My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Submitted by the panel on 17 February 2013 - 9:34pm

Cover:

Artist:

Kanye West

album-ID:

a_91

Nationality:

USA

Year:

2 010

Release-year:

0000

Num-of-tracks:

Track-listing:

Dark Fantasy*Gorgeous*POWER*All Of The Lights (Interlude)*All Of The Lights*Monster*So Appalled*Devil In A New Dress*Runaway*Hell Of A Life*Blame Game*Lost In The World*Who Will Survive In America

Length-in-mins:

Nominator:

Bean

meeting-ID:

m_34

Now-num:

Spotify-URL:

6LBiuhK7PZKjVXyMfPxPoh

Grooveshark-URL:

My+Beautiful+Dark+Twisted+Fantasy/5093475

Short-title:

beautifulDark

nominator-ID:

u_43

Meeting-date:

Tuesday, 1 March 2011

MusicBrainz-URL:

5d6e21e1-deb5-428e-bb42-c2a567f3619b

Wikipedia-URL:

My_Beautiful_Dark_Twisted_Fantasy

Spotify-link-type:

album

Metacritic-URL:

my-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy/kanye-west

Discogs-URL:

Kanye-West-My-Beautiful-Dark-Twisted-Fantasy/master/288153

Allmusic-URL:

my-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy-mw0002022752

BBC-URL:

jngw

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82

reviewed by

Richard Norbury
74

reviewed by

Glyn Lewis

Know where the swamp is

6-10-13

5

For an album that seemed to receive such universal and unqualified acclaim, I found this to be a pretty patchy offering. Monster I think is fantastic – a rumbling, driving groove which includes Nicki Minaj delivering an astonishing top drawer mentalist rap performance. Bits and pieces of other songs had some great elements, but there were a few passages which struck me as embarrassingly poor – the ‘Easy Taught Me’ dialogue from Blame Game? Hmmm, album of the year?

A moment of self-awareness and self-doubt may be very unusual for a big name rap act and is something to applaud, but I’m not really sure it warrants quite the fanfare and amazement it seems to have received. The fact that it has taken 20 years or more for a mainstream rap artist to more or less acknowledge the ugliness of the decadent, dumb, hedonism that is de riguer for a modern performer in the genre is perhaps what is actually, as per the words of the song, ‘fucking ridiculous’.

Lyrics aside, there is loads of great musical work on here, all sorts of ideas in all sorts of combinations, delivered very slickly and convincingly. However it is such a scattergun approach that you never get a sense of any vaguely unifying idea to give you any particular indication that any of these songs might have originated from the same album.

After all that, I did found it a struggle to find a track that was actually that bad, there are redeeming elements on all these pieces. Well worth the listen but not really in masterpiece territory, in spite of the Greg Lake sample.
52

reviewed by

Matthew Baker

Kanye West is NOT a service station on the M1

Oh God, I'm struggling to remember any of the tracks on this.
28

reviewed by

Neil Hornsey

My gun's bigger than yours

It's sad that in 30 years rap hasn't moved on more. There's nothing in this that wasn't done to death in the glory years of hip hop... the same gloating tedious stories about money and women and crime, yet even more offensive for no apparent reason. The samples are predictable and uninteresting while the beats are pedestrian.