Kanye West - Dark Twisted Fantasy

i'd venture that it's probably a thing about US/canada & not where you bought the album

wait my version was all pixelated too -- you can buy non-pixelated ones??

Anyway, going to bed now so I can listen to this on the train tomorrow so I can really have something worthwhile to say (theres a first time for everything I suppose).

Weird. Maybe it`s just us Canadians who get the uncensored version.

Here`s picture for proof: http://24.media.tumblr.com/preview.xe2JF5bKl0D7NY1x_500.jpg

While I dig the different covers, especially the one with Kanye's misshapen face and the crown, part of me wishes that this was actually one of them.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7RHnmlEM6P4/TNb9uuEPkkI/AAAAAAAAAvo/Oq5UqTaD41c/s1600/MyBeautiful+DarkTwistedFantasy.JPG

Hearing it for the first time. The thing that thrills me the most is how he seems to be striving for an overtly ambitious visual/musical/lyrical universe of bourgeoisie decadence.... neo-baroque visuals in his videos and shows, megalomaniac drama lyrics, progressive rock and symphonic samples... It's hard for the overall concept not to sound monumental and Kanye has the ego and the tools to pull it off succesfully.

Don't think it's the most perfect execution of the concept - I'd personally would have loved more baroquesque/african references in the music samples- and certainly not deserving of all the perfect 10 scores it's getting but I am honestly glad that such an ambitious vision is being rewarded by the music media.

xp: yeah, the monster bear's great and should have been included in the insert

u know before this even came out i had a pre-assembled stoner riff abt kanye cycling thru western art--college dropout is his high renaissance, late registration is his mannerist period, graduation his baroque, and now this is on some rococo ish, in a good way

I am honestly glad that such an ambitious vision is being rewarded by the music media.

― Moka, Tuesday, November 23, 2010 12:09 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

ha im honestly not surprised by it

lol are those the "thought @ work" drums at the end of "that's my bitch"?

jordan where are u ... get on im

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/bat-signal.jpg

thnx dayo

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/bat-signal_2.jpg

I will try listening to this again when I get home on Friday, I usually like pfork enough for that. Or Carles.

I listened to this in two sittings (first half last night, second half this morning), so maybe that's why I didn't feel that it was overly long and bloated like many people are saying. That wasn't intentional or anything, it was just because I didn't have the time to listen to it all the way through. But I was digging the proggy stuff a lot more than I expected to.

Belated OTM to this - 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

A lot of reviews feel to much like they're just cosigning the narrative already written by Kanye: I AM A TROUBLED, ENDLESSLY FASCINATING GENIUS - I HAVE LOTS OF MONEY AND MANY FAMOUS FRIENDS AND AMPLE BREAKFAST OPTIONS - LOOK ON MY WORKS YET MIGHTY AND DESPAIR. Maybe a lot of reviewers didn't have long enough to live with it before filing their reviews but I don't see much close reading going on.

Which is not to say there isn't still some great writing about it - just that it's all about the broad strokes rather than the details.

like if you took a music fan and made him listen to this w/o presenting any of the backstory, the Kanye narrative, the football team that he assembled for all of the lights, would he walk away being like "this is the most ambitious album I've ever heard! 10.0!"

think the closest we've come to that is DJP liveblogging itt

I don't know how I would score this. There are some really TERRIBLE things on here, especially at the beginning, but there is also a bunch of stuff that I think will grow on me and a bunch of stuff that I absolutely love. Also, the stuff I love mitigates the stuff I don't (unlike, say, MAYA).

I think Big Boi, Massive Attack, We Love, Owen Pallett, Janelle Monae, Underworld, Vampire Weekend, Sleigh Bells and Abe Vigoda all released albums this year that are better than this. I am still considering giving it a 9.

Bet it still doesn't top Pitchfork's year end list (Deerhunter lock, surely? Or mebbe JoNu).

Or ILMs for that matter. Actually think it might end up - shocker horror - not doing very well on the ILM one. Has any actual human being said this is the album of the year? Will Dombal even put this no1 on his list? Why do I care when I should be working?

http://img.slate.com/media/1/122939/2240270/2272973/2275801/CA_101123_KanyeWest2.jpg

Weiner

Winner.

We come to hip-hop songs expecting to be able to hear what the guy on the mic is saying—it's a big part of what goes into being a rapper as opposed to, say, being Thom Yorke

loooooooooooooooool weiner has never listened to odb i guess

yes that's exactly the laugh to take away from that sentence

I don't even get what's that ambitious about MDTF itself - I get that the marketing, the good fridays, the multiple cover arts, the huge guest lists are ambitious etc., but what is 'musically ambitious' about this album?

― ＿|￣|○|￣|○|￣|○ (dayo), Monday, November 22, 2010 10:33 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://www.allmusic.com/album/my-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy-r2055009/review

― challop and a muff (deej), Monday, November 22, 2010 11:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i feel like dayo and I are going to be posting this question for the next 6 months and getting these kinds of brick wall responses. i mean, look at the review you linked in response to this: a lot of it focuses on the fact that 42 people worked on one song. it's a good review (and "only" 4 stars, thank god), but still pretty stupid to use it to answer that post.

the thing I don't think people are getting is that ambition is relative. most of Kanye's albums, especially the first 2, are big ambitious star-studded affairs that cover a lot of musical ground and lyrical subject matter. I don't really hear how this album ups the ante from those in any substantial way. if Pete Townshend wrote a rock opera with a big confusing narrative tomorrow, you wouldn't say "wow, how ambitious!", you'd kinda shrug and go oh, that's all you do now, isn't it.

yeah tbh I think 808s was more ambitious than this

has anyone seen a convenient download of all the good friday tracks that didn't make the album all in one package?

i think this album looks ambitious because all the songs are long and there are lots of extended instrumental bits, but you could also use the word unedited

i can't decide if i find the individual productions impressive or not

Finished my first listen this morning and yeah, this is pretty great. But it pretty much runs completely off the rails after "Runaway", the 7 minute track with John Legend is completely awful. The last track with Bon Iver is a little better, but not enough to save it. Up to that point, though, this really is engaging as all hell. The most embarrassing part is Jay-Z and I've been known to defend him a lot longer than others. 10.0? No, but definitely an engaging album that is going to take a while to learn to live with.

i also finished my first listen this morning--i don't know if i'm ready to call this a "bad" album, but it's pretty disappointing and the two words i keep coming back to are "joyless" and "entitled"

one of the few consistent things i find running through my test is that i really don't like maximalism very much and listening to this reminds me a lot of listening to late registration--it's just so suffocating and overstuffed, and on top of it all kanye's persona here is less defensible than ever.

test=taste

http://www.indieshuffle.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/electriccircus.jpg

RIP other attempts at 'hip-hop Sergeant Pepper'. Never forget.

Yeah, his persona is abhorrent here, I was getting pretty uncomfortable with all the woman choking and slapping.

i'm not where someone like lex is in finding this album actually distasteful, but i do think that 10.0 took a little more sack than i originally thought because it really does say "yes i am signing off on a belief that all of this guy's crazy ideas were good at some point in time even if a few of them ultimately fail" which i could never possibly get to with this.

mostly it's depressing and i just want to listen to the college dropout on a fuckin discman like it's 2003 and wonder what happened to that guy

we encouraged that guy is what happened

^^^ otm

sad, true

yeah i'm really depressed this guy isn't doing the exact same thing he was doing six years ago

yeah that's exactly what i meant

I'm not wishing this was 2003, I'm glad we have this verson of Kanye because we wouldn't have awesome things like "Power" without it. Even though I was pre-sold on an awesome King Crimson sample, that song still kills me every time.

what i mean, you goofs, is that the disappearance of kanye's sense of humor, his humility, and his ability to write about things other than himself is one of the great tragedies of the 2000s

He had humility?

once upon a time he knew where he came from

"Last Call" 12:40

^^^my cd skips now in the spoken word part of this, i think right around the time he meets jay

I really like "Gorgeous" too, this is actually more like what I wanted out of the new Kid Cudi (yes, I like him and yes, I know I'm the only one).

Kanye was never a humble dude IIRC

The whole thing about him was that he was a nerdy guy with glasses and a cardigan who was still like "bakdafucup I am the realest nigga alive"; afaict he's been his own #1 booster since we first heard of him (remember the 2004 AMA "I WAS ROBBED" rant during the show?)

yeah i don't really agree but my other two points stand regardless