If sense was a log cabin, Kanye West is on a mission to become the world’s biggest bulldozer. The past few weeks have seen him wage a one-man war on humility and self-awareness, sending out ill-advised, inflammatory tweets and fumbling the release of his new album.

You’re likely already aware of the numerous name-changes that West’s latest LP, now titled The Life of Pablo, has gone through, but that’s all small potatoes compared to the much larger potatoes of when he tweeted that accused serial rapist Bill Cosby is “innocent”.

Then came West’s launch event for The Life of Pablo, which was a farce of Gilbert and Sullivan-ian proportions. Highlight: after the crowd gave a lacklustre reaction to a trailer for West’s new video game (in which his mother ascends to heaven on a pegasus), he insisted the trailer be played again.

However, most of the world was too busy talking about one particular lyric on the album in which West claimed he made Taylor Swift famous. The rapper later claimed he received permission for the line from Swift herself, a claim which the singer’s camp promptly refuted.

Ever the innovator, West somehow managed to find a new way to prove himself totally out of touch by embarking on a Twitter tirade in which he urged Silicon Valley bigwigs to give him their money instead of using it to build schools in Africa… really.

Arguing that tech leaders in Palo Alto are renowned for their love of hip-hop, West said Mark Zuckerberg and those of his ilk would be better off giving him their money but “you’d rather open up one school in Africa like you really helped the country“.

There’s so much wrong with that sentence we don’t even where know to begin, so let’s start with the fact that Africa is not a country. However, if you needed any more proof that the launch of West’s new album has been a total disaster, you need but two syllables: TI-DAL.

As the AAP reports, West is currently begging fans to subscribe to the controversial streaming service, of which he and a cabal of other superstar musicians are part owners, even putting off the sale of his album to get more people to subscribe.

“People are sharing pirated versions of the record on the TIDAL Facebook page.”

The Life of Pablo is currently available to preview on TIDAL, ahead of its delayed release next week. Apparently, West is still trying to make TIDAL a thing, even though the world has made their position on the matter very clear: it isn’t.

However, since TIDAL is the only place you can currently get The Life of Pablo, fans are signing up to the service in order to get their hands on the LP. Only that last part isn’t really working out too well and fans are seriously upset.

TIDAL’s Facebook page has been inundated with furious new customers who claim they’ve paid the subscription fee in order to secure West’s new album, but have received nothing in return, not even a response from the streaming service.

“Why is almost no one talking about how Tidal has taken THOUSANDS of people’s money for a download of Kanye West’s new album, not given them the album, and are not answering their help and support tickets?” wrote one such customer on Reddit.

“Tidal’s Twitter feed has been flooded with complaints and requests for refunds since yesterday morning due to an apparent glitch in the payment section of their website which allowed people to pay for Kanye West’s new album yet never sent them a link to download the album.”

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“Their help support team is only giving useless form-letter answers, in the rare event they answer at all. And now Kanye West himself is alluding to the fact that he’s decided ‘not to sell’ the album until next week, and that it’s not even finished.”

“This album release has been an epic shitshow. I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about it.” The customer later updated his post with the transcript of an email from TIDAL informing him that the download of TLOP “is currently not available”.

So how are things looking at the moment? Well, the proper release of the album has been delayed a week, West says he wants to “fix” one of the songs on the album, and people are sharing pirated versions of the record on the TIDAL Facebook page.

All in all, it’s a disaster.

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