Being crazy is this guy’s job, and judging from the sound of his music, business is booming. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
is his most maniacally inspired music yet, coasting on heroic levels of
dementia, pimping on top of Mount Olympus. Yeezy goes for the grandeur
of stadium rock, the all-devouring sonics of hip-hop, the erotic gloss
of disco, and he goes for all of it, all the time. Nobody halfway sane could have made this album. Last time, Kanye went minimal for the electro melancholia of 808s & Heartbreak. But on Fantasy,
he gets ridiculously maximal, blowing past all the rules of hip-hop and
pop, even though, for the past half-decade, he’s been the one inventing
the rules. There are hip-hop epics, R&B ballads, alien electronics,
prog-rock samples, surprise guests from Bon Iver to Fergie to Chris
Rock, even a Elton John piano solo. It’s his best album, but
it’s more than that — it’s also a rock-star manifesto for a downsizing
world. At a time when we all get hectored about lowering our
expectations, surrendering our attention spans, settling for less, West
wants us to demand more. Nobody else is making music this daring and weird, from the spooky space
funk of "Gorgeous" to the King Crimson-biting "Power" to the paranoid
staccato strings of "Monster." Nearly six minutes into "Runaway," long
after the song has already sealed itself in your brain, the sound cuts
out and you think it’s over. Then there’s a plinking piano, the feedback
of an electric guitar plugging in, some "Strawberry Fields"-style
cellos and Yeezy himself singing a poignant Robert Fripp-style solo
through his vocoder. There’s no way it should work, but it keeps rolling
for three more minutes without breaking the spell. Coming off a string of much-publicized emotional meltdowns, Yeezy is
taking a deeper look inside the dark corners of his twisted psyche. He
has sex and romance on his mind, but he comes clean about his male angst
like never before. In confessions like "Runaway" and "Blame Game," he
honestly struggles to figure out why he has to be such a bad person.This album truly encapsulates the new genre created in the 21st century that has yet to be named. This is why this album is a magnificent work of art.
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