Kanye West - Dark Twisted Fantasy

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

it wasn't during the AMAs, he stormed out and complained to reporters outside the event. but yeah, Gretchen Wilson was the first Taylor Swift.

i'm not where someone like lex is in finding this album actually distasteful,

I was grossed out from the beginning, and I usually like grotesque star turns.

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

― "I am a fairly respected poster." (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 2:23 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

some dude: you are right, I was reading a faulty source

here's a compiled list of Kanye's ego explosions prior to his 2007 "that's two years in a row" tantrum: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1569536/20070912/west_kanye.jhtml

think at least some of this is intentionally over-the-top "rarr, I'm a MONSTER!" trolling — maybe with implied "YOU! I LEARNED IT FROM YOU!!!" subtext?

Perhaps partially, but it was really hard to read that intention in "Blame Game". But even if that is his intention, I'm still uncomfortable with it. Imho, there is no okay way to talk about choking a woman.

i think it's kind of lol but mostly sad how much he cares about awards. like, i get the feeling that barely any musicians really give that much of a shit about the Grammys, relative to how much they care about fame or money or fans, compared to the way Hollywood people care about Oscars, but this guy is out there getting emotional over the AMAs and the VMAs. i feel like someday he's going to commit suicide onstage at the Kids Choice Awards or something.

of course everything "flawed" about this album is intentional - kanye could not be more transparent, the man has no nuance - that doesn't excuse it or make it interesting

liked this puncturing blog by dorian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/nov/23/kanye-west-fantasy-critics-hype - but really what few have mentioned so far is that kanye's creative peak was 00-04, when the focus was on his talent rather than his personality. i love a lot of stuff from his own albums, to varying degrees, but the story of his solo career has been a tilt away from the former to the latter when he's nowhere near interesting enough to justify it.

re: wishing he'd stop talking about himself; granted, I've never heard "College Dropout" in its entirety. The singles were by and large about him though, and pretty much every song he's done since has either been about him or narrated from his perspective.

xxp: um, I really don't think that is an accurate take on how a good number of mainstream hip-hop artists view the Grammys, which is essentially the height of establishment success.

um... I am going to get a ton of shit for this, but Lex, you honestly do not have the disposition to even give shit like this chance, so nothing you say about it is either surprising or even interesting

One of the perils of superstardom is that, as you become more isolated, your most interesting subject becomes yourself.

granted, I've never heard "College Dropout" in its entirety.

think you should stop what you're doing and do this

ha, maybe I should but I remember at the time thinking "All Falls Down" was really good, liking "Jesus Walks" for a hot minute before I listened to the incredibly wretched rhymes, and always loathing "Through The Wire" with a passion hotter than a thousand suns, so unless those songs are at odds with the rest of the album or time has mellowed me more than I think it has, I expect it's going to be a dissatisfying listen

xxp: um, I really don't think that is an accurate take on how a good number of mainstream hip-hop artists view the Grammys, which is essentially the height of establishment success.

― ali-baba-boob-job-bomb.jpg (DJP), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 10:04 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

obviously it's a 'big deal' but i don't think other rappers lose sleep over it the way Kanye does. i think they're probably way more concerned with their first week album sales or their single flopping or what the gossip sites are saying about them (which Kanye also obsesses over, because that's who he is).

oh gotcha, yeah I agree with that because Kanye is a crazy egomaniac

Only Through The Wire and Touch The Sky are really about *Kanye* singles on the first two records? and maybe even not Touch The Sky.

Jesus Walks duh. All Falls Down is kinda about him but more about materialism in general. The New Workout Plan is lol about going to the gym. Diamonds is about Blood Diamonds and ok his place in that. Gold Digger is another duh. And then there was an obvious disconnect between that and Graduation imo.

Yeah, I pretty much knew lex was going to hate this three months ago.

Through the Wire is terrific! Dude is literally rapping through the wire keeping his jaw together about his crash.

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?

i'm calling it now: this album will top pfork's list, as well as p&j, and will place in ILM's top three -- tempted to say it'll win ILM as well b/c i can't honestly think of something that ppl will vote for on a broader scale

dan it's a really diverse album full of cool stuff--give it a front to back listen sometime

Having trouble believing this could be worse than the Deerhunter record.

will win the nobel prizes for peace and mathematics

deerhunter album will only win a caldecott medal

oh god I forgot about "Slow Jamz", which I also hated

ok you're beyond help

"Gold Digger" basically came completely out of left field for me because I had always assumed that lyrically Kanye was going to always piss me off by being incredibly, mind-alteringly stupid in how he used the English language, so it was a real shock to hear a song where I didn't want to send him back to a remedial English class.

He's backslid somewhat on this album; I found a lot of the time I was more enjoying the sound of his voice than what he was actually saying, and some of the things he said that I thought actually displayed some semblance of wit/thought are things people are holding up as the worst possible things anyone has ever said on a hip-hop record ("swallowship" being the flagship exapmle).

Perhaps partially, but it was really hard to read that intention in "Blame Game". But even if that is his intention, I'm still uncomfortable with it. Imho, there is no okay way to talk about choking a woman.

― "I am a fairly respected poster." (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 2:59 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

shouldn't have smoked a bowl halfway thru that post

I've only listened to this once and I really haven't spent as much time parsing it, so I'm not going to say your wrong - it just made me uncomfortable, that was my whole point. I'm not knocking the album for it, that particular song has many many other problems (lol Chris Rock) keeping it from being one of my favorites. But I do respect that the ambiguity he presents, and that you allude to, is part of what is making this whole album so interesting.

(Annoying myself with my your/you're misuse, really shouldn't be trying to do too many things at once right now)

Basically I'm trying to say that you are probably correct wrt your reading snowy, I was just saying that in any context the woman slapping and choking makes me uncomfotable.

yeah I gotcha, it's coo
(kanye west for "most self-consciously offensive" thread 2k11?)

((and as I type that: "this week's a bad massage / I need a happy ending", lol))