There isn’t much that Kanye West can do to shock us these days. The artist, producer, rapper, fashion designer and every other career he wants to add to his resume, is a prolific creator and never holds himself back from making art. However, for his album The Life of Pablo, West apparently attempted to make a porno to help promote the record.
The Life Of Pablo can, on some terms, be considered the sister album to another of Ye’s most cherished albums, Yeezus. On this record, West gets even messier than its predecessor and creates an LP that’s deliberately difficult to listen to but continuously has gems scattered throughout it.
West pushes boundaries again on the album, and tracks like ‘No More Parties In LA’ are up there with anything he’s made. However, there is an unavoidable coherency to the record as West revels in creating a record as twisted as he can, which can be divine one minute, and dark as hell the next. This is perhaps the crux of why he tried to hire Bret Eaton Ellis to write the script for a comparative pornographic film.
The album, which was released in 2016, featured tracks such as ‘No More Parties In LA’ and ‘Famous’ which came with the much-debated music video depicting the likes of Taylor Swift, Chris Brown, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Ray J naked in bed together. Ellis, who was speaking on his podcast, detailed how West had contacted him a few years ago in order to make “pornographic videos on tracks he had recorded during The Life of Pablo sessions.”
When Ellis explained his doubts about the idea, West reached out again a few months later with the suggestion of turning the videos into a movie. Having been invited to West’s home in California, Ellis admitted that he felt a little “hesitant and didn’t know what to expect” when he arrived.
“In the five years I had known him, I had never seen him this focused, this together,” he said before adding that the rapper is “sane, his own man” and not a “drugged-out freak gibbering on Twitter as the media suggested [at the time].” The project, however, would never come to fruition.
However, Ellis also provided a sincere sense of working with the icon: “Kanye is, yes, a genius, and every hour I spent with him was more than worth it, even if the project never happened.”
Listen to The Life of Pablo below.