As a hip-hop producer, West has been (rightly) spoken of as among the greats of the past decade's renaissance, a musical auteur on a par with Timberland or the Neptunes: but this is squawky, reedy, just banal.Īs a vocalist and frontman, West has never been exactly overburdened with charisma. Following a solitary, stabbed piano melody, we are sucked into six minutes of rising sonic extravagance, lyrical bombast, until all that remains is a fuzz-backed, heavily filtered vocal doing an impression of waves of guitar feedback. Intercut with this sort of musical chest-beating are tracks like All of the Lights (Interlude), a short burst of an orchestra warming up, a nice analogue for the sense that money has not bought West taste.Īlthough there are plenty of contenders for this title, the apex of his full-frontal assault on modesty is Runaway, and it is simultaneously breathtaking and desperately mediocre. the world is ours." The backing track, with its handclaps and repeating "way-hey-hey" vocal, makes it feel to all intents and purposes like Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll. "Every superhero needs his theme music," he raps, "tripping off the power. The pomp and ceremony of Power exemplifies his mania. If his debut demonstrated the value of vaulting ambition, Dark Fantasy represents its folly. Even on West's first, best album, 2004's The CollegeDropout, there were lots of sky-scraping solipsism and opulent fripperies (skits, overlong tracks).
There's a gospel chorus asking West's rhetorical (for him) question, "can we get much higher?" with a driving, plinky-plonk piano-led rhythm underscoring its epic sense of ambition - and that's great. DarkFantasy, the opener, works in this vein. Hubris isn't the problem, in itself - hubris has often been the source of great art. Sampling everyone from Aphex Twin to Mike Oldfield, Gil Scott-Heron to Black Sabbath, this is the work of an artist so infatuated with his own fame and greatness it warps towards the grotesque, like Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey's sofa, but for 70 minutes. Kanye West's fifth studio album has garnered a landslide of critical praise - including, notably a rare perfect 10 from the esteemed US music website Pitchfork - triggered by his stratospheric celebrity, his very public eccentricity, and his increasingly tenuous grasp on reality. When the most interesting thing about an album is its reviews, there's probably something wrong. Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Mercury)
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