The Watch - Ep. 19: 'The Watch' Re-up

Episode Date: February 13, 2016

The guys talk about Kanye West and the Madison Square Garden reveal of 'The Life of Pablo.' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch on the Channel 33 podcast feed. My name is Chris Ryan, and I am joined in my office. He just found out he got taken off the final version of Wolves. It's Andy Greenwald! Tough day for me. Great day for America.

Andy, it is Thursday night at 6 o'clock in Los Angeles. Yep. And we are living in a post-life of Pablo world. This is the life of Padlo. Oh, that's what? Good. You just think of that. This is the watch re-up where you can find us on the Channel 33 podcast feed on SoundCloud Stitcher and iTunes.

And today we are going to be doing a short podcast about Kanye West's new album, The Life of Pablo. Although, calling it an album is kind of a misnomer. It's an event. We're not quite sure what it was that happened today, but I think we loved it. Yeah, let's break it down. Best way of organizing principle here. Let's do winners and losers. Should we, can I just set the mood for a second?

Sure, set the mood. So 4 p.m. East Coast time, 1 p.m. West Coast time. doors open at Madison Square Garden all the luminaries you'd expect at a record release party like 40 models who were told not to move including Veronica Webb and Naomi Campbell because they're pieces of art

and young thug and Lamar Odom and was Swaggy there was Nick Young there those guys were on the side yeah Lamar and Swaggy were not participating in the actual fashion show and as far as we know and then Kanye played his record for a couple thousand what 30 40,000 of his closest

Easy Season 3, Madison Square Garden, and then he walked out. He's wearing a red long-sleeves t-shirt and a red baseball cap, and he was just kind of like, here's my new album, feel free to dance to it. And hit play and unleash the flutes on everybody. So we want to do winners and losers from today because it was kind of like, sort of like an amazingly chaotic, game-changing, and also just wonderfully stupid day. Every word you just used, I think, is an adjective that we've used to describe Kanye's build-up to this album

over the last three weeks. It was anarchic. It was kind of beautiful. It was utterly perplexing, and it was a lot of fun. Yeah, and the weird thing was, is that watching him, he seemed like he was in control of the whole thing. I was worried that there was going to be, like, the lights didn't work. No. Well, he's a crazy person in the best possible way,

and he did at the very end. I thought this was big of him. He thanked people for literally staying up for the last 95 hours working on this. Vanessa Bicroft, who is the artist who has become his collaborator on these events, you have to think that she was asked to do this 10 days ago. There's no, like the window of when she was told this was happening and then doing it,

it's no greater than 10 days. Right. So the fact that they pulled it off. But if she did, it's like the concept bind, it must have changed a couple of times, as has the album. That's what I'm saying. And then even at the end of his talk, he was just like, thanks to Paris, because I flew there two weeks ago to, like, purchase the leather from the boots. Like, he's not, he's been busy. Yeah.

He's been busy. He's been burning the midnight oil. And yet, and then we'll get into the winners and losers. But the thing that was the best takeaway about this is that he kind of does know what he's doing. And when you put a microphone in front of him, you know, it's been a dangerous situation in the past. There are a couple, caught a couple L's with a hot mic. Or with a hot keyboard. But, yes, but.

Yeah, exactly. But he is a funny guy. And he has a sense of humor, and he knows what he's doing. And so when he says, it's often easier when he makes tweet, like, pronouncements live into a microphone because you can kind of gauge, is he 80% series? Right. 20% series. You can tell.

So I thought the vibe was surprisingly posy, as is the album. So the first one I want to address here then going off of this is the first loser of the night. Oh, you're going to begin with loser. All right. I think I'm going to go first loser of the night. And I think that it was the concept of the album release. Okay.

Which we've actually been talking about in the last few weeks with Rihanna, with Beyonce, and now with Kanye, is the fluidity of the term, album release. What are we really talking about? I don't know. I mean, Beyonce doesn't have an album to put out yet, but she is sort of internalizing the means of production and distribution. It's like she controls all that. Okay, Carl Marks. Yeah, and Rihanna had a few hiccups, possibly where, you know, Doug from Title, we'll get to him later. May have hit the wrong button when he meant to hit option, hit alt, and he just kind of went out. He'd George Bush the button, man. Yeah, but Kanye seems to be, I think it's like you're saying, it's anarchic, and there's

something, this was supposed to be, I think, by all, everybody thought, okay, this show's going to be over, and I will have a Kanye West album ready to download from the stream service of his choice or my choice. Yeah. And it is 615, 630 or whatever. There's not a commercially available Life of Pablo yet. No, and in fact, the record that we're going to be talking about may not end up being the record.

We're really not sure about that. Because not only did songs that we fully expected to be on it not make the cut, the song Wolves, and we'll come back to some of the specifics about it, but Wolves was performed on the Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary event last year with Vic Mensa and Sia, neither of whom made the final version of the record. So, you know, we don't really know what it is that we're talking about, but I kind of, is it wrong for me to say that I like that?

It's surprising. I wish I had the record right now to listen to. I'm not going to lie to you. But there was something about it that felt really, really, really, I said anarchic, so it's just, it was, creative chaos, which is probably the way this was made. The version we heard today is definitely the version he finished at 358 p.m. Right. And there's, to that extent, no matter how corporate it feels with Adidas being involved

and performing or like the listening session for an album taking place in Madison Square Garden, it still feels kind of DIY and weird. Yes, but let's say this, because we went from a period of time, especially with a hip-hop record, right, the hip-hop album. It really suffered for a 10-year period because the album became an exercise in which an artist would dangle potential singles and sounds to radio stations

in hopes of finding a hit. And if they found the hit, they would quickly build the album around that and they would build it with beats and tracks and collaborations that had been piled up for God knows how long. So anywhere from one week to three years. So the album itself would be a bloated beast

of a thing that really captured nothing other than the artist's desire to connect. Right. Hit certain quadrants, you know, like, yeah. The big tent theory of record making. The thing that Kanye did this with Yeezus, and he has done to an even greater degree with Life of Pablo, is this is actually a snapshot of this dude right now in February 2016. Yeah, there's like a Rob Kardashian-Balachian-Black China reference. That's only been like a public story for a couple of weeks now.

This is the album as Snapchat. Right. Like this moment might fade. the vibe that he's on might change. But I find that pretty exciting because we know that he is 1,000% committed to these songs in this order today.

Right. Now, I alluded to this a second ago, but one of my first winners for this would have to be Madison Square Garden. Yeah, good look by the old lady. This is the first time in a while that I've had a lot of New York envy. There was all these crowd shots

in the title live stream of the show, and it was just all these people in coats. And it was like, they cold, and they were inside at Madison Square Garden, and it's, like, New York, and it's 29,000 of the coolest people you could possibly know just, like, listening to this record for the first time. Not all the great famous wrestlers. They didn't all make it.

No, no. Rick Flair, I don't think Rick Flair was there. Michael Jordan didn't make it, got booed. Yeah, and it was just, like, the scene of all the dudes standing behind Kanye at this laptop at the table where it was, like, Pusha and Nick Young. Pusha looked regal. Pusha looked real happy.

Pusha has made a second career out of being next to Kanye when good shit happens. Absolutely right. time they did run away at the VMAs. Probably the most important moment of my life that wasn't getting married or having a child. But push and two chains and thug and all the guys who were like standing around Kanye. It just seemed like a really fun moment. So something that should be antiseptic or weird. That's right.

Or corporate just somehow takes on this. It was weirdly shambolic in a way that was surprising. And not surprising in the sense that he pulled this together in, you know, in seven days. But surprising considering the stakes and the money and the egos involved. And, you know, I am going back to that cold weather in 24 hours, so I can't say I felt any pangs about that. But I was impressed in Madison Square Garden, which, as you know, is one of the most antiseptic and generally unpleasant places to do much of... To see music. I think it's pretty decent for sporting events.

Well, it's good in the sense that it's hallowed. So you know what's going on. The energy and atmosphere is good. But the building itself is not a place I would go for much personality. The last time I was at MSG for a show is OASIS with Ryan Adams opening. That's pretty good. The last time I was there for show was Fleetwood Mac. Nice.

Yeah. You know, weirdly, Young Thug was on stage for that, too. But yeah, that was just a cool thing. And it was in it, as a New Yorker, it made me happy that, though Kanye is spending a lot of time up in Calabasas from Chicago, jetting to Paris. When it's time to do this. I know it's Fashion Week, but when it's time to unveil the album, that's where he goes. Channel 33 is brought to you by Lisa. Lisa is like the Tom Shoes or Warby Parker from mattresses.

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Let's talk a little bit about your boy Doug from title. Oh, my man caught another L. My man is having the work week from hell. You know what, to be fair, once it became apparent that you could watch this live stream on a lower bandwidth within the video and that it would have. actually work, I think that we were, everything worked out. But there was a lot of heat that, that Doug was catching. Yeah. Here's the thing. Like, Doug is coming off a week where he accidentally did command control, you know, whatever and drop the Rihanna album. And then you think that he's probably

like he just wants to, you know, it's that you want to get away. I mean, he wants to fly Southwest. He wants to go on vacation. He wants to take a break. Seriously. But then they come to him and he's like, oh, God, this is it. They're going to fire him. I'm not going to make it. And then they're like, we got a project coming up. And he's like, oh, my God. Like, this is. is this weird trial by fire because I just fumbled the ball on the biggest project we've had to date. So now they're going to trust me with another album. And then they're

like, wait, this is what they say to Doug. They're like, Doug, we actually like you to do a live stream that could support 20 million people in a week. And he's like, this is a music service. Yeah. I'm Doug. Didn't you look at my CV? I don't do this. I have a timeshare in Naples, Florida. I have a time share in Naples, Florida. I got a neck pillow I like to

put on at the end of a long day. Nothing, nothing makes me happier than a curl up with a DVR full of old Scorpion episodes. Except possibly JetBlue's complimentary wafers. Oh, do you think he likes those? I think he likes, you know, he likes those blue chips. Yeah. Look, Doug is a man of simple pleasures.

You know what I mean? He likes his neck pillow around his neck, and he likes Travis Scott and his earbuds. Yeah. That's Doug. Yeah. You know Doug. Everyone knows a Doug.

And for him to be just en blast like this again, that's tough, man. But you've got to feel for him. So here's my favorite thing about today is that if the loser was dug from Title, who had some buffering problems in the beginning of the day, the winner was a decidedly instant vintage piece of technology, the ox cord. Yes. There is a real ox cord now.

The ox cord is just... To be clear, you're saying A-U-X. You're not referring to, like, cattle management. So do you say A-U-X cord? No, I say ox, but I... You know what? Let's be honest. I rarely say it.

How often does that come up? Right. Because you were walking around being like big day for ox-cords, And I was like, was there an element that was sort of like Amish people? I was picturing, you know, curtailing cattle. There's something more personal about the ox cord than Bluetooth, if you ask me. Because like when you get into somebody's car and they're just like, here, you can just plug that in.

It's like that first pop, right? And then you get in and then you're on somebody else's iPhone. You don't have to link. No. You know what I mean? You have to hope that there's good Bluetooth. When you wanted to play me, Zane Lowe talking about Adele on a loop in my rented Chevy Malibu. The return of the autist. What did you?

Did you try to, like, sink your phone? No. You jammed that John in there. Yeah, and then what was great about this was at the end, after this album has been played, dudes were just taking the oxcord. Young Thug was like, Young Thug wants to play some music now.

Yeah, some new S from Thug. And then Vic Mentsa got his... Yeah, I gotta say, a writer, Chris X tweeted that the 21st Century version of, like, turning on the ugly light is letting Vic Mentsa grab the iPod. That cleared the garden. It's like not that many things could force people back out into 20-degree mid-tong weather at dusk.

I really want to stretch my legs. What if the A-Train's clear now? It's bracing out there. Pizza Supremah. I get one to go. Look, do you remember? I know you remember. There was a time when you and I were young thugs ourselves.

Boxcore DJs. And we would go and DJ in the biggest quotes possible. There was a bar in Brooklyn that we would frequent. Make a playlist on our iPod bricks. Devices. And we would just play songs. And then there was something super fun about the fact that you could just trade off. And, oh, I got something, I got something.

And it could get annoying when, you know, if you invited, like, I guess, I guess that was back in the time when Doug worked for Napster or, you know, sort of a pre. It was always cool when you were doing one of those sets. And then I got out of be like, do you guys want to hear my dusty fingers deep funk crates? That was Doug. That's what I'm saying. That was like a pre. No, no, what do you? What company would be, like, Cosmo.com, Doug.

He's like, it's brilliant. You can order a candy bar to your desk. The break on this song is tremendous, dudes. But there was something, like, this is the high-low stuff that we really like with our pop artists and especially with artists that we love like Kanye, which is he cares so much about this show that in it's circulating. You can find it online, but the list of do's and don'ts for the models was so extreme and excessive and wild specific. It was like, you are a picture. Do not move.

Should your legs become tired, just suffer. And it was great because everybody was so stoned. but Naomi Campbell was like, I'm up here, man. Screw this. I'm grooving to this. But so in something that rigid and scripted, there's still room for him to be like, I'll just unplug this and we'll plug in, we'll plug in Vic Mence's iPhone. Like, this is what this is going to be now. That was a very nice thing.

My favorite thing about, one of my favorite things about, especially the last, with Yeez-Is and with twisted fantasy, is how Kanye records are also clubhouses for like a lot of my favorite musicians coming together at once. and this one seems no different. We were just viving out. What was that called? Ultra Light Beams that has the Dream and Kirk Franklin and Kelly Price and Chance the rapper on the first song. That's that gospel flow.

We are on a, what is it? We are a God Dream. Was that the line? That's the shirt. He was wearing the shirt. Oh, right. That says Ultra Light Beam, God Dream. This is all new to us.

So let's talk about some of the winners and losers of the non-Kanya participants in the life of Pablo. Okay. Okay. So I think the dream's got to be up there because he's on a couple of these songs. That makes me so happy.

Yeah. And he is, you know, a phenomenal songwriter. Yes, and kind of fell out of favor for a minute, even though pretty much everything he's done has been like border. Baseline is always interesting. Yeah. His ceiling is higher than almost anyone. He stayed busy with Pusha.

And I wonder if this was, because he's all over the King Push prequel. And is he just like got, is he a good music kind of house guy now? Well, I wonder if that may be evidence of President Push having a little bit of influence on the uninfluencible artist that runs his label. Another person who got well off of this as Young Thug who's going to be performing with Kanye on Saturday and got to get a little bit of burn for his own song like at the very end.

Let's talk about the track he's on too. One of our favorite tracks from 2015 was the Jamie XX song Good Times. Yeah. Which it's like you take this rapper who's often talking about using the curtains in the back of his car to wipe off parts of himself. And then you put him on this song

that just sounds like the most wonderful summer He literally sounded like the Dowager Count is describing young thug. By the way, I would watch that episode. Like I've been out on Down for a minute, but I would watch that episode. He's so malleable. You could just put him on these different kinds of tracks, and he does it again here. Like this highlights is so, it's got that warm feeling. Maybe it's because I'm out here in the sunshine in California, but it's a really

delightful song. And he picks the right people. Yeah, I mean, the dream stuff, I love Chances verse on. on ultra light beams. I'm going to have to learn to love chance. Really? Yeah, I'm not... What's his?

Like, Johnny Trombone? I don't feel that. Johnny Trumphant? I'm not feeling that. I don't mean to make... Donnie trumpet. You're confusing me. You try to get me into that,

and I want to be a part of it with you, but I can't go down that road. I disagree with you. What about... Should we do the flip side of that? Yeah, absolutely. Because this is sort of the problem with this. The problem is that when you start seeing those pictures

and you're like, oh my God, he's doing it again. He's doing it again. He's doing dark twisted fantasy. He's put up the bat signal in all the people who matter or who are interesting are going to show up. And he's going to be the lightning rod and everything is going to strike. And then you're like, post Malone.

Okay, all right. You know? I mean, Ty Dalla's, I'm happy about that. Yeah. But let's start right from the top. Like, no parties in L.A. No more parties in L.A. No more parties.

Right. So Kendrick. That's how it was that I think we could see if there's a commercial version of it. It will have slash no more parties. One other takeaway from today is that there are, Connie doesn't do B-sides anymore. He doesn't do throwaways, right? He used his time on stage to do all day, which was a single that sort of fizzled last summer, even though I like it. He did Fax, which is his sneaker commercial that he dropped on New Year's.

I'm glad he stands by it, I guess. That's what I'm saying, though. He's clearly not running from this stuff. So it's not like he doesn't like no more parties in LA. It's very much like Lindsay Buckingham being like, I know exactly why you guys are all here, but now Mick gets to do her drum solo. Thank you for putting it in terms that the Dowager Countess over here, can understand. Johnny trumpet and the Dowards of Countess.

Actually, I said Johnny Trombone. I feel like that's even worse. But yeah, so Kendrick, so Connie has the best rapper in the world, 2016 edition, just doing this fun verse, cuts the track. Similarly, we saw Andre 3000 in the studio. Doesn't appear to be on here. Diddy? Diddy was in the, well, I'm okay with that.

But who was the other big one that we thought maybe would be on? Well, I think we thought there would be more of a Kendrick contribution since he was sitting on a couch with six Madlib CDs at the. already apparently. I mean, all this stuff exists and the beauty of living this life of Pablo is that something else could happen at any moment. But the biggest L, the biggest Ls were caught in this sense by

Cia and Vic Mensa, who I alluded to before, who were crawling around on the Vanessa B. Croft stage for Saturday Night Live a year ago singing this song that has finally, finally been released. But they've been delicately ex-ized from it. Because when we get in that CDQ of Wolves has been probably one of the most tweeted things

of the last 12 months. Not there. No. Not there. Okay, who else you got? Well, the last one we have is really just the Sega Dreamcast fans. This is a winner. Do you remember? People should, this guy Jason Hartley invented something called Advanced Theory. Now, we're not going to do this on this podcast.

You should Google it. He wrote a book. Our friend Chuck Closterman has written a lot about it. Jason is on Twitter. And I feel like Jason should weigh in on this because the idea behind it, and I'm going to butcher it. Right. But the idea of it is that when an artist and established artist does something so left field, so out there, that the first reaction is to be like

they've jumped the shark, they've lost their mojo, they're insane, the reverse is always true. The truth is that they are advanced. They are doing something that is something you just don't get it yet. We can't possibly understand it. And Lou Reed being the most advanced artist of all time

for all the choices he made in the 80s and 90s, right? That came to mind when Kanye finished doing the record and he was just like, now I want to share with you the video game I'm having made about only one, my tender ballot about my deceased mother. Right.

And the video game clip, which was done in the style of some of my, like, like, knights, like my favorite, like Sega Saturn games from the 90s, is of his mother ascending into the clouds, getting her angel wings, and flying towards the pearly gates. Then he said about, they vented with real anger about how people in San Francisco cursed him out, first of all, not true. But they didn't. They were like, yeah, exactly. They're like, hey, bro, want a vitamin water?

When he said he wanted to do this. And you know what? Let the market decide. Let the market decide if the world is ready for a video game about someone's mom getting her wings. I feel like there's... But then he played it again. And this is so advanced that I was just moved by it. This is what we need our artists to do.

They need to be on not just the bleeding edge of culture. They need to be on the bleeding edge of sanity. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what we talked about this on Monday. This is what you get with Kanye, where you're just kind of like, this is the notebook is the final canvas the and that is literally true with waves or with with TLOP because we were watching him create this this album by jotting down song titles and let's talk about changing the name of the album step by step we are obviously the biggest stands

in the world about this and and and I love talking about all the ways that Kanye is great and interesting I even like there's a piece on slate today about how he's actually a critic and one of our greatest critics because of the way he talks about art and other people's You could make that same argument for the way that he basically curates the contemporary music that's around him. This is what I wanted to say, that even if you take the most negative view of him as a musician or as an artist today, right, and you say that what he's doing is curating and what he's doing is collating and collecting and he's taking these cultural strands where he's taking, you know, the sounds that the style of production that Travis Scott brought to him around Yeezas, right? or whoever came up, whoever introduced him to the earth-shaking, like, I want to go back to Chicago in 1989.

There's a lot of Travis fingerprint's on this record too, I think. But whoever brought him that track, like, okay, house music is what we're going to do now. Right. Someone has to say yes. Someone has to put it together. Someone has to choose what lies on top of what and deal, live with the new flavor that that creates.

And so for this record, when he was saying, this is a gospel record, it is a gospel record, but it's a gospel record with these crazy synth stabs over it or with young thug talking about, you know, curtains over it. Or with like reclaiming house music, which had started as a very African-American thing in Chicago and then went to Europe and became like, you know,

people tripping balls in Ibiza. I'm sorry, Ibiza. Yeah. And bringing it, literally bringing it back to church on a track like Fade. That is pretty inspiring art to me. It's exciting art. Like, you know, we've been talking 20 minutes about it. We barely, we don't know what we've listened to.

Yeah, I mean, my initial impressions were that there's like a degree to which it's almost like if you, you know, because at the end of Jesus, there's that disconnect between the body of the album and bound. Yes. Where you're just like, bound is this, you know, injection of humanity and life and beauty and wonder. Bound is blinking in the sunlight after you've come out of the darkest club. After just like listening to Capleton and doing cocaine at 4 in the morning for like the entire rest of it. and having this record almost sounds like the combination of the two. It sounds like he took some of like the Hudson Mohawk, the electro stuff that he was doing on Jesus

and layered it with like this deep soulful gospel, Kirk Franklin, Kelly Price, Rihanna singing Nina Simone hooks. And the playfulness. Yeah. The track where he comes out and he says like, I made Taylor famous and says something else about her too. Like that's a part of Kanye that had gone away from the music.

And all the time we talked about, the buildup to this record, the year plus buildup, and all the things he said it was going to be. And for a while, it was like, it's going to be like going back to the backpack, where I'm going to play songs you could play at your barbecue. And it seemed odd that he would announce he was going to go backwards because it's very unlike him. And what this album, or whatever this is as of today,

seems to suggest is that he did find a way to bring back the vibrancy and fun and in, like, youthful spirit of the music, but ground it. Yeah. In the darker ideas, he's lived through the darker ideas, he keeps them in there. The stuff about family, the first track is very moving. Yes.

And it's very moving, but it's also completely over the top. It's completely over the top because of Johnny trombone, just blowing them trumpets. I think at the end of the day, and we could wrap up on this, it's just like what he said

when somebody was like, F Michael Jordan. And he was like, don't say F Michael Jordan. You know, that dude is like a very important person. But he's like, but when I come to MSG,

I play one on none. And this is just, he is still sort of just this singular artist. There's just nobody who creates this kind of tilting of the axis like he does. Nobody else can do it. Nobody else can get us to do a podcast on such short notice or have so much fun talking about it. So we'll wrap it up there.

This has been the Watch Reup. We'll be back on Monday when we'll be doing a lot of TV talk. We'll be covering the first episode of vinyl. Oh, yeah. And we'll preview Better Call Saul. Oh, yes. And we'll talk a little bit of Horace and Pete, which is the Louis C.K. show that he dropped out of nowhere on his website.

And maybe we'll bring it back to London Spy, which I think is finally. ending and we have some thoughts. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Thanks very much, guys. Great job, Kanye.