Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (G.O.O.D. Music)
Kanye West is the most singular and talented popular musician working today. Since the mid-2000s, he has expanded his middle-class soul rap template to include experimental strains of rock, pop, electronic and hip-hop, while continuing to improve as an MC and add texture and nuance to his production.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is West’s fifth album, the proper follow-up to 2007’s focused blockbuster, Graduation. Since Graduation, West has been through break-ups, a death in the family, an enjoyable but tossed-off synth-pop album, and some egotistical behavior that lost him favor in the eye of the general public. You can hear all of those things at work in MBDTF, a moody, desperate, paranoid, gigantic blockbuster of an album that sounds like a rich hero locking himself in his mansion to play with the world’s coolest toys, then wondering where the hell everyone went.
MBDTF has the most in common with the sprawling, pop-savvy experimentation of best-album-of-the-‘00s, 2005’s Late Registration. But, while Late Registration added an air of “Fuck it, I’ll try this” to the heartwarming soul of West’s 2004 debut, The College Dropout, the recurring, opulent additions to MBDTF are planned. They add a lonely and nauseous mood to the monstrous electronics of Graduation, and indulge in structures and arrangements that recall the stadium-ready prog epics of ‘70s rockers Queen.
MBDTF is more West's A Night at The Opera than his Uptown Saturday Night. The average song is over five minutes long, with “November Rain”-esque piano and string breaks, choral vocals, and ebbs and flows. Usually, West stops rapping after just a couple minutes, and settles in behind the knobs, letting guests step in as he brings different parts of the track to light. Each cut isn’t a song so much as a journey. Consequently, MBDTF isn’t so much an album as an epic.
It’s like there’s two albums at work in MBDTF: the collection of innovative rap songs, then their freaky alter egos. The songs’ beginnings are Kanye bringing the hits; the endings are the accompanying tour through his psyche, where we hear every possible tweak, gamble and second guess. In this, we see the duality at work. The guy who wants people to like his record, and the guy who wants to forget his audience and indulge his every impulse. Lucky for us listeners, the impulses are generally as engaging as the crowd-pleasers.
West relies on the same formula for most songs. After about three minutes of standard verse/hook/guest verse/hook structure, the radio version ends, and West steps into the role of conductor. Then the ballet music shows up. Then we hear the Peter Frampton talkbox on “Runaway;” motherfucking Chris Rock thanking Kanye for cuckolding him on “Blame Game;” or spoken word by a young Gil Scott-Heron. We can predict when the epic stuff is coming, but it is epic nonetheless, and not just big for the sake of being big, but big for the sake of trying new things and pushing the boundaries of what pop listeners will accept. And, because these experiments are always made in good faith--for art, rather than just ego--they are fruitful. Fuss as I will about the grating horns and autotuned diva vocals on “All of the Lights,” none of these eleven songs are duds.
Icaruses with unlimited studio time fly too close to the sun and come up with overshined messes like Axl Rose’s Chinese Democracy, or snatches of compromised genius like the RZA’s 8 Diagrams. The shocker is that West, who seems supremely scattered thanks to drama that he created during the making of this album--the half-hour long Skinemax movie, the apology to George W. Bush, anything he ever Tweeted--has created a cohesive album with a variety of sounds, both new and old. "Devil in a New Dress" returns to his early trademark, chipmunk soul. "Runaway" makes good on 808s And Heartbreak's New Romantic promise. "Power" continues with the arena electro of Graduation. But MBDTF isn’t a tour of an artist’s past triumphs. It’s those victories tinkered with, improved, and combined with an overarching, plaintive mood. It’s a masterpiece.