my beautiful dark twisted fantasy full album

In anyone else’s hands it’d be an A-list circle-jerk of horrid proportions, but through Kanye’s bar-raising vision it becomes a truly wondrous thing, all Rocky-apeing brass flourishes and epileptic drum’n’bass breaks.Įlsewhere, ‘Monster’ proves a riotous bit of respite, Yeezy sending up his rep with a self-mocking diatribe about drowning his pain in a blizzard of blow jobs and mass adulation (beats Prozac, we suppose) while Nicki Minaj sets the dials to ‘ridiculous’ with a fire-breathing, raga-inflected verse. ‘All Of The Lights’ is the sleb-studded centrepiece, with a credit list including Rihanna, Elton John, Alicia Keys, John Legend, The-Dream, Fergie, Kid Cudi, Ryan Leslie, Charlie Wilson, Tony Williams and La Roux’s Elly Jackson. Then the record’s first real moment of catharsis arrives in the shape of the gladiatorial ‘Power’, whose tribal fanfare and supercharged lyric seems to imagine in advance Kanye’s warm welcome into heaven: “ I guess every superhero need his theme music”. ‘My Beautiful…’ kicks off proceedings with a suitable sense of what’s at stake here a tense, string-laden affair with Kanye musing how “ the plan was to drink until the pain was over/But what’s worse, the pain or the hangover?” There’s more trouble at hand with Kid Cudi collaboration ‘Gorgeous’’s slouching guitars but Kanye relocates his funny bone with lines like: “ This week has been a bad massage/I need a happy ending”. It’s a world away from the indifferent reception afforded to ‘808s & Heartbreak’, a brave but unloveable record of synth-drenched introspection dealing with Kanye’s split from Alexis Phifer in 2008 and the tragic death of his mother, who died following cosmetic surgery.

Reportedly a cool $3million in the making and with a stellar cast comprising the great and good of 2010’s musical establishment – plus Fergie from Black Eyed Peas – it’s an epically conceived song-suite, a titanic wrestling with music’s most colossal ego that effortlessly engages its hype as the most feverishly anticipated record of the year. It’s an utterly dazzling portrait of a 21st-century schizoid man that is by turns sickeningly egocentric, contrite, wise, stupid and self-mocking. ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ captures that essence in full. A man with a head so unfeasibly smooth, it looks like he’s slowly evolving into a Madame Tussauds effigy of himself.įor better or worse, he’s also the pop star for our morally implicated times an instinctive consumer with a mouthful of diamonds and furtive bad conscience, a performer who lives the American dream to its fullest with a creeping sense of the spiritual void at its heart. Kanye West: douchebag, enemy of the state, incurable gobshite who’s annoyed more American presidents than Fidel Castro.

My beautiful dark twisted fantasy full album