My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy reviewed

 

Once upon a time, I was really into Kanye West. College Dropout was a great album where every track was killer and every skit was hilarious.  After that, things started to slide.  Late Registration was good but there were some instances of some obvious filler tracks and it didn't lend itself to much repeated listening.  And if I never hear "Golddigger" again, it will be too soon.  Graduation just had nothing but three killer tracks and one good track.  I just listened to it once and that was it.  I didn't even bother with 808's and Heartbreaks since none of the singles were killer.  However, everybody seems to deem his latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, as his greatest album yet.  So is it?  No, it's not.  Not to say it's a bad album since it's not, just not that good.

But there is always one thing that Kanye can do far better than most of his contemporaries and that is his production and his beats.  This album may have his most interesting and entertaining beats yet.  Like in "Power", where it combines guitars, sirens and a women's choir to make something totally exhilarating leaving you breathless.  And even the relatively sparser production on "So Appalled" and "Runaway" moves at an even pace that is still entertaining.  The last time I heard a Kanye beat almost as good as it's displayed here was on "Flashing Lights" from Graduation.

While Kanye still has stellar production, his lyrics have taken a backseat.  Now some may argue that's in been the case for quite some time...I don't know who's arguing it but surely someone thinks that.  There are some of Kanye's clever wordplay at work like calling himself the "Abomination of Obama's nation" which is one of his better lyrics, but those moments are few and far between.  It gets so bad that he gets regularly murdered by every guest star on this album.  I mean you expect that from Jay-Z or Kid Cudi or John Legend.  But when you have Rick Ross or the RZA or Nicki Minaj murdering Kanye on his own song, there's a problem there.

But even weak lyrics aren't the album's fatal flaw since those lyrics are weak by Kanye standards and not standards to rap.....which has gone DOOOOWWWWWWWWWWNNNNNNN lately.  No, I don't like how long and self-indulgent this is.  "Runaway" is a nice 5-minute song that gets stretched out to 9-minutes so he could play with his vocoder and while Kanye never had a real knack for ending songs, he had enough sense to make the last track of an album the one where he rambles on about stuff after the song's over.  And in the "Blame Game" West flat out just steals a few minutes of one of Chris Rock's monologues and it's not even a funny one.  Lastly, the album has the audacity to end with applause...unearned applause.

This isn't a bad album by any means, it's just somewhat disappointing.  The production is still so very good even if the instances where it actually complements the lyrics are few and far between with the only real killer tracks being "All of the Lights", "Monster" and "Lost in the World".  Now, this may be an album that takes some repeat listenings to fully get and this review may be an artifact of a more naive me, but right now it's more of an interesting failure.

6/10