WUnderground WashU's Premier (only) Satirical Newspaper Est. 2004
Pitchfork – 8.3./10 Best New Review – Penned after just three full listens of the album, Pitchfork’s Jason Greene dispenses an engrossing chronicle of West’s musical bildungsroman. His varying sentence construction and periodic employment of italics demonstrate his commitment to his modus operandi. The one inhibiting quality of Greene’s assessment appears to be his misconceived postulations regarding West’s preparation of the album—or lack thereof. Finding credence in Kim Kardashian’s unabashed honesty in the tweet, “we still don’t have a title,” Greene exemplifies his blind willingness to affirm the perspicacity of West’s ‘confidants’. Certainly West would not disclose such confidential intelligence to someone of Kardashian’s stature given that he demanded in the album, “I need every bad bitch up in Equinox / I need to know right now if you a freak or not.”
Rolling Stone – ★★★★☆ – Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield dwells in a place of limbo between his baseless opprobrium of West’s song choices and his laudations of the project as a whole, bestowing upon it four-and-a-half stars out of five. Readers find themselves conjecturing as to how Sheffield “connects the dots,” but such nuance has always characterized his trademark style. We can postulate that Sheffield couches his criticism of Pablo in a subtler character analysis of West—not the project itself. The line, “and dude knows he’s got some issues to work on,” is profoundly vague yet delightfully prepossessing. Sheffield’s incompletion is intentional, mandating a more active experience from the reader, simultaneously reminding the reader that he or she engaged in the digital consumption of his link consensually.
Brad from your freshman floor – 68,403 retweets – By far the most compelling take on Pablo, despite his literary perspective as what West would call a “no-pussy-gettin’ blogger.” Voicing his thoughts at 4:07 AM after two listens through the album while intermittently inhaling vaporized marijuana, Brad’s succinct assessment was beautifully summed up in 26 succinct characters. “#TLOP is straight fireeeee,” read the evaluation. Concision is a lost art in the present-day album review industry, and thus must be praised when utilized with such efficacy.
