that? Let's hear what that sounds like. Get the full stack of these three melodies. So basically throughout the whole song, the bass, this howling wolf synthesizer high part in the middle vocal. are constantly interplaying with each other. I guess this is an interesting compositional style, but could you say more like, what does this mean?

Why is he doing this? How does it connect with the theme of the wolf? Word. Okay. So first of all, let's back up for a second because to me, Counterpoint and the way that Kanye is using this track is just one of the most incredible things about music. It's something that no other art can do. because when you're listening to Counterpoint,

you are listening to three separate things simultaneously and hearing them individually and together at the same time. Does that blow your mind a little bit? Yes. Think of it this way. I'm not convinced by your response, but maybe if I phrase it like this, I will be. When you listen to three people talking at the same time,

say three different Kanye's all talking at you simultaneously, can you hear what they are all saying at the same time? I miss the old Kanye. I miss the sweet from the dog tea. I invented a soul Kanye. It was a set on a tone. I look around and there's so many Kanye's. No, absolutely not.

You can't understand it. It is just a mess of noise. But if we play three musical melodies at the same time, to make sense of that mass of sound, you are able to hear all three of those melodies as individual separate melodies and hear how they're interacting with each other in real time simultaneously.

Now is your mind blown. I think that's pretty cool. What do you think, Andrew? Yeah, it points out what makes music a different language than spoken language. It's like it can meld in your brain in a way that words can't do. Thank you, gentlemen.

And this phenomenon is something that composers have been exploiting since the Middle Ages. You can't come up with a better example than my man, Johann Sebastian Bach, the undisputed king of counterpoint. I guess that takes us into a little segment we call classical masters. Indeed, it does. Yeah, so hit us up with this Bach. So I'd like to propose that what Kanye West is doing in Wolves, is actually not dissimilar from what Bach would do on a hot track like the canon, perpetuous super temer regium from his musical offering.

Sounds fancy. This is a whole set of counterpoints that Bach wrote all on the same theme, a single melody that was given to him by the great King Frederick, who you may not know, also a very accomplished loop player. I didn't know that. But that's not entirely relevant. What is relevant is how Bach is able to layer

three completely separate, intricate melodies on top of one another and have them all make sense. So here is our first melody. This is the melody given to Bach by King Frederick. And he was essentially challenging Bach. He was like, all right, counterpoint this, yo. Bach immediately comes back with this line on top of it.

Okay, so now you'll hear the original line and the line that Bach adds. That's that violin part on top. So he's come up with this contrapuntal line that stands on its own and fits perfectly with the original. And now he'll add a third. Got that cello. A third line, also standing independently on its own in its like, you know, complexity. and then constantly working in perfect vertical harmony with the other two lines. And so I think the joy of listening to something like this is kind of the wonder at being

able to hear all of these lines separately and hearing how they interlocked together. If we go back to Wolves, Kanye is doing the same thing, and I think he's choosing to do so in this track probably because of what we were saying earlier, that this is a little bit of. a way to capture multiple points of view and yet have them all make sense as a kind of coherent hole at the same time. I want to double down on your classical masters and go a little bit further forward in history but still stay in the classical realm because I think that there's another interesting reference though.

Unprecedented. So this piece reminds me of the very first music lesson that I ever took. It was like first grade, and we were studying Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. This recording is actually from my favorite version, which is narrated by David Bowie. Whoa. This is the story of Peter and the Wolf. Each character in this tale is going to be represented by a different instrument of the orchestra. Right.

So you might remember Peter's theme. It's played on the strings. I love Peter and the Wolf. I'm stoked for your breakdown. But no love for my Bach breakdown? Well, I was sorry, I was in a fugue state. Oh. That was a great music show.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. I'll take it. And then, of course, you have the wolf. He is represented by the French horns. He sounds like this. So Prophiev isn't just using this wolf melody because it sounds cool and it's a nice children's story.

Peter and the Wolf is actually an allegory for Russia fighting off foreign powers. And I think we can look at Kanye's track Wolves in much the same way. He's using the wolf as a metaphor. Yeah, take us there. When you ask, like, what is the wolf representing in this song? I think it's really easy to say, the wolves are a metaphor for the media and all the people who bother Kanye and his family. He says at the very end of the song that he's surrounded by these wolves. But I think that that's too easy of an interpretation.

Because if we look at this contrapuntal structure, these multiple melodies coming in and out, they're shapeshifting. I think just like Kanye West is shapeshifting, just as this album is a shapeshifting album always changing. And so I think there's actually two other ways that we could look at this metaphor of the wolf. I think in Western culture it takes on two different forms.

One is the wolf as the greek, greater evil or inner demon and the other as the warrior and the lone wolf. Right. Okay. So maybe Kanye in that case, you could interpret him as talking to himself when he says, you turned out too wild. That's exactly right. I think referencing the erratic agitator Kanye who speaks out too much and has turned out.

too wild, as he says. I'll give that interpretation from support in the song Black Skinhead. He says, I'm aware I'm a wolf, which is like a little werewolf pun, but it's definitely tying himself to that image. Perfect. All right. Thank you for the triangulation thing. And I think that's the thing that always makes Kanye so challenging is how much he is or is not

aware of the other darker sides of his personality, Kanye, the misogynist. Kanye, the person who confronts nasty stuff in the media and has caused many stirs. Kanye, the sometimes erratic lyricist. And I think in this song, we hear it, I know that, Andrew, you pointed me to your favorite or maybe least favorite lyric from this album. Oh, yeah. There are so many lines that fall flat on this album. What was the one on this one?

So this one is, you tried to play nice. Everybody just took advantage. You left your fridge open. somebody just took a sandwich. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, come on, dude. You don't need, it's like, it's like taking that William Carlos William's poem and just ruining it.

You don't need to throw sandwich in there. I just feel like, you know, this continues my Beatles analogy, right? It's like, how many lines of Paul's lyrics have you just like rolled your eyes at and been like, All right. I'll forgive you. It can be true, though. I know that Nate is a strong Paul defender, so watch out. Me too, but that's just part of it.

I mean, you know, that's just part of the package. I actually know the exact number. It's 57%. I have a spreadsheet. Yeah, someone's got to keep track. Let's go back to the metaphor of the wolf. And here he could be referencing the sort of biblical idea of the wolf. In Matthew 715, it says,

watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. So I think here we are getting Kanye as the wolf. Kanye as his inner demons. Right. Okay. So then going to the other side,

because this is a nice bridge, because there is a lot of overt religious imagery on this track and on this album in general. And that leads to maybe another interpretation of the wolf in this song. Give it to me. Why don't you give it to me, Charlie? Okay. It looks like someone did more of their homework than the other.

I'm more used to giving homework than getting work at this point. The other way that I see this song is the wolf representing the warrior. In the Norse tradition, the wolf is the warrior or Odin. We also in the Western world talk about the lone wolf, one who has taken their own. own path. And I think we all know Kanye as the self-aggrandizing and truly genius producer. And I think that that persona of Kanye is represented equally as well on this song. If in the beginning in that first verse, when we first hear those wolf howls and we hear the darker side of Kanye, I think that they take on another meaning in the following verses. The first is actually when we hear,

the bridge come in. And we get some other mythological language here. Vic Mensa, who's singing the bridge, sings the Icarus story. Don't fly too high, your wings might melt. Alluding to Kanye's assent as well as the perpetual ascent and descent that he goes through.

At the same time, the baseline takes a change. That first voice that we heard in Counterpoint starts to ascend up, giving us a hint that there's actually transformation happening. And what's neat is that that baseline comes in, and later on, Connie starts the third verse, which is actually a verse, using that bridge baseline, but with the original wolf melody that we heard at the beginning. You got to let me know if I could be your Joseph,

only tell you real. And for me, this is sort of saying that we can hear that wolf melody in a new context, in an ascending context rather than the original descending bass line. And as he sings about this in this new space, he eventually modulates the whole song up a fourth, taking all the chords higher. This is where he makes the metaphor that he's made over and over and over again, evoking that he is a god, Kanye as Yeez-Zeezy. he begins to talk about himself as Joseph, his wife Mary, and his children the Savior's,

needing protection from the wolves. So as Mary was in the club, but she met Joseph with no love, cover saint, and lamb's wolf. We surrounded by the fucking wolves. So as I hear it, we've gone from original melody with the descending baseline as dark Kanye, as his inner demons, and as the song evolved. the ascending baseline, transforming the sense of the melody, and bringing in a sense of Godlike Kanye,

the Jesus Kanye. Whoa, Charlie, I love that. You just ascended to another state yourself. You just went, uh, Jesus on us. Um, I don't question the ridiculousness. I do support your theory. And I, I would just reiterate that this, you know, the, the use of counterpoint in this song,

becomes even more understandable in your interpretation, because now depending on how you put these different melodies together and how they interlock against the lyrics of the song, it offers these different interpretations of the song's central metaphor of the wolf, which is very cool. So overall, the way that I'm hearing this song, that the compositional structure using counterpoint and the metaphor of the wolf is used to represent Kanye the shapeshifter, just as this album is unfinished and always breathing and always moving and changing, and the content on it is so varied and almost erratic. I think that this song captures that whole feeling in its structure.

What's your take? What do you think? Have we done it? Yeah, I mean, I'm into it. I think all those things are in play. I like your three themes, just like the three counterpoint melodies of the song. They can all sort of play off each other. Oh, okay, that's a relief. So we will take a short break, and when we come back,

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in Shopify. coms bar records. So I was hanging out with my baby cousin this last weekend and that meant

we were playing a lot of this animal says that sound game you know like the cow says moo. so on and whatnot.

So I'm familiar with the concept. Yeah. You've heard about that? You've heard about that one? It's a good game. Well, I thought we could adapt this with a little bit more of a pop conscious to it. So I've put together a list of six songs by major artists that use animal sounds somehow in their composition. And I want to see, Andrew, if you can name the artist, the song, and the animal.

You get a point for each. And they're going to be in increasing difficulty. Oh, all right. This is going to be tough. All right I think you'll be okay on the first couple ones Let's give it a try See now if I flood one of the first ones

It's like game over All right Track one This is Drake's Future Jumpman But I'm trying to figure Like is that like a Rooster in the background or a chicken or something

it's a crow but you got it in the bird family so i'll give you three points for this one all right well i'll take it but slightly more ominous than uh yeah i mean i was like how are they going to justify it chrisons a lot more sense okay we're going a little bit further back uh in the history of pop music but i think you might know this track as well Yeah, this is Missy. And it's going to be an elephant now. Well, okay, you got it.

Missy Elliott, work it. We got the elephant. Three for three. Next track. Major artist, maybe a bit of a B-side. This is the zoo by R. Kelly. I was waiting for this one. Oh, my God.

I thought that was going to be the first one right out the gate. Wow, that was like after the first base hit, he was there. After the first, oh, oh, oh, ah, ah, which animals would like to choose? Well, that was an orangutan, I guess, or like a monkey. Some kind of monkey. You can kind of pick pretty much any animal. R. Kelly can find a way to sexify it. Yes.

All right, three for three. We're going to keep on going. And this one might be a little bit more obscure, but I think you might at least know the artist here. Oh, yeah. I do not know what that is. I heard some dog sounds. Yeah, well, I do not. That does not ring a bell.

I also have no idea what this is. Oh, I'm so glad I have found one to stump you. This is Justin Timberlakes. Give me what I don't know. And for animals, monkey, lion, birds, or elephant would have all surprised. Wow. Wait, what else is that? that is off of 2020.

Wow. Okay, yeah, I did not make it to the end of that album. Apparently not. Deep cut. All right. One play, Harding. And we're going to go into the DJ world. This is a big name, maybe not a big song. Okay. So, let me know if you want to phone a friend or get a little help. Well, I mean, this is really pointing out to me how much these guys sound alike. because like that could plausibly be a lot of people this DJ has an animal in their name

yes oh DJ Snake because it sounds like that thing the the Turn Down for what guy that's the same guy right exactly okay and I'll give you another hint the name of the song also the name of the animal okay so it's DJ Snake but it's also the name of a famous Grateful Dead song. So yeah, so it's got to be Dark Star. No, it's

its name, it's birds song. Bird song, okay. Yeah, I could see that. I assume you heard the birds on it, so. I heard the birds, but I was trying to be, I was trying to be more specific this. But yeah, no, I like that. I think that has a nice, you know, I could see them playing that like in the, at the Bronx Zoo or something.

Oh, like, you wanted to know whether it was a Panamanian Swallow. Rinked, yeah. Great. So we'll give you two points for DJ Snake's Bird song. I've, uh, this one might be trickier. So for our final song, this is one of my absolute favorite songs with animals on it. I'll give you just a little taste of it. That's all you get.

Is it like from some like Pink Floyd like, you know, movie in a album like the wall or something? Yes, I can not believe it. You got the artist. Can you name the song? I don't know. I am having all kinds of wizard of odds associations in my brain, but I have no idea what this corresponds to. The song is called several species of small furry animals

gathered together in a cave and grooving with a picked. Yeah. See, and this is why people think Pink Floyd is pretentious. Exactly. So, any guess of animals? A, you know, a bird? That was a bird, right? I'm sorry, I cannot give you any points.

for a bird. In fact, all of the sounds were made by human voices using tape echoes and delays and reverbs to make it sound like animals. Dude. Sorry to stump you there. My mind is blown. So let's see. Let's see. Can I do addition? You were awarding points way too generous. I tallied it up and I'm happy to announce that Andrew won. He won. Yes. Yes.

Wonderful. Well, it was a lot of fun playing, name that animal with you. And so much fun discussing the life of Pablo. Thank you, Andrew, for joining us on Switch on Pop. Thank you, guys. This is great. Wonderful. Thanks to everyone out there on Twitter who helped us put this episode together. There'll be a Spotify playlist of music with animal sounds in it awaiting you on our website.

What's our website, Nate? That would be www. switched-onpop.com. You can also reach us on Twitter at Switched On Pop, and we would love it if you would leave us a review on iTunes. This piece was produced by the two of us, Nate and Charlie, our design. It's done by Luke Harris,

and we got additional support from Susan, Pergo, and Mike. We'll be back in two weeks, and until then, thanks for listening. Cheers.