All the fans who sifted through the official singles, televised short film, and free downloads that Kanye West released this fall are already familiar with most of the songs contained on his fifth album.
Students of pop culture will be missing out if they don’t listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in its finished form. West has tricked out these tracks with sharper verses and grander instrumental interludes, then lined them up in a sequence that demands to be heard from start to finish.
Kanye West begins Fantasy with a flashback. “I fantasized about this back in Chicago” are his first words on the opener, evoking his now-distant pre-fame years. He spends the rest of the album exploring the sounds that have defined his work since then. The luxurious soul of 2004′s The College Dropout, the symphonic pomp of Late Registration, the gloss of 2007′s Graduation, and the emotionally exhausted electro of 2008′s 808s & Heartbreak all recur at various points, as if to remind us of his achievements.
Kanye West is repeating himself. He is ravenous for fresh inspiration, and the last four decades of music are on the menu. He samples atmospheric noodling from Aphex Twin and bombastic nuggets from Black Sabbath and King Crimson, and he gets help from some of the biggest names in pop, rap, and indie rock. West crafts these influences into a fever dream with a crescendo around every corner, the Beautiful Fantasy of the album’s title.
The rapper Kanye West makes only a handful of explicit references to the damage his image sustained after he interrupted Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs. But while he’s sounded humbled in recent interviews, his attitude on Fantasy couldn’t be more different.
He debuted at this year’s VMAs, complicates Fantasy‘s intermittent ugliness.Kanye West may be obnoxious, but at least he’s interested in confronting those aspects of his identity through his music.
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