Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (The Albums of 2010)

Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Albums of the Year 2010)

By: Chris Bosman

Every year in this post-Napster age, the blogosphere blows up with a new, exciting indie sub-genre. This year, it was witch house; last year, chillwave; 2008, lo-fi revivalism. They’re all reactions to each other. Chillwave took the production values of the lo-fi revival and turned them from 70s garage rock to 80s synth pop. Witch house found chillwave too chilly or too new wave-y, so it darkened the corners and evaporated the structures, focusing on haunted house melodies and ghostly sketches of atmosphere. The point is that these sub-genres spring up like clockwork in the indie music landscape, with the response times to each new label progressively dwindling.

Sub-genres in pop music, though, are an entirely different beast. Pop and jazz dominated the American music landscape until the 1950s, when rock music came in. Digital instrumentation’s seeds were planted in the 60s, providing the fledgling backbone for dance music. Then, in the 70s, punk bloomed as a rock and roll offshoot. A decade later, rap’s roots were taking shape. Of course, there have been tons of sub-genres involved that encouraged these maturations. Miles Davis alone practically invented a dozen of jazz’s offshoots. But in the macro scope, those are the capital letter Big Changes.

This year, one album marked another Big Change; with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West has essentially created post-rap.

The “post-” genre prefix has kind of an ambiguous meaning; post-punk and post-rock have little to do with each other, for instance. The one constant of that particular addendum has been a forward movement. The basic tools of the genre are still distinguishable, but the “post-” genre takes those tools and creates something undeniably different. Post-rock used the instrumentation of rock to create pocket epics, expanding the structures and annihilating the verse-chorus-verse form. Post-punk turned punk’s attitude and velocity as fuel for more advanced chord shapes, counterpointing the anger with dissonance. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy has taken rap’s basic tools and used them in the service of something enormous.

Rap’s had a very basic and traditional form, essentially since its inception: a back and forth between verse and chorus, with music that mirrors that and bounces between two simple melodies. In the case of some rap songs, it’s only one. Lil Wayne is the first rapper who really fucked around with this structure, most notably on Tha Carter III, but even his beats often rode a single hook. On Fantasy, Yeezy has almost completely abandoned the traditional form, and the consistently all-star producer has used his talents to create music that rap has never heard before.

The most logical way to think of Fantasy is as a stage play, written and directed by, and starring, Kanye West.  It uses a variety of characters not for their own attitudes, but for how their characters reflect a facet of the author’s personality.

Each voice on Fantasy speaks to a lesson West himself has learned. Nicki Minaj stands in front of the album cover’s grand red curtain, playing an omniscient narrator, then later shows up as a monster in the dark, mirroring West’s journey from unsuspecting hero to public villain. Jay-Z becomes a disdainful elder statesman, looking down his nose at the rabble beneath him, and West use’s Jigga’s long-standing respect to speak down to all those he considers beneath him. Pusha T is untouchable and arrogant, as uncaring about public perception as West wishes he could be. On “Blame Game,” West manipulates his own voice to create a litany of characters, all wronged in the same way, but each pitch shifted modulation views it with a different amount of bile.

These morality plays are highlighted by the production, which ranges from enormous orchestral bombasity to 808s and Heartbreak-style drum machine minimalism, and the emotional moments aren’t just accompanied, but intensified by the depth of the music. The drumbeat on “All of the Lights” dances like buckshot over the layers of vocals, highlighting the anxious freneticism of the song’s main character. The orgasmic chorus of sighs that ends “Hell of a Life” undercuts West’s depressed sighs, turning meaningless porn star sex and intense depression into the same thing. And in sampling Bon Iver’s “Woods,” West lends a sense of heartache to an otherwise relentless disco-influenced beat.

Slate Magazine’s Jonah Weiner pointed out that West’s biggest strength and most glaring weakness has been his passion against perceived injustice. In that way, Fantasy’s lyrics find West at his most passionate. On “Gorgeous” alone he threatens to choke a South Park writer with a fish stick, compares his black Beatle status to being “a fucking roach,” and sneers about his Polo ads somehow making him palatable to white people, “but they would try to crack me if they ever see a black me.” “Hell of a Life” finds West’s porn star girlfriend trying to get an Oscar de La Renta dress for Oscar night, only to have the designers snatch it off her back. “How can you say they live they life wrong/ When you never fuck with the lights on?” West incredulously asks.

Every play’s hero learns a lesson. On Fantasy, as it always is with West, the lesson is less certain, more ambiguous, and more interesting because of it. What West’s character seems to be wrestling with over the course of the album is how to how to come to term with his own flaws. On “Power” West throws down his most massive boasts, but they ultimately prove empty; Yeezy actually views jumping out the window as a better option. On “Runaway” as West attempts to accept his problems at face value, the song’s three-minute, wordless outro communicates the suffering that entails. “Devil in a New Dress” finds West extending his ire outward toward a romantic interest, only to find that unfulfilling. It’s only on “Blame Game,” when West experiences firsthand the consequences of his denials, that he finally seems to come to terms with himself. “Lost in the World” finds West admitting his fears, but still being “down for the night.”

Over the course of the last year, Kanye West faced some of the most intense public scrutiny that a modern pop music figure has encountered. After Taylor Swift, West took a Hawaiian sabbatical. Given time to meditate, West came out of his seclusion with an album that represents two things: Firstly, a spiritual journey that mirrors West’s own, from hero to villain to a man who has to accept the fact that he’s both. And secondly, the first post-rap album, where the essential basics of rap have been warped, distorted, melted and scraped into an incomparable epic.