A testament to talent reigning supreme above all. As Noah Callahan-Bever wrote, Ye’s true aim was to create “an undeniable piece of art, so compelling it would eclipse all his perceived missteps and reassert his prominence in, his absolute necessity to, the culture.”Īnd he did just that. This wasn’t just Kanye tapping people to make the project hot-this was Kanye leaning on giants to help make a towering piece of work. Sure, rappers have long littered their albums with guest features and beats from the hottest producers in the game, but this was different. From the outside, it was unlike anything we’d ever seen.
Everyone from JAY-Z, Raekwon, and Pusha-T to RZA, Nicki Minaj, and Q-Tip would find their way to the studio to help Ye with his secret project.
Over the course of a year, he would fly in a who’s who of rap royalty. Kanye returned to Hawaii, a locale he found comfort in after the death of his mother, to record the project. So he did what he always does when his back is to the wall. It seemed as though everyone was against him. Even President Obama opined that he was a jackass.
It was the talk of nearly every news show. The night became infamous when Kanye interrupted Taylor Swift as she accepted her award for Video of the Year. The apogee of that wildness came as he descended on the 2009 MTV VMAs red carpet with a bottle of Henny in hand and his new girlfriend in tow. Still reeling from the sudden loss of his mother and the dissolution of an engagement, Kanye was a little out of control. And it came out all throughout the album. A stunt if there ever was one, with Kanye basically asking, “Can anything fuck with this?” The answer, we’d find out later, was a resounding, “Nah, B.” MBDTF was famously made out of a symphony of pain, confusion, and heartache. “Can we get much higher?” It’s one of the first phrases you hear on the project. It was also the album that would act as a high water mark for the decade to come. It felt like the album Kanye was waiting his entire career to make.
KANYE WEST MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY LP ART REGISTRATION
Without the earnest gospel and soul of College Dropout or the ostentation of Late Registration or the pop maximalism of Graduation, you don’t get My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It took all of six years and five solo projects to get to that point and to perfectly hone the craft. The first saw an expert postmodernist who, as he told McQueen, leaned “on something that people are familiar with and comfortable with to get their attention.” Aside from his impact on the worlds of fashion and sneakers, he bridged gaps, created new lanes, and sought to expand the purview of what a rap record could be. With that, it may be permissible to divide Kanye West’s musical career into two epochs: pre- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and post- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It felt like a new chapter in Kanye’s career, one that wouldn’t include albums like his opus, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. In their place were uncomfortable sounds abutting one another to create something wholly original. Gone were the ornate orchestrations, cleanly chopped soul loops, and beautiful textures. Stepping forward with what I know about architecture, about classicism, about society, about texture, about synesthesia-the ability to see sound-and the way everything is everything and all these things combine, and then starting from scratch.” He wanted to abandon most of what had made him a household name over the past nine years. While on the press run for his sixth album, Yeezus, Kanye West, in conversation with director Steve McQueen, said the album was “the beginning of me as a new kind of artist.
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