Story by Jacob O’Gara
Photo provided by Kanye West
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy isn’t the kind of album you hear or “feel,” but see. It rouses a sort of Kanye-inspired synesthesia, a neurological anomaly where one starts “seeing sounds,” to borrow from Pharrell Williams. Kanye West paints his soundscapes with broad strokes of red, purple, and blue, generous drizzles of gold, and ribbons of black. In other words, the colors of royalty, grandeur, bigness. Following the wintry, minimalist 808s & Heartbreak, West aimed for the Milky Way, and it paid off. M.B.D.T.F. is a work of art that transcends genre and form. If you’re looking for an analogue, forget other hip-hop albums. Start with Ken Adam’s volcano-lair set for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice or maybe the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the ancient terraces built by King Nebuchadnezzar to satisfy his wife and his ego.
However, to write off M.B.D.T.F. as a mere ego trip would be a mistake. Of course, like his Twitter feed and his diamond-encrusted dentures and everything else he does, West’s ego—that goading specter that seems to sit on both his shoulders—was certainly engaged in the recording booth. But unlike Graduation, which sagged under the weight of that ego, M.B.D.T.F. is uplifted by it. In the former album, West stumbled through his world of “drunk and hot girls,” Maybachs, and drinking champagne on airplanes without a wisp of self-awareness. In M.B.D.T.F., he recognizes the absurdity of his persona and asks us to join him in a “toast to the douchebags.” Call it (relative) maturity. Call it a comeback.
The year preceding the release of M.B.D.T.F. was Kanye West’s annus horribilis: Trey Parker and Matt Stone called him a “gay fish” in an episode of South Park; he was Swift-boated by the American press and public after his drunken stage-crashing and mic-swiping incident at the VMAs. That orgiastic display of hostility and vicarious hurt feelings toward West worked its way up to the White House, where President Barack Obama called him a “jackass” in an off-the-record comment. While promoting his memoir, former president George W. Bush said that West’s statement in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina (the memorable “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”) was “one of the most disgusting moments” of his eight years in the Oval Office.
And so hated on by two presidents, satirized by Parker/Stone, and deplored by a nation of Taylor Swift sympathizers, Kanye West had no place to go but up.
And up he went. One of the most striking aspects of M.B.D.T.F. is that it’s an album rather than just a collection of singles. Thinking about the key tracks of the album, songs like “Gorgeous,” “All Of The Lights,” “Monster,” “Runaway,” “Hell Of A Life,” “Blame Game,” and “Lost In The World” spring to mind—that’s about half the album. On their own, these songs are great, but weaved together, they’re superb. In the iTunes era, it’s rather bold of West to create a work that’s this cohesive, that demands to be taken as a whole and requires undivided attention.
In Batman (the 1989 version) there’s a scene where the Joker, played by Jack Nicholson, bursts into an art gallery with his goons and proceeds to knock down, slash, and splatter paint on all of the artwork in the room. The Joker is Kanye West. The art gallery is hip-hop.
M.B.D.T.F. is the culmination of the promise that is West, who represents both the pinnacle and the betrayal of the genre and of those MCs who fought on the West Coast/East Coast battlegrounds in the 1990s. Along with Jay-Z and Eminem, Kanye West pushed hip-hop from the edges of the music world to the center. In the early 2000s, under his watch, hip-hop became pop. Now in the new decade, West has released an album that serves to demolish any remaining alcoves in the gallery of rap. M.B.D.T.F. transcends hip-hop by stomping on it first.
It’s appropriate that in the fall of 2009, West was going to tour with Lady Gaga, another artist who strives to be the endpoint of popular music. West might be more successful though. Lady Gaga is Frankenstein – she’s murdering pop by cannibalizing from its history, creating herself out of other parts. Kanye West is Samson from the Biblical myth – he’s willing to destroy himself, or at least destroy his previous College Dropout incarnation, if it also means bringing down the temple of hip-hop. And emerging from the rubble and ashes, reborn.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
