Kanye Is Right (About His Albums)
Today in an interview, Kanye West said that his most beloved and respected album—the sprawling 2010 monstrosity My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy—is not his best. Let’s once again celebrate Kanye for being right.
In a two-hour live interview with something called SHOWStudio, Kanye, according to Complex, rated both Yeezus and 808s & Heartbreak over Twisted Fantasy, which is by one measure the eighth best album since 2001, and by another the best since 2010:
Kanye’s talk about his music wasn’t as extensive, but he did mention that he believes Yeezus and 808s & Heartbreak were better albums than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy because it was an apology album and not as groundbreaking as the other two.
On the one hand, Kanye is falling into a trap of pretension in which he prioritizes albums that he feels were “groundbreaking”—808s with its misty, morose Autotuned ballads, and Yeezus with its EDM-nodding acid beats. On the other hand, those two albums are purely better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a bloated amalgamation of his previous records that is propped up by some of his best songs (“Dark Fantasy,” “Devil in a New Dress”) but ultimately sags under the force of its own weight.
People really love that album for some reason! It is grandiose and structurally ambitious. Nicki Minaj has a very good and famous verse. “Runaway” is a song that nice people like to pretend speaks to them. Yet Twisted Fantasy is also deeply self-indulgent, but without the sense of wonder or humor of his first two epics, The College Dropout and Late Registration. It is a long, dreary record with useless songs about the messy unclenching of a relationship that not even Kanye cares about anymore. Given the current status of his life—happily married with a kid and another on the way—it’s easy to see why Twisted Fantasy has dimmed in Kanye’s eyes.
Now, what will it take for you?
[image via Getty]
