Kanye West - Dark Twisted Fantasy

okay Rick Ross sounds way way better on this

deeper voice against all that aggravating treble = more balanced overall sound

"Runaway" musically is also pretty dope until the autotune nonsense

the way it builds is just great

also lol for all time at Kanye sending girls pictures of his dick and then writing it in a song and then the pictures turning up on the internet

like for real, I think the chorus to this song is fucking fantastic

i still love this album and the pitchfork score just reinforces how surreal and logic defying its appeal is

djp u are enjoying this record in all the right ways imo

like that highly reverbed hit that substitutes in for a snare hit on the second half of the chorus is a tiny detail but one that adds momentum to the beat and pulls it forward into awesome

of course things start getting incredibly self-indulgent around 3:30 but for some reason I'm not mad about it, maybe because the string chords that pull in shortly before 4:00 really fill out that sound

there's some really effective heart-on-sleeve warmth all through this beat in terms of the selection of that analogue bass synth and the tinny reverb on the Penderecki-esque piano bit

and yes, it should stop at 5:50, I do agree with that

actually this extended coda would have been okay without the autotune over it

as it stands it's just kind of like "dude I know you love this song and it's incredibly dope but now your just rubbing it raw"

grr "you're"

okay I was a little disappointed that "Hell of a Life" wasn't full-on 6/8 but the 3-against-2 is actually kind of hot

ha, so it's like "how can I make this song more awesome to DJP after piling it full of polyrhythms.... oh I know, I'll put in an a capella break"

why the hell don't I have any John Legend albums, is what I want to know right now

what makes this album fascinating/enjoyable to me is its imperfection

this is true -- my prob is that this is true for every single kanye album, & of course by proxy kanye himself -- and 'my dark twisted fantasy' is not his best/10.0 album

i would've love to have seen a 10 given to the xx album since it's kind of a perfect album & they came in w/ such a fully formed sound & aesthetic -- but i understand being wary of saddling a debut indie album w/ a 10.0

oh my fucking god

this fucking song

just got to the speaker-panning section

fucking yes

also yeah I would have heartily cosigned a 10.0 for The XX

wait how are there 3.5 minutes left in this song

Now you're approaching the boring part of the album.

i mean albums can really never be like special effects-driven movies where you really can feel or see or hear the budget in the final product in any meaningful way.

this really isn't true - admittedly you have to sort of be a geek or have spent a lot of time with super-audio-geeks, but giant-budget albums pretty much announce themselves from their opening moments as clearly as big blockbuster movies announce themselves before the opening credits are done rolling

― aerosmith: the acid house years (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, November 22, 2010 2:07 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I was saying this in response to someone basically saying that Kanye is the only rapper in the world who has the money to make this album, like it's Avatar or a Pixar movie or something where it costs millions just to produce technology that's used in every single frame, so you're either missing the point of what I was saying or taking it in some complete other direction. do you really thing MBDTF or really any album works on the same level? like, ooh, Elton John and a choir and some nice drum machine programming, that definitely cost millions.

okay dude, where is your editor

no one wants to hear Chris Rock at this point

although lol at "Cirque du Soleil pussy" and "I ain't never seen this part of Pussytown before"

also hindsight is 20/20 but maybe when ppl gave you a nickname that sounded like "Yeasty" you should have said "hold up, no"

okay was not really expecting "Lost in the World" to do that

I guess he got enough feedback about "Pinocchio Story" that he was not going to do that again

i would much rather here a kanye + rick ross album than a kanye + jay-z album

lost in the world reminds me of todd rundgren for some reason

this is exactly how he needed to end this album IMO

which pun do you guys think is worse

obamanation

or

swallowship

obama definitely. a decent punchline rapper could've sold the swallowship line by not shouting it like the most clever thing in the world and just moving onto the next joke.

so in summation:

This is a very good album. Kanye gets in his own way sometimes, but when he doesn't this is blazing brilliance. Unfortunately, the spots where Kanye's ego isn't massively fun to listen to are a massive bummer to listen to.

I would not have given this album a 10.0 but this will likely be on my top 10 list of the year. If you'd told me in January that Kanye would unambiguously be in my top 5 and MIA wouldn't even be under consideration*, I would have called you crazy.

xp: in the context of the song, I don't think anything special was made out of "swallowship"

* I still like MAYA a lot, it's just that there are at least 10 other albums I've heard this year that are better.

Obamanation.

now off to the Pretty Hate Machine re-release

i would've love to have seen a 10 given to the xx album since it's kind of a perfect album & they came in w/ such a fully formed sound & aesthetic -- but i understand being wary of saddling a debut indie album w/ a 10.0

― J0rdan S., Monday, 22 November 2010 20:08 (11 minutes ago)

uerugh i like some joints ok but the indie-goth sade jr. vibe =/= 10.0 worthy at all

a lot of those songs are way underwritten too & just slide by on ~pleasant vibes~

well no, that song is really about the use of space in the musical arrangements

actually "VCR" might have kept me from giving it a 10.0; that's the only song on there that I think is the flawed/boring mess that detractors of the album hear all the way through it

grrrrrr for "song" I meant "album"

The songs are not underwritten at all, not if you start breaking them down both harmonically and looking at the arrangements, with the sole exception of "VCR" which I think has some tempo issues and could have used more attention paid to the rhythm section

actually i think the worse pun is jay-z saying "i'm not only fly/ i'm not playin" and trying as hard as humanly possible to make "playin" sound like "plane"

'shelter' is p much the only song that really has some songwriting that sticks w/ me

by 'underwritten' i mean 'conceived to be underwhelming' not, like, 'not enough chord changes'

I don't think anything on that album was "conceived to be underwhelming"

also yeah I would have heartily cosigned a 10.0 for The XX

co-cosign ^^

* I still like MAYA a lot, it's just that there are at least 10 other albums I've heard this year that are better.

likewise -- MAYA will prob. be on my 'honorable mentions' list or w/e

now off to the Pretty Hate Machine re-release

liveblog?

deej, that is a seriously prejudicial read of what's happening on that album; the whole thing is intentionally mellow and open, also in many spots low-key, but "intentionally underwhelming" is you putting words into their mouths

but regardless of yr opinion on xx's quality, doesnt it feel like some pretty underwhelming ambitions to get a 10.0? its an album synthesizing some influences that are becoming more hip, i.e. R&B, 2step, Sade, but im not really sure that is enough to stand out as some kind of meaningful historically significant record. which, whatever its flaws the kanye feels like

i feel like i'm arguing w/ dr. jekyll here

liveblog?

ha I do have to do SOME work today dude

but regardless of yr opinion on xx's quality, doesnt it feel like some pretty underwhelming ambitions to get a 10.0?

... no? Because if I felt that way, I wouldn't have agreed with J0rdan that I would have given it a 10.0?

"I love this."
"Oh come on, you don't really."
"... oh my god YOU ARE RIGHT"

as i said earlier in some thread, i think you could def make a reasonable argument for this album to be "given" a 10, but 'ambition!' is a pretty slippery slope

eh. i just think its a weird record to single out for that sort of thing. the vibe it goes for has been done before, its just done under an indie tent so it gets more attention for it. also im kind of shocked that DP would rep for any record w/ singing as bad as that dude's

chick is a good singer, tho

i really hate the affectedness of his voice. hes fakin it like Plies

im kind of shocked that DP would rep for any record w/ singing as bad as that dude's

thought u meant kanye

i actually miss when this thread was about kanye

those halcyon days of 16 minutes ago