Released Nov 2010 via Roc-A-Fella<\/p>\n
On seeing that last week\u2019s record reappraisal was Radiohead\u2019s Amnesiac<\/em>, I pressed the head-ed as to why it wasn\u2019t Kid A<\/em>, as it\u2019s clearly superior. Quite rightly, he responded that such a review would be redundant; countless critics have talked the album into journalistic sludge and there\u2019s simply nothing left to say.<\/p>\n The same could be said of Kanye West\u2019s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy<\/em>. Putting aside the fact that it\u2019s only five years old and so a reappraisal seems a little premature, it\u2019s probably the most acclaimed album of the decade so far, garnering top marks from a ridiculous amount of music publications (seriously, look on Metacritic\u2014I don\u2019t think even The Beatles were treated that well).<\/p>\n So what\u2019s left to say? Well this week we\u2019re talking prog and aside from dusting off my old Rush albums, I couldn\u2019t keep my mind off of Kanye. Is My Beautiful Dark\u2026<\/em> a prog rock album? I think that would be stating the case a little too strongly, but it is his prog rock album.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s address the elephant in the room. \u2018Power\u2019 samples King Crimson. It\u2019s a prog classic, but if this were the extent of the comparison, I\u2019d be just as entitled to call To Pimp A Butterfly<\/em> an indie-folk record because it samples Sufjan Stevens. Even out of prog rock context this fact is talked over to death and I\u2019m not quite sure why. Sure it\u2019s a bold move, but he\u2019d sampled Curtis Mayfield and Daft Punk prior to this; I\u2019d say that\u2019s bolder.<\/p>\n Kanye doesn\u2019t give good taste and respect for musical history the time of day, he\u2019s Kanye fucking West damn it, he\u2019ll do what he wants. This is precisely the reason, contrary to the opinion of many a critic, that I think the sample is so perfect. On this album, Kanye fully embraces the persona of the 21st century schizoid man: Erratic, indulgent of modern pleasures, a force of pure ego.<\/p>\n Prog is an intrinsically egotistical genre. It indulges in lengthy solos, high concepts, and pulls from a variety of styles for the primary purpose of showing off. My Beautiful Dark\u2026<\/em> is certainly a diverse album; \u2018Devil In A New Dress’ is smooth as caramel soul, and \u2018Hell Of A Life’ shuffles along with the clip, clop noises of an old western soundtrack.<\/p>\n Many elements of the instrumentation are shared with prog itself, such as the symphonic horns on \u2018All Of The Lights\u2019 and with swirling, screaming guitars scattered all over tracks like \u2018Power\u2019 and \u2018Gorgeous\u2019. In terms of solos, the nine-minute centrepiece \u2018Runaway\u2019 ends with what I can only describe as an autotune jam. This thick, distorted drone has become somewhat of a trademark of his, but on first listen it took me totally by surprise. It serves as a brilliant FU to anyone who\u2019s criticised his singing abilities or professes that use of auto tune cannot be artful: an absolute highlight of his career.<\/p>\n When it comes to high concepts, to quote theatrical opener \u2018Dark Fantasy\u2019, \u201ccan we get much higher?\u201d The album isn\u2019t set in a mythical land or dystopian future in the conventional prog sense, but instead twists his own life into a dark fantasy, where he\u2019s the most powerful man in the world, has daily orgies with porn stars and dances with the devil herself. Don\u2019t take him for not being self-aware though; after the climactic closer \u2018Lost In The World\u2019, which acts as an operatic reprise, we\u2019re left with patchy applause from a small room. It\u2019s as if the original college dropout has woken from a perverted day dream.<\/p>\n It\u2019s impossible to talk about prog without acknowledging the backlash of punk and appropriately, Kanye created his own. Perhaps disillusioned by excess and grand orchestration, Kanye\u2019s followup Yeezus<\/em> is stripped back, visceral and angry. Compare the \u201cI, I, I\u201d of ‘Runaway’ to the \u2018yous\u2019 in spat out in \u2018New Slaves\u2019 and you have the punk\/prog conflict in a nut shell.<\/p>\n One of the virtues of a re-appraisal is the ability to step back from the hype of the time. Is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy<\/em> overrated? Well it\u2019s certainly not perfect. I can never tell if I\u2019m missing something when listening to ‘So Appalled’ or if it really is just as vacuous and self-serving as it seems on the surface. The misogyny smeared over ‘Blame Game’ ruins an otherwise beautiful and fantastically produced song. However, picking flaws is like passing up an enormous cream cake because of the calories: The pure hedonism draws me in every time. It\u2019s the most grand hip-hop record ever made and is unlikely to be matched, because only one man has the perfect balance of talent and ego to pull it off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rob Paterson reassesses Yeezy’s magnum opus as more than just a great hip-hop album: it’s a hedonistic, prog-rock dream<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1480,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[1458,4957,12193,12194,6761,1011],"coauthors":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15516"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1480"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15516"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}