For all its intimacy and shades of autobiography, though, Skeleton Tree’s most powerful line is its most universal and simple: “It’s alright now.” And in that moment, whether he sees us or not, we’re as close to him as Wenders’ angel on the stage. On ‘Rings Of Saturn’ – which could be about a sexual encounter, a birth or a loss of life – the subject of his tale disappears “over heaps of sleeping children” and “dangles herself like a child's dream from the rings of Saturn”. In lyrics mostly written before this tragedy, Cave approaches his greatest themes, love and death, with a newfound expression over a delicate electronic framework. ![]() The frontman seems to be at an unhinged peak until we hear his weary internal plea: “Just one more song…” Nick Cave has played countless murderers and monsters in his albums, but it’s the character in Wenders’ film that he embodies most on the synth-washed stream-of-consciousness poetry within Skeleton Tree, a heartbreaking album released in the wake of his son’s death. In Wim Wenders’ 1987 masterpiece Wings Of Desire, a Bad Seeds show is visited by one of the film’s angels, invisible to humans but able to hear their thoughts and prayers. But the same could be said of its flawed, fantastic Rubik’s cube of a creator. It’s not perfect, pulling in too many directions at once to be completely cohesive. On the melancholy ‘Real Friends’, the weight of being Kanye West is most heavily felt, as he reveals how he paid a cousin $250,000 to give back his stolen laptop. 1’ to the fizzing Kendrick collaboration ‘No More Parties In LA’. But what hasn’t changed are the snatches of genius that make Pablo another vital entry in the modern rap canon, from the gloriously sunny, Metro-meme spawning ‘Father Stretch My Hands Pt. Similarly, The Life of Pablo sounds very different since his claim that he “would have voted Trump” and his subsequent hospitalisation the lyrics about his mood swings when he’s “off his Lexapro” feel particularly sad and pointed. ![]() But within months, he’d brokered a deal with Adidas and declared racism non-existent, recasting that album as rage against a different type of discrimination – discrimination against Kanye West. This was true before he began tinkering with his sprawling seventh studio album weeks after its release: Yeezus, for example, felt at the time like a black artist’s rage after hitting the glass ceiling put in his way by the overwhelmingly white fashion industry. Instead, they’re oil paintings with meanings that refract and refract again through the prism of whatever he does or says next. A Kanye West album is never a mere snapshot in time of the artist Kanye West.
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