In the world of Donda, West wants to treat pop culture as a religion, a place where sinners (abusers, lawbreakers, and killers) have the opportunity for redemption if they want it.

If West’s works are ever “soothing,” it’s precisely because they do often succeed in revealing something true about the world, something we can relate to as listeners. If critics feel that “Wash Us in the Blood” fails to hit the mark, then, it must be for a different reason.

Today’s culture and its criticism seem like they are dying to keep the past alive. But to what end? If knowing our past isn’t exactly what we’re doing here, then what are we doing?

The question is whether these works are self-critical in their own rebellion against established forms and their limitations, or whether they dogmatically adhered to Schoenbeg’s categories in their quest for the obliteration of the subject in service of musical free will.

Man must care about art because it is a practice in which he can both critique his ambivalence and envision a world without it.

The veil has been lifted on the sensually expressed neoliberal ideals of being alright.

Within the essence of postmodern music is embedded a struggle with the necessity to toil against the interpretative and compositional standards of the status quo, and simultaneously, a fundamental confusion about how best to accomplish this.

The sounds of the tower, both percussed and ambient, are the most interesting dimensions of this project; yet, they are also what become the most compromised through Bertolozzi’s treatment of them.

With A Moon Shaped Pool, the band has officially transitioned from ostensible aesthetic activity to political pseudo-activity.

The Life of Pablo is West’s most dissonant record, literally and figuratively.

The majority of ambient music seems to reside in a form of despair; it exists most often in a state of being, relying merely on the passing of time itself to serve as its dramatic momentum, engaging the listener in a largely static sonic-auratic experience.

In the end an artwork can teach us, as a form of social knowledge, about how we experience our own experience in the face of the total industrial domination of life and, of course, art.