You’d be mad not to follow him.His life with Kim and all of the madness that came with that really was his Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It’s the best thing he’s done since his game-changing debut, and heartening evidence to suggest the self-professed Louis Vuitton don is in a good place right now. If ‘808s & Heartbreak’ was the wilderness period, then by extension ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ is Kanye’s entry into Jerusalem, on a jet-propelled donkey with chrome-plated hooves. Segueing into a coda which samples Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Comment #1’, it frames Kanye’s inner demons in a universal way, recasting Vernon’s semi-mythical woodland retreat as his own cipher for spiritual replenishment.
Kanye raises a trip-hoppy toast to the douchebags of the world on ‘Runaway’ – generously remembering to include himself – before finally squaring up to some uncomfortable home truths: “ Never was much of a romantic/I could never take the intimacy/And I know it did damage/’Cos the look in your eyes is killin’ me”.īut it’s ‘Lost In The World’ that provides the heart-rending highlight, chasing down Yeezy’s soul past velvet ropes and jaded afterparties as Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon reprises an autotuned vocal from last year’s ‘Blood Bank’ to quite brilliant effect. In anyone else’s hands it’d be an A-list circle-jerk of horrid proportions, but through Kanye’s bar-raising vision it becomes a truly wondrous thing, all Rocky-apeing brass flourishes and epileptic drum’n’bass breaks.Įlsewhere, ‘Monster’ proves a riotous bit of respite, Yeezy sending up his rep with a self-mocking diatribe about drowning his pain in a blizzard of blow jobs and mass adulation (beats Prozac, we suppose) while Nicki Minaj sets the dials to ‘ridiculous’ with a fire-breathing, raga-inflected verse. ‘All Of The Lights’ is the sleb-studded centrepiece, with a credit list including Rihanna, Elton John, Alicia Keys, John Legend, The-Dream, Fergie, Kid Cudi, Ryan Leslie, Charlie Wilson, Tony Williams and La Roux’s Elly Jackson. Then the record’s first real moment of catharsis arrives in the shape of the gladiatorial ‘Power’, whose tribal fanfare and supercharged lyric seems to imagine in advance Kanye’s warm welcome into heaven: “ I guess every superhero need his theme music”. ‘My Beautiful…’ kicks off proceedings with a suitable sense of what’s at stake here a tense, string-laden affair with Kanye musing how “ the plan was to drink until the pain was over/But what’s worse, the pain or the hangover?” There’s more trouble at hand with Kid Cudi collaboration ‘Gorgeous’’s slouching guitars but Kanye relocates his funny bone with lines like: “ This week has been a bad massage/I need a happy ending”. It’s a world away from the indifferent reception afforded to ‘808s & Heartbreak’, a brave but unloveable record of synth-drenched introspection dealing with Kanye’s split from Alexis Phifer in 2008 and the tragic death of his mother, who died following cosmetic surgery.
BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY FULL ALBUM PLUS
Reportedly a cool $3million in the making and with a stellar cast comprising the great and good of 2010’s musical establishment – plus Fergie from Black Eyed Peas – it’s an epically conceived song-suite, a titanic wrestling with music’s most colossal ego that effortlessly engages its hype as the most feverishly anticipated record of the year. It’s an utterly dazzling portrait of a 21st-century schizoid man that is by turns sickeningly egocentric, contrite, wise, stupid and self-mocking.
‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ captures that essence in full.
A man with a head so unfeasibly smooth, it looks like he’s slowly evolving into a Madame Tussauds effigy of himself.įor better or worse, he’s also the pop star for our morally implicated times an instinctive consumer with a mouthful of diamonds and furtive bad conscience, a performer who lives the American dream to its fullest with a creeping sense of the spiritual void at its heart. Kanye West: douchebag, enemy of the state, incurable gobshite who’s annoyed more American presidents than Fidel Castro.
0 kommentar(er)
