12/7/10 Edit: This post prompted Marcus Dowling of True Genius Requires Insanity to invite me to participate in a friendly debate about the merits of Kanye's album on TGRI's BlogTalk internet radio show. We'll be discussing it on Wednesday, December 8th at 6pm, and I think the conversation will be archived there later.

Last week I did my usual Monthly Report post of my 5 favorite albums that were released in November, and as you may have noticed, the month's most acclaimed and high profile new release, Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was not on it. Given the hysterically over the top 10/10 and 5 star reviews that greeted the album's arrival, I guess it's impossible to say anything less than positive about it without coming across somewhat contrarian or reactionary. But I might as well try and make my case for why it's simply a mediocre and unpleasant album, and not a perfect or even fascinatingly flawed one.

I'll say this: Kanye was possibly my favorite person making music, or at least the one I was most enthusiastic about, from about 2002 to 2005, first for his production, then for the clumsy but likable and often clever rapper that emerged on the Get Well Soon and I'm Good mixtapes, and the still clumsy but increasingly confident and thoughtful MC that made The College Dropout and especially Late Registration. And while my confidence in him was shaken with the merely good Graduation, I didn't even really write the guy off after 808s & Heartbreak which, as much as I hated it, was kind of a one-off experiment that gave me no reason to give up on hope of his next rap album being good. I even thought maybe his quality control would elevate The Blueprint 3 above Jay's post-retirement doldrums, before that album turned out to be an utter shit sandwich. So I tried to go into this album with an open mind, at least before the hit and miss G.O.O.D. Friday leaks started lowering my expectations all over again.

I thought Fantasy would end up being roughly on par with Graduation, a record I don't particularly like as a whole but love at least a handful of songs on. But really there's just nothing on here I enjoy remotely as much as "Flashing Lights" or "Everything I Am" or "Champion." The first two tracks, the kind of misshapen, drawn out "Dark Fantasy" (also too long and poorly structured is a running theme of most of the songs on this album) has pointless windchimes slathered all over the generic piano loop beat, and the obnoxious faux lo-fi "Gorgeous" feels like it exists primarily to make the third track, "Power," sound bigger and better than it did as the single that underwhelmed me all summer. After that, you get into the guest-heavy middle half hour of mostly songs that were previously heard in the G.O.O.D. Friday campaign, and out of the dozens of voices you hear, the most enjoyable verses come, improbably, from Nicki Minaj and Fergie. Honestly, Kid Cudi's voice may be my single least favorite sound in popular music right now, so any album that asks me to listen to it on two different songs is sapping my goodwill right off the bat. And don't even get me started on "Runaway," which gets halfway to being the breakout pop hit every previous Kanye album has had, but falls apart with first draft laziness on the almost inspired chorus ("the jerkoffs that'll never take work off"? really?), cringe-inducing Kanye vamping, an off-topic verse from the one Clipse guy that's slightly less boring anonymous than the other Clipse guy, and that completely useless extended album mix. Where Kanye used to self-deprecatingly compare himself to rap's calmer, more reserved voices like Ma$e and Fabolous, now he's trying to keep up with Wayne and Nicki, leaning into every lame punchline with shouts and grunts.

I'm not saying I outright hate the album, but even the songs that appeal to me on some level on the second half are marred by some annoyance or another. "Hell Of A Life" has some of the album's best production, but that awful "Iron Man" chorus. "Blame Game," might be my favorite track, and feels more emotionally honest and vulnerable than anything on 808s, but the cheesy poetry slam part grates on me more than the Chris Rock gags. The Bon Iver stuff where Charlie Wilson's singing is more audible than Bon Iver's is nice, but "Lost In The World" also has some of Kanye's most Madlibs fill-in-the-blank rhymes on the album. Having the album's closest thing to 'serious social commentary' imported from Gil Scott-Heron would be a weak trick even if he didn't already do it on Late Registration. "Devil In A New Dress" is a nice throwback soul beat from one of Kanye's Blueprint co-architects, Bink, but the whole thing feels kind of empty and underwritten with all the instrumental pauses that seem less deliberate or clever than just lazy. And that's the strange thing about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: for all the talk of this being an epic, ambitious statement from rap's reigning overachieving perfectionist, the whole thing feels as piecemeal and stitched together as any other major label rap album, with a random assortment of guests and co-producers helping to prop up the inconsistent inspiration of its star. I'm tired of hearing about the "5000 man hours" spent on a song with rhymes as lazy and smugly clever as "Power," or how ambitious an album is that sounds no more ambitious than Late Registration and not remotely as successful at realizing its ambitions. It's like if Pete Townshend came out with a new epic rock opera that sounded just like his other ones, and everyone gave him an enthusiastic pat on the back just for trying. Giving this album a 'weird' title and cover art helped set it up as a masterpiece; I'm reasonably certain if Kanye released the exact same CD as Good Ass Job with a goofy mascot bear graphic on the cover, we'd all be talking about it in much different terms.

One of the running themes of my various conversations and arguments about this album over the last few weeks has been comparing to various AOR disasters of hubris like Be Here Now or Chinese Democracy, befitting Kanye's status as the only guy in rap going for a real classic rock idea of album as art or as an auteurist statement. But at the moment, the album this most feels like to me is No Line On The Horizon, the U2 album that dropped with a thud of indifference everywhere last year but still sold boatloads and got 5 stars from Rolling Stone and a ton of other mags because, well, they're U2, they've set the precedent that everything they do is big and worthy of attention. Kanye has set a similar precedent in his much younger career, and while he's done a better job of making his uninspired moments more bombastic and attention-grabbing than Bono, who at least does a good job of making his self-aggrandizing monomania at least seem well-intentioned and earnest most of the time, I'm not sure Fantasy is any better or any more fun to listen to than the shrug that was No Line On The Horizon

Ultimately, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is just another rap album, and since most of the rapping is subpar if not head-thuddingly stupid, and the beats are diverse and far-reaching but don't really knock that hard, it's just kind of not a very good rap album. It doesn't transcend its genre, and it sure as hell doesn't transcend the flaws and foibles of its maker, who's just done much better in the past. And that's the thing that grates on me about this album more than anything else, the implicit message of every rave review that the ambition and the drive is enough, that Kanye's sheer will and desire to make a classic album every time makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kanye's antics give the album a context and make it a good conversation piece, but they don't make it good. He's got the same shortcomings he did 5 years ago, but he's more assured that he's already great, and the fans that have stuck by him longer than I've felt it's rewarding to are happy to accept his wack rhymes and paper-thin drums and superficial extra-genre signifiers over and over, diminishing returns be damned. Kanye's mixture of bravado and insecurity isn't unique -- it's damn near the whole theme of modern hip hop. He's always been eager to please, and his weaker early solo songs like "Wow" sound like him trying to impress his Roc-A-Fella friends; this album sounds like him trying to impress his new dance music/indie rock and fashion and art world friends. If nothing else, I will give him credit for sticking to commitment to a concept: from the Fantasy of the title, to the portrait of the artist naked on the couch on the cover, to the "jerkoffs" in the centerpiece single's chorus, to the punchlines about his balls, this whole album is masturbatory to the core.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 06, 2010 at 11:54 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.