Kanye West - Dark Twisted Fantasy

that to da croup

i would say the album is emblematic of the era it's come out of (successful albums tend to be!), though I wouldn't say it's solely striking due to that fact.

I know why this album bores me: as a man who just turned thirty-six, I'm impatient with guys whose bank accounts are bigger than mine yet assume their good looks are enough for me to forget their irritability, paranoia, and disinterest in other human beings.

He says he's a monster, I say, "OK, you've told me already, buddy. Check, please."

i'd agree. i wouldn't say that the album is solely striking due to its resonance with the current culture of oversharing and our fascination with celebrity as an end in itself, but i do find it fascinating on that level, and more so than most pop albums. plus i've always loved a good trainwreck.

Naw. I hate rubberneckers.

ever been to Miami? Most traffic forms as a result of rubbernecking.

everybody loves a good trainwreck

this isn't a trainwreck, it's just a bit self-absorbed! i mean if you call this a trainwreck wtf would you call britney's blackout or lindsay lohan's life

Maybe I need to see a train wreck to understand what makes them self-evidently fascinating.

a zeppelin crash on the other hand

I like enough trainwrecks that I won't throw stones if that's what people are digging here, though if that's the case I do recommend some of you check out Chocolate Starfish & The Hot Dog Flavored Water. Songs with lines like "Dedicated to you, Ben Stiller! You are my favorite muthafucka!" and "Pay me no mind/ I seen Fight Club about 28 times" deserve a revisit in this context, and don't tell me the songs are too plodding!

One track Durst is fuming about being dissed in a NIN video, the next he's announcing himself the voice of his g-g-generation!

how is Chocolate Starfish like Empire Burlesque?

I'm saving 80s Dylan for my forties

britney's blackout

A great album.

lindsay lohan's life

Six trainwrecks colliding at ground zero during a nuclear explosion.

But I really don't think this is a trainwreck, if it is, it is the really cool kind.

i mean if you call this a trainwreck wtf would you call britney's blackout or lindsay lohan's life

― lex lex lex lex lex on the track BOW (lex pretend), Wednesday, December 1, 2010 3:13 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

a good album and a flat-out bad one, though the lohan record is quite a mess, sure. which jon just said. the fact that the trainwreck is, in this case, an ambitious and at times brilliant art statement makes it something more than just a stupendously wrong thing. to my mind anyway. can't stand limp bizkit, but maybe that's my loss...

i wasn't really referring to lindsay's albums, which only have minor trainwrecky songs on them, though i'll take both of them over MBDTF easily, and have no idea wtf makes this an ambitious art statement and the britney/lindsay ones not - in fact lindsay's second album is pretty comparable to this in the massively obvious and sorta dumb way it flags up its own confessionalism and rawness and self-importance - the thing's called a little more personal (RAW) for heaven's sake.

ALMP(R) has a few better songs than MBDTF though.

don't get much sense of a distinct & personal artistic/musical aesthetic out of britney's albums, tbh, certainly not one i can watch develop over time. i mean her persona certainly exists and evolves, but it doesn't seem to have a terribly deep relationship with the music. in kanye's case, i get not just a pop persona and some tunes, but a musical vision and an dominant aesthetic point of view that seems to integrate all these things. the distinction is subtle, though, and undoubtedly colored by my assumptions and prejudices. so be it.

but who cares about those things?

I mean -- lots of people (look at the Metacritic score). But recording is so serendipitous.

i mean her persona certainly exists and evolves, but it doesn't seem to have a terribly deep relationship with the music

can you be a bit more specific about what you mean here? because as this point is written i couldn't disagree more.

i just had a major brain explosion.

you know what guest stars would have really taken this album into the fucking cosmos???????????????

http://content8.flixster.com/photo/10/96/79/10967938_gal.jpg

+

http://content8.flixster.com/photo/10/96/79/10967938_gal.jpg

on the same song.

woah.

here's a way to say it, lex:

if you gave britney absolute and total control over every aspect of her entire career to date, final cut on every second of every one of her albums, and if you spent years surrounding her with people who told her that she was not just a talent, a star, but a bonafide creative genius whose every word and whim reeked of unparalleled artistic brilliance. if you coupled that external environment with an inner britney who was desperate to demonstrate her superiority to every other living thing on earth and let her stew unsupervised in a multi-million dollar recording studio for months on end, then she might cough up something as at once bugfuck nuts and artistically coherent as MBDTF. shy of that, you get something else.

two michael winslows on one song

who says she doesn't?

xp

If you think she has no control over her songwriters and producers at this stage of her career, after all her success, I mean, you're wrong.

Also: every one of those conditions is precisely what makes Kanye's album so repugnant (among other things).

also when i said be more specific, i meant actually specific, with reference to songs and sounds and so on, not waffley assumptions about what goes on behind the scenes or speculation as to what might happen in hypothetical circumstances

It's possible he'd chase his pathology around just as loudly in the 70s, though I think his competition for being The Greatest would have forced him try harder at making better lyrics and songs.

― da croupier, Wednesday, December 1, 2010 4:49 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this kind of alternate history type ish is kind of batty.

you know what else it is? totally harmless.

IS IT!?!?!?!?!

http://bookcoverarchive.com/images/books/man_in_the_high_castle.large.jpg

oh god

i never knew

i agree that britney seems to have a lot of control at this point, but hasn't always. that said, she was raised to work according to or at least within the dictates of a guiding hand. i'd argue that this conditioning has defined and continues to define her career, even in the wake of her "period of adjustment." i don't say this a criticism of britney on any level, nor do i suggest that an artist cannot communicate effectively when working in such manner. but kanye's position relative to personal agency and the myth of the creative artist is and has been very different all along. that this situation, coupled with his own personality has indeed, in this album, generated something that will be repellent to many (hell it's repellent to me, and that's a big part of why i enjoy it, perverse as that might seem). to my mind, it's also something very different in kind than anything britney's done to date, for better or worse.

i understand why people might want to erase the distinctions between the ostensibly promethean "creative artist" who determines all aspects of his/her output and the "mere" performer who works by and large in a space directly defined by managing others. an artist like madonna, for instance, obliterates such distinctions, at least relative to her own career. and far too much has been made of the idea that only that which one has wholly created is truly artistically legitimate. nevertheless, the distinction isn't entirely meaningless even if it isn't always clear, and it does have bearing on where britney and kanye are at at this point in their respective careers.

will get back to you (likely late tonight) on the specific examples you ask for, lex, as i wrote that before seeing your clarification. not sure i'll be able to provide them, honestly, as the perception of artistic coherence is, as i suggested before, awfully hard to define in precise terms.

I don't want to derail this, especially since we alluded to Madonna last Tuesday or Wednesday, but there hasn't been one aspect of her career in which Madonna hasn't shown herself to be its guiding force.

oh ok it's a straightforward question of authorship/auteurship then. i don't think anyone would dispute that, but what i took issue with was

i mean her persona certainly exists and evolves, but it doesn't seem to have a terribly deep relationship with the music

which i don't think is right, and has nothing to really do with how much creative agency she personally has. throughout her career - and more and more as time has gone on - her persona (both the image of britney that's been presented to the public, and the IRL britney beneath that) has been totally intertwined with the music - the beats and the songs that have been crafted for her. and often, especially as she's become more famous, for her specifically. blackout is as driven as much as MBDTF by its singer's persona, even if she didn't write it. also, it has better songs and you can dance to it.

you know what else it is? totally harmless.

― BIG MUFFIN (gbx), Wednesday, December 1, 2010 6:37 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sure just not really shedding any light on anything

another thing, in parting. the search for tangible evidence of artistic self determination in the work of any given artist seems like something of a shell game to me. that sort of thing can't really be definitively known or shown. we can talk about what we like or dislike in art, how those effects seem to have been achieved and what they might mean. if we know something of an artist's life and situation, we can talk about the ways in which the work reflects that. we can do all these things equally well whether or not the ostensible "artist" has any hand at all in the work produced in his/her name. by which i mean, that we could probably make a solid case for the presence of britney's identity in the music that bears her name even if she had never once made a single decision about its form or content, if she were only its nominal author.

to the extent that we are rational materialists above all else, this might seem to suggest that what we call "artistic vision" is a sham, a projection, or an act of potentially misplaced faith, grated to some and denied others. i disagree, at least to some extent. but i doubt that i could ever make this case to anyone's satisfaction.

there hasn't been one aspect of her career in which Madonna hasn't shown herself to be its guiding force.

― look at it, pwn3d, made u look at my peen/vadge (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 1, 2010 4:48 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

agreed.

that we could probably make a solid case for the presence of britney's identity in the music that bears her name even if she had never once made a single decision about its form or content, if she were only its nominal author

lol that's pretty much what i did. it's true tho!

she may not be the author, but she is both muse and performer, roles which provide ample scope for channeling her identity in the end product

totally on board with that

think i said i was going somewhere...

identity /= brand

It's possible he'd chase his pathology around just as loudly in the 70s, though I think his competition for being The Greatest would have forced him try harder at making better lyrics and songs.

― da croupier, Wednesday, December 1, 2010 4:49 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this kind of alternate history type ish is kind of batty.

― lotta diamonds ... but prolly more display names (deej), Wednesday, December 1, 2010 7:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think there's a kernel of truth in that if Kanye was a contemporary of Stevie he'd never in his wildest dreams be put in the same category as a top shelf albums artist the way he is now

Let's have a bump for the douchebags

― Two and a Half Muffins (Eazy), Wednesday, December 1, 2010 5:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

lol

xpost because he can't play piano+samplers not invented yet? or just because people would be like "woah wtf is this, more like CRAP amirite??"

i'm saying put the guy Kanye in the 70s and see what records he makes, not put Kanye records in the 70s. don't be ridiculous, clearly my sci-fi premise makes more sense than yours!

This thought experiment is fuckin' ri-dick-a-lus.

This album is incredibly stupid in at least one essential, correct way; I am having tons of fun quoting it and hearing/reading other ppl quote/reference its dumber lines as part of conversation.