Kanye West
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
(Roc-A-Fella/Universal)
When the dust settles, Pitchfork go back to giving bands nobody has heard of 5.3 out of ten and sixteen year olds add something else to their torrent download queue, what will we say about Kanye West’s fifth album? Will it become the generational classic that so many are (somewhat prematurely) heralding it as? And in any case, is it even possible to ever match something as flawless as
The College Dropout or its partner,
Late Registration?
After a swathe of reviews which trawl through the extensive history of the man’s soaring highs and self-imposed lows, his guest stars, his spats, his ego, his alter-ego, his self-obsession, his sex-obsession, his record label, his relationship with Jay-Z, his fallout with Amber Rose, his God complex, his Michael Jackson complex, his Michael Jackson aspirations, his backpack whiteness, his old-school blackness, his production skills, his mother, his Auto-Tuned breakdown, his mouth, his Twitter account, his head, his heart, his dick and pretty much anything else that doesn’t actually address the musical and lyrical content, it seems like West’s ambition to be bigger than pop music has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But you can have all of that trash - let’s talk about what matters; the disc currently spinning loops in CD players the world over.
Pharrell Williams once boasted that he could see sounds, and Nas has said in interviews that he can feel beats before they’re even delivered to him. But nobody can hear things like Mr West. If
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy should be celebrated for anything, it must be the decisive clarity with which West combines old and new, samples and live elements, string arrangements and beats in a way that is so seamless, so effortless and so convincing, that had he not acknowledged the source in the liner notes, you would be convinced he wrote the lot. “I create oil paintings – sonically,” he said in Sydney just a few months ago, and it’s hard to deny it. He’s no Quincy Jones, but for a generation of kids raised on rap crossovers, rehashes and samples of awful ‘80s synth tracks, Kanye West is just as much a pioneer. Every second of this record is perfectly calculated, expertly set up and devastatingly executed. West didn’t actually need to use Aphex Twin to whip bloggers into a frenzy or finish up with Gil Scot Herron just to get in touch with his roots. He didn’t need to fly Justin Vernon out to Hawaii and spend label cash to get the rights to his ‘The Woods’ for the epic closer of Kanye's record. But West did it anyway, because what he hears and how he hears it is sometimes more important than what others think.
At the Sydney premiere of the
Runaway film earlier this year, Kanye spoke about the lyrical content of
...Dark Twisted Fantasy like others speak about writing books. He stressed how he was exhausted with ‘hashtag rapping’ and that he wanted to create a new vernacular for the medium. One he felt was collapsing underneath the weight of its own bullshit. “I think there’s maybe one simile on the whole record,” he said. “I really wanted to get rid of things being ‘as’ or ‘like’ something”. And if you listen to a lot of hip-hop, you’ll see how big a deal that is. On cuts like ‘Devil In A New Dress’ and ‘All Of The Lights’, West pushes himself and his guests to create images without referring to existing elements. Nicki Minaj is not
like a Monster, she
is one, and everyone from Kid Cudi through to Fergie, Pusha T and even boss man himself Jay-Z follow suit. Incidentally, I picked up Jay-Z’s
The Blueprint for ten bucks this week and heard one of West’s first hits (‘Izzo H.O.V.A’), penned back when nobody outside the industry knew his name. The former producer has undeniably overtaken his boss, rich, famous and ubiquitous as may be, for the scope of other rappers is only as great as their hit writers. West is his own, as he has been from the beginning. Lil Wayne or Nas would kill to get their hands on something as ear-shatteringly orgasmic as ‘All Of The Lights’. UGK or Clipse in their heyday would be clamouring for the distorted, bass-heavy ‘Hell Of A Life’ or rolling piano riff of ‘Dark Fantasy’.
The concept of the six-minute rap song, long since abandoned by mainstream artists, is brought back with terrifying force as story telling destroys posturing and personas overtake personalities. Everybody on this record is encouraged to become someone or something else, nobody more so than West. He is at once, the image of decadence and self-destruction; see the porn-star marriage fantasy, ‘Hell Of A Life’ and the intensely personal, wounded anti-hero in‘Blame Game’. Whether he’s the black Patrick Bateman of rhyming or the Liberace of production this is what great pop music is all about. Both visually and lyrically, West has given much deference to the late King Of Pop, and though he can’t sing or dance, he is redefining the sonic landscape in similar ways, by performing what he termed “a crash [of] the classic against culture.”
A recording artist in the old-school sense of the word, West has built his career slowly, reaching tremendous and well-deserved fame before near-fucking it up royally, changing the game when nobody was watching and always, always, (sometimes perhaps too much) believing in himself. Any other rapper who recorded something as jarring as
808s and Heartbreak would surely have died a commercial death instantly. That was Kanye’s
Pinkerton, his
Stadium Arcadium and he emerged with cuts and bruises to prove it. The fact is, West is crafting himself and his life into a real pop saga. That ill-fated record, along with recent triumphs, was simply part of a long history that will continue, by the sound of this record at least, for many years to come.
Is it as good as
The College Dropout? As a longtime fan, I’d say
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is different, but West was a different man back then. He’d just signed a record deal, escaped death by a sliver in a terrible car accident, and was bursting with ideas after years of underappreciated hard work behind the scenes. Sonically, ...
Fantasy is West’s most phenomenal album to date/ As it should be given how much it cost and how intensively the guy worked on it. Lyrically, it’s mind-bogglingly dense and incredibly difficult to pin down; many will come for the beats and leave for the really heavy, disturbing stuff.
As an album competing with all the others released this year, it’s a juggernaut that will absolutely destroy anything else you’ve heard. Turns out Kanye West doesn't ever really misstep. He just takes steps in a direction most people don't appreciate until he's moved on again.
I’ll happily play catch up for a while yet.
Jonno Seidler
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Kanye West - 'Runaway'