Make no mistake: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a bid for immortality, and nothing less.
After all, no one would ever accuse Kanye West of being demure. Not after the pugilistic, old-school aping, soul-sampling College Dropout and Late Registration; not after the intoxicated technoid-braggadocio of Graduation; and certainly not after the beautifully pathological oversharing of 808s and Heartbreak. Apparently, Kanye has done some strange things in public, too, but there is music to be talked about; let the cable-channel awards shows corrode in the past, where they belong.
Looking back at those five albums now, it isn’t hard to see that they were all building up to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The record is, unquestionably, Kanye’s masterpiece to date: a fusion of his retro tastes, ranging from Motown to Wu-Tang to Nas to Jay-Z, with his tireless probing into the future. This includes both the roster and community of rappers that he’s come to cultivate as well as his constant, almost childlike search for new sounds.
MBDTF certainly sounds new. Though the album is not perfect, the instrumentals come about as close as one can get. The word that seems to hang over the piece in its entirety is “symphonic;” every move sounds deliberate, every trilled vocal sample and every shimmering synth. It’s this way right from the start, beginning with “Dark Fantasy.” Ascending at first on the swelled voices of what sounds like a choir, the song soon drops into a piano-strings-and-handclap trot that is frequently halted, restarted and generally mussed up. The song has a sense of orchestral movement that is rare in hip-hop, which often, even at its best, sees producers crafting a great beat and coasting on it for three and a half minutes.
Such ebb and movement is characteristic of the album as a whole. Despite a running time of 68 minutes, Kanye never rests on a single sound, not once; constantly the songs shift between rappers, styles and thematics. A few of the tracks are huge: “All of the Lights” is anchored by a pummeling match of horns and drums, the percussion coming in a flurry beneath the choruses and sinking out during the verses; “Lost in the World” pairs Bon Iver’s aggressively Auto-tuned crooning with fragmentary drum machines, quilted backing vocals and maracas constant as rain. Other tracks put the rapping more center-stage, which is just as welcome.
Throughout My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye fixates on a handful of different concepts: religion, fame, women, drugs and race. Songs shift in focus and oscillate in tone, but nearly every one has some combination of those ingredients. God in particular is a frequent subject, almost surprisingly so. Two of the songs, “Hell of a Life” and “Devil in a New Dress,” confront this straight from the titles, and Kanye’s verse on “Lost in the World” opens with the line, “You’re my devil, you’re my angel/You’re my heaven, you’re my hell.” And in a spectacular marrying of concepts, and probably the best line on the record, “Hell of a Life” is buoyed by Yeezy robotically wailing, “Have you lost your mind?/Tell me where you think we’ve crossed the line/No more drugs for me/P***y and religion is all I need.”
Kanye’s flow is much like it’s always been. For such an overtly wealth-obsessed guy, his style is surprisingly blue-collar. Short on verbal and technical theatrics—he fits plenty of those into his beats—and long on rhyming the ends of the verses, he raps in a clear, affected sneer, delivering his emphases like punch lines. He hews closely to his instrumentals, and the workmanlike flow serves as a serviceable vehicle for what he wants to say. And he’s got plenty to say. Trying to dig out all the record’s lyrical highlights would be like picking rocks from the soil, but there are some cringe-worthy moments as well. Then he’ll drop a line like, “I treat the cash the way the government treats AIDS/I won’t be satisfied ‘til all my n****** get it, get it?” and everyone forgets, which has always been the saving grace of any successfully verbose individual.
Speaking of which, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy owes much of its verbosity—and greatness—to other individuals, too, as West surrounds himself with a murderer’s row of rap greats and his own up-and-comers alike. On “Gorgeous,” Wu-Tang vet Raekwon delivers an impossibly intricate verse, and his Clan-mate the RZA both produces and shouts furiously on various tracks. Clipse alum and Kanye favorite Pusha T, characterized by his crystal-clear, knife-sharp enunciation, out-raps his host on “Runaway” and complements him nicely on posse cut “So Appalled.” Also on this song, newcomer Cyhi Da Prynce shows up the underwhelming Jay-Z by boasting, “If God had a iPod, I’d be on his playlist.” And with possibly the album’s best verse, Rick Ross floats down into “Devil in a New Dress” after a long, guitar-augmented jazz interlude—characterized by a hauntingly lovely vocal sample—and destroys the track, his voice dripping with equal parts dented hubris and strangely tender nostalgia.
All of this is brilliant, and it’s all cocooned around the album’s trinity of tent poles: the Kanye showcase “Power,” the athletic and dexterous cascade of verses on “Monster” and probably the year’s best song, “Runaway,” which is simultaneously heartbreaking in its delicacy, virtuosic in its articulation and searing in its performances.
And the sum is greater than its parts. What My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy does is overwhelm, inundate and amaze. It is a prodigious collection of beats, an all-star team of artists and a stunningly cognizant confrontation of contemporary themes and issues. It is the album as art, a cohesive whole, a nod to the past and a prototype for the future. Kanye, for all his flaws, is a creator, and this piece is beautiful, imperfect and all the better for it.
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