Despite all of the non-musical related headlines that Kanye West seems to create on a regular basis, I've always been a fan of West's music. From his stellar 2004 debut to his 2008 auto-tone soaked experiment, I've admired the way that West has had an ear for a good pop tune or the way that he often weaves his clever tongue in cheek rhymes around interesting samples and beats. With his last album, 808s and Heartbreak, Kanye strayed away from his winning formula and played around with a darker more melancholy sound. On his latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, West not only proves the fact that his first three albums were similar sounding pieces of a trilogy, but he also shows us that the dark and sorrowful path he traveled down on 808s has not only gotten darker but is now surprisingly bitter.
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I’m not sure exactly what has pushed Kanye over the edge. We were told (or possibly assumed) that his fun loving persona had been put on hold after the tragic death of his mother and broken relationship with his girlfriend, but by the sound of things, they certainly haven’t gotten any better. The first inclination that this isn’t going to be your typical upbeat Kanye West album is the cover art. Rather than seeing a cute cartoon bear being shot out of a cannon we see a creepy painting of an armless winged woman straddling a man (possibly Kanye?) who is sporting an evil grin and a beer bottle in his hand. If my description of the album’s cover doesn’t match your own, it’s probably because that cover has been banned and replaced in a number of stores. Once you get past the artwork and actually listen to the album though, it won’t take long to notice West’s change in persona and tone. We’d be wasting our time if we tried to figure out what West is so bitter about. Maybe it was the lampooning he received on South Park. “Choke a South Park writer with a fishstick” he says on the track “Gorgeous.” On the same track he sums up what a good lot of Fantasy is about, “I don’t really give a f--k about it all” Kanye raps toward the end of the track, the electric guitar loop far past stale to the point of annoyance, “Cause the same people that tried to black ball me forgot two things, my black balls.”
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy doesn’t always seem to me like a deep and emotionally distraught album. I rarely felt like I was listening to an apathetical Kanye. Instead I almost felt as if I was hearing West’s attempt to regain some street cred. Sure there were touching moments, such as “The Blame Game” which features a worthy contribution by John Legend singing the chorus and playing a poignant piano ballad as West raps about a failed relationship. More than not though, Fantasy is relentlessly hard to sit through. The album features a bushel of unremarkable, typically vulgar rap tracks and a number of songs that attempt to do something remarkable and fall flat. Replacing West’s cheeky humor with a more wry and dark sense of humor just doesn’t seem to fit Kanye’s less than intimidating vocal delivery. The song that has gotten a lot of attention recently is the rallying cry track, “Runaway.” Though not a bad concept, the light airy tone of the song stands in contrast to the rest of the album. On top of that, the song’s chorus is repetitive and the four minute instrumental that leads into the following track is pure excess.
I’m not surprised that West borrowed heavily from his auto-tone loving contemporary Bon Iver for his track, “Lost in the World.” It’s a song that when coupled with “Who Will Survive In America,” is a surprisingly powerful close to the album. The fact that when he puts his mind to it, West can still put together a stirring collection of sounds is given credence when you hear West’s masterful implementation of the racially charged “Comment No.1” by the famed spoken word performer Gil Scott-Heron. It’s a pretty jarring ending to a rather dark, but all too unsatisfying of an album. While it isn’t hard to distance myself from the swirl of noises and hedonistic rhymes and realize that this album is a cohesive work of art that captures a certain mood, I still find it to be a masochist chore to listen to such a heavy handed album in one setting. And if I can’t manage a chore like that, how good can it really be?
"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" is on sale November 23, 2010 from Roc-A-Fella.
