American rapper Kanye West's seventh album, "The Life Of Pablo," felt inescapable when it emerged this past February. But that wasn't the case in Japan. Streaming music service Tidal — which initially had exclusive rights to "Pablo" — isn't available here.
This gave Toyomu Hayashi an idea. Unable to hear West's latest, he decided to splice together his own version instead. The result was "Imagining 'The Life Of Pablo,' " which the Kyoto trackmaker created based off a list of the samples used in West's "Pablo," by typing the rapper's lyrics into his computer's text-to-speech function, and by going on a gut feeling as to how West would've put it all together. He then uploaded his Frankenstein album onto his Bandcamp website, where it sat pretty much unnoticed for a month.
"Then one day I woke up and discovered I was featured on Complex, The Fader and Fact," Hayashi, 26, says in his first in-person English interview. "I was going viral."