#236 Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Everyone's going nuts on this album. Guess I better check it out.

Pitchfork in particular went all 10 on this, and usually when they like a rap album, I'm not into it (see also Clipse, Tha Carter III). And I don't really like Kanye all that much, finding him to be a bit too self aware, a bit too concerned about being a good rapper and not concerned enough with just fucking rapping.

Here though, I have to admit, he turns some kind of corner. For one thing, his self awareness goes over the top and around the horn, becoming neurotic, erratic and bracingly personal, somehow. For another, while I'm still not too into his rapping, the production and structure is the star here. Its like I said about early Busdriver, you're better off thinking of it is a really weird art rock album that just happens to have a rapper at the helm. Here too, this is barely a hip hop album in any traditional sense, the track lengths run long, the sentiment is all over the place, the structure is wildly inventive, the approaches to production busting themselves in half everywhere. There are bizarre, fractured outros, going on for a minute, two minutes, three minutes on half the songs, following no particular method. Runaway ends on a fuzzy, strangely heartbreaking vocals-distorted-to-pure-synth solo that runs three minutes thirty! Who does that on a hip hop album?

I want to call this a prog-hip-hop album. Influences from genres far outside the co-hyphenated genre? Check. Long songs? Guitars? Check, check. Complexity in structure on a micro and macro level? Check. A general sense of indulgence, in the service of an attempt to be something "more important" than the genre normally demands? Double check. Heck, it even samples King Crimson's 1969 masterpiece 21st Century Schizoid Man; if that's not a wink I don't know what is. So as a rap album, its not what I'm looking for in rap. As an album in general? If I just take this in terms of what I want from music? Very yes. For the most part, he actually pulls it off.

So Appalled and Devil in a New Dress break up the flow pretty badly, each is momentum-killingly repetitive and generally a miss, but the rest is compelling, and even a bit heartbreaking, adding up to two pretty excellent half-albums on either side of that too-slow core. In my book, that's a solid 4.5/5