Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Description

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Kanye West created the most compelling body of pop music by an American artist during the period. Having risen from obscurity as a precocious producer through the ranks of Jay Z's Roc-A-Fella records, by the time he released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF) in late 2010, West had evolved into a master collagist, an alchemist capable of transfiguring semi-obscure soul samples and indelible beats into a brash and vulnerable new art form. A look at the arc of his career, from the heady chipmunk soul exuberance of The College Dropout (2004) to the operatic narcissism of MBDTF , tells us about the march of pop music into the digital age and, by extension, the contradictions that define our cultural epoch. In a cloud-based and on-demand culture – a place of increasing virtualization, loneliness, and hyper-connectivity – West straddles this critical moment as what David Samuels of The Atlantic calls "the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music." In the land of taking a selfie, honing a personal brand, and publicly melting down online, Kanye West is the undisputed king. Swallowing the chaos wrought by his public persona and digesting it as a grandiose allegory of self-redemption, Kanye sublimates his narcissism to paint masterstroke after masterstroke on MBDTF , a 69-minute hymn to egotistical excess. Sampling and ventriloquizing the pop music past to tell the story of its future – very much a tale of our culture's wish for unfettered digital ubiquity – MBDTF is the album of its era, an aesthetic self-acquittal and spiritual autobiography of our era’s most dynamic artist. Review: Intelligent and very readable dissemination of a pop masterpiece - Graves wisely by-passes a lot of the usual pap about Kanye, instead delving into the visual and aural depth of his opus, with some fine contextualisation regarding the work's (and its creator's) place within millennial culture. This is smart, engagingly written music criticism in the same vein as Greil Marcus' Mystery Train. Review: Generally every bad review of a 33 1/3 book starts out with ... - Generally every bad review of a 33 1/3 book starts out with a sentiment along the lines of "this is very different work than the other books in the 33 1/3 series" - a point which probably proves that readers shouldn't expect a singular thing from a 33 1/3 title, a claim I think few reasonable readers of the series would dispute. All that to say, this is a very different work than the other books in the 33 1/3 series. Kirk Walker Graves does an amazing job of pulling apart the motivations and inspirations on each track, drawing parallels to similar works in popular culture, and even (very capably) practicing some light pop psychology on the album's creator throughout; as well as his fans and critics. End to end, the album should please any Kanye fan (or 33 1/3 fan) capable of setting aside expectations or preconceived bias before reading. Which, I'm sure Walker would agree, is a big ask when talking about Kanye.