Kanye West - Dark Twisted Fantasy

J0rdan, you're on T-shirt detail.

weirds me out than anyone would be so petrified about handing out a perfect score, at least once in a while.

I think p4k is trying more to turn themselves into the rolling stone of the 00s

i think just selling it as "an ambitious & generous album [note: i'm purposefully leaving out negatives] by our generation's transcendent pop star" makes more sense

yeah, but that reads more like 4/5 copy

i think mags in general, and especially Pitchfork/Complex/Fader/Rolling Stone, would just rather join hands and chant "WE ARE WE ARE, THE KANYE GENERATION" than try for a measured, nuanced critique of the album

yeah that's the thing, albums with this kind of balance of ambition/accomplishment come out all the time, and they often get Chinese Democracy pans or "could've been great if it was shorter and less indulgent" 4/5 reviews

rolling stone doesn't ever seem to have worried about giving something the wrong score. they just go back and fix it in the book.

i still don't see how "art-prog-rap" represents pfork's 'aesthetic outlook'

i think just selling it as "an ambitious & generous album [note: i'm purposefully leaving out negatives] by our generation's transcendent pop star" makes more sense

― J0rdan S., Monday, November 22, 2010 9:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

idk i think kanye is obvi aiming at them? I mean hes usin effin bon iver

examples? xp to s dude

yeah that's the thing, albums with this kind of balance of ambition/accomplishment come out all the time, and they often get Chinese Democracy pans or "could've been great if it was shorter and less indulgent" 4/5 reviews

― some dude, Monday, November 22, 2010 9:41 PM (26 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i argued nitsuh's review was this & you didnt like that one either

i think PF is in the demographic that Kanye is aiming at but for some reason i don't see him actively thinking about PF scores the way ?uestlove does or the way he obsesses over a lot of milemarkers of industry/fan approval

but again, it isn't just p4k, tho. looking at that METACRITIC page, a lot of publications have already given the disc a perfect rating (or, in the case of other publications cited by METACRITIC, damn close to perfect scores).

I think Lex is 100% wrong in his aggressive slating of the album. It has issues but the stuff on it that I think works works really really well, well enough to make up for the things that don't.

well nitsuh's review didn't have a number on it so it's hard to really place it in the score conversation. and obv it wasn't a badly written review or anything, it just falls victim to the same "here's 80% big picture stuff about kanye and a quick paragraph actually talking about some of the individual non-singles" problem i have w/ most reviews of this album. (xpost)

i think PF is in the demographic that Kanye is aiming at but for some reason i don't see him actively thinking about PF scores the way ?uestlove does or the way he obsesses over a lot of milemarkers of industry/fan approval

― some dude, Monday, November 22, 2010 9:43 PM (56 seconds ago) Bookmark

i agree w/ that. im just sayin i think kanye makes sense as an artist to represent the mainstreaming of the pfork aesthetic /worldview. a lil bit indie, lil bit hip hop, arty & ambitious, internet-centered. idk

kanye def appeals to the rockist auteur part of p4k's sensibilities

kanye def appeals to the rockist auteur part of p4k's listener's sensibilities

yeah...i still don't get how "this artist is in this publication's sweet spot" in and of itself translates to "yes of course they gave this a 10.0" though

idk i think kanye is obvi aiming at them? I mean hes usin effin bon iver

― challop and a muff (deej), Monday, November 22, 2010 9:41 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

well sure, but the dude is using autotune on every part so it's not exactly like "folk music!" or w/e

Just finished reading the p4k review - it seriously could've been shorted to about 4 sentences if the reviewer didn't take up the rest of the space talking about kanye's real life relevance to "his art".

It makes me wonder whether the 3,000 word allotment p4k gives themselves is really justified for music journalism... I really truly did feel the review went on for far too long than it should've.

No opinion on the actual album for myself.

maybe they are just trying to make bigtime music mag criticism relevant again in 2010 by piggybacking onto kanye

idk i think kanye is obvi aiming at them? I mean hes usin effin bon iver

v. disappointed that kanye didn't collaborate with iron & wine, too.

after Dan's PDA with the album this afternoon, I gave it another spin, and am still in lex's camp. "Power," "Monster," "Gorgeous," and Ross' bit on "Devil in a Blue Dress" are all I want to listen to again. A 5.0, I guess, if I were reviewing it.

No opinion on the actual album for myself.

― Good news, everyone! (kelpolaris), Monday, November 22, 2010 9:48 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

thanks for playing

yeah...i still don't get how "this artist is in this publication's sweet spot" in and of itself translates to "yes of course they gave this a 10.0" though

some dude OTM. it's a surprisingly high rating for such a bizarre album. person pitch and MPP got scores in the high 9s, but not 10.0s, and they're way closer to the kind of thing that pitchfork regularly gushes over.

sorry - i wasn't thinking through what i was writing. sonically bigger and more accessible viz. radio jams/ stadium sound. personally less accessible - it's kanye at his most oblique, least personal...generalizing himself away from the very connected, almost communal feeling of college dropout and late registration, but before the totally introspective/self-absorption of 808s and MBDTF.

the first two albums had family business & roses & hey mama & never let me down - a sense of family, of neighbourhood, of location, city. and even when they didn't he had children's choirs backing him up on we don't care and gigantic guest lists of people who didn't seem totally arbitrary. the who's who of NYC and Chicago rap scenes made it feel a block party hosted by Kanye. the raps are populated by real PEOPLE - not just abstract evil supermodels/whores...his cousin who's too niggerish now, his aunt pam, his mom and his grandfather at sit-ins, jobs at the mall, and picking up girls off blackplanet with Talib, and undeclared sophomores with compulsive shopping habits, his homie Mali...hell, even his G.O.O.D. Music interns.

by graduation, his dad gets mentioned on champion, and Jay-Z gets an entire song, but other than that it's all feel good aphorisms, pump-up Dr. Phil-isms, etc. Homecoming is a billion times less warm and lived in than its initial College Dropout area incarnation w/ John Legend, and the most detailed picture of a non-Kanye person we get is Flashing Lights (which probably holds up the best out of anything on this). the entire glow-in-the-dark tour was this odd paean to kanye's isolation from the world...him lost in space with a computer and holographic sex-computers. i wrote a piece at the time for my college paper about how ODD it seemed for a hip hop show. the immense ego, pervasive loneliness, and the musical desire to transcend the boundaries of 'merely' rap (which, SMH, but whatever). by graduation he was taking pictures at the grammys w Feist and sampling Peter Bjorn & John on Mixtapes and trying to move from 'rapper' to 'pop star' on his way to 'icon'

808s he's already totally isolated, even moreso than graduation, but the robot-with-a-broken-heart thing worked so well that he was more accessible than graduation. kanye broken and dissatisfied with what he spent graduation aspiring to reach. but at the same time, he's not living in a populated world - his mom is only present as a ghost and all the other characters are women who have done him wrong - objects of lust/fury/scorn

MBDTF is sonically impressive - way more so than graduation in some senses - or maybe just more appealing to me, and it's nice to see kanye rapping again with some purpose, even if i still prefer him ~Dropout/Registration, but while the posse cuts on his first two albums felt communal and natural - kanye tossing lines and verses back and forth with people he genuinely liked, the guest spots here (even the very very good ones) almost feel like perfunctory appearances, not necessarily connected to his narrative across this album (save perhaps Pusha T). and the themes are total solipsism now. still more interesting than graduation, if only because he has things about himself to genuinely grapple with here, but i've always found his issues more interesting when filtered through other stories/experiences/people.

this is poorly articulated, but it's the best i can do right now.

youre fooling yourself if you dont think contrarianism didnt play at least some part in p4k giving this a 10.0

xxxxxp clearly.

i still say the title change and weird artwork is probably the smartest thing he did about this whole project -- really doubt the same album would get 10/10s and 5/5s everywhere if it was called Good Ass Job and had another goofy mascot bear graphic on the cover

good post, alex

like everything except for "so appalled" and "devil in a new dress". oh god and that hideous, hideous chris rock bit at the end of "the blame game" (which would have been GREAT if he'd kept it to like 15 seconds).

damn that alex in montreal post is great

The cover reminds me Steely Dan attempting Gaucho now.

^^ otm

yeah everytime I think of publications giving this a perfect score I just think of them having to listen to kanye reupholstering chris rock's pussy in 5 years, for the 13932809th time

If I were feeling sinister I'd posit this album as Kanye's Gaucho, with the caveat that SD's character sketches felt lived-in.

thx. i think this also plays into the sonic shifts from soul loops to soul loops + jon brion strings (artsiness! ambition! respectability!) to big stadium synths and DAFT PUNK (populist! dancey! outside-the-box for rap at the time!) to autotune + 808s (sad kanye!) to this kind of big-enough-to-absorb-it-all prog rock and Bon Iver and fucking Aphex Twin and Elton John and Gil Scott-Heron.

but yeah. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is so incredibly PREDICTABLE in some senses. musically, lyrically, emotionally, there was never really any other option for Kanye. He was always climbing higher, always in desperate need of both critical AND popular adulation, and always dissatisfied with the things he wanted once he got them.

Can we get much higher? is kind of the POINT of Kanye. You can get higher and higher, but you just keep on burning things off. You're either going to plummet like Icarus or burn off everything human about you and end up on Olympus, but in the end you're either dead or a god, which may as well be the same thing as far as he's concerned.

youre fooling yourself if you dont think contrarianism didnt play at least some part in p4k giving this a 10.0

― ＿|￣|○|￣|○|￣|○ (dayo), Monday, November 22, 2010 9:55 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

contrarianism against what? the album has a 98 on metacritic -- if anything you'd have to agree w/ ship's characterization of all mags being WE ARE THE KANYE, GENERATION

some dude OTM. it's a surprisingly high rating for such a bizarre album. person pitch and MPP got scores in the high 9s, but not 10.0s, and they're way closer to the kind of thing that pitchfork regularly gushes over.

― phish in your sleazebag (contenderizer), Monday, November 22, 2010 9:53 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

how is this post agreeing with somedude?

complex is double guilty of that for being a walking bukakke for kid cudi

yeah...i still don't get how "this artist is in this publication's sweet spot" in and of itself translates to "yes of course they gave this a 10.0" though

― some dude, Monday, November 22, 2010 9:47 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

'publication's sweet spot' means 'people who write for the publication like it a lot' which is what happened. get it? and we can identify strains in pfork's value system that suggest this record makes perfect sense to be acclaimed, cant we? i dont see whats so hard abt this

contrarianism against what? the album has a 98 on metacritic -- if anything you'd have to agree w/ ship's characterization of all mags being WE ARE THE KANYE, GENERATION

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, November 23, 2010 12:07 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

contrarianism against everybody who is still pigeonholing p4k as an indie mag who would only ever give 10.0s to yankee hotel foxtrot & source tags and codes

alex's post is awesome -- my main point from a few hours ago actually enunciated intelligently w/ specific examples

by 'pfork's value system,' again, i mean 'the collected tendencies of the writers who make editorial & writing decisions on a daily basis,' amongst which i am an outlier. these arent abstract values put down in writing. they are just tendencies that many of the writers overlap on. kanye hits a lot of those, for a lot of writers.

ilm is very inside baseball but to the general public I still feel p4k is still that 'indie music site that only hipsters check out' to the point where I get asked 'where do you get all your music from, pitchfork'? by friends who rarely if ever follow music

and like...this is why i love this album despite myself. kanye IS the biggest pop star of our era. we get the icons we deserve. six years ago he had things to say - important things maybe, but in the age of twitter and facebook and gossip girl doesn't it make sense that our real hero is a navel-gazing narcissist who's self-aware enough to know what's wrong with himself AND the rest of the world but more concerned with posting hot pictures of models to his blog and worrying about whether or not he hurt George Bush's feelings back when he was still saying things that made sense? but for better or for worse, he's ours, and i'm as invested in his ego and persona as he is.

like...fuck Lady GaGa, Kanye was doing life-as-performance art for years. we're all doing life-as-performance art these days.

contrarianism against everybody who is still pigeonholing p4k as an indie mag who would only ever give 10.0s to yankee hotel foxtrot & source tags and codes

― ＿|￣|○|￣|○|￣|○ (dayo), Monday, November 22, 2010 10:10 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

how does this even qualify as 'contrarianism' -- the site hasnt been like this in years

yeah that's either a small subset of ppl or a massive strawman

you still get people itt who think it makes more sense for p4k to give a 10.0 to anco or joanne newsom

real contrarianism was running deej's waka review in the lead spot

why is that contrarian?