Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is good enough to deserve a better title. I wish he’d just called it Twisted: meaning strange or perverted, but also, in vernacular usage, confused or misunderstood (as in “don’t get it twisted”). Isolating this double meaning illuminates the double consciousness at work throughout the album, which dropped late last year into a media landscape so hostile to personal expression that misunderstanding was to be expected as well as feared.
On MBDTF and elsewhere, Kanye’s flow smacks of the scholastic. His precise enunciation and aggressive emphases could be those of a young schoolteacher standing in front of a blackboard, swatting syllables and words with the tip of his pointer. But his tone of voice contradicts this impression; it’s often the sound of that teacher’s worst bratty nightmare. (E.g. Kanye’s signature challenge to all comers, a nasal, snarling “Hanh?!”, which dismisses competition before even sizing it up.) It’s hard to imagine Kanye dramatizing a confrontation with authority, as Jay-Z did so successfully on “99 Problems”; Kanye’s scholastic/sarcastic voice evinces a uniquely creative intelligence that grapples with internalized authority.
In the 21st century, the voice of caution cannot be easily distinguished from the arrogant prohibitions of authority, which may account for Kanye’s widely criticized real-life behavior as well as the debauchery he describes in MBDTF. (After the Taylor Swift incident, President Obama called him “a jackass.”) “Hell of a Life”’s hook includes the line, “Pussy and religion is all I need,” but religious faith is barely there on the album. Social pieties are gone too. Kanye’s internal struggle, pumped-up by his ego, inflates to fill all that empty space.
This is inarguably narcissistic, but Kanye doesn’t expect us to be fascinated by his narcissism alone. As the main producer on most tracks here, he sculpts self-referential psycho-soundscapes that hold together aesthetically even while pushing pop music to schizoid extremes. Mixed in amidst the chamber-music orchestration and dissonant synths, celebrity guest vocalists such as The-Dream and Alicia Keys serve as almost subliminal threads in Kanye’s weave. With all his connections gathered around him like a mantle of protection, Kanye confirms his megastar status and achieves an aural-palimpsest effect not unlike Bryan Ferry’s Olympia.
Through it all, he takes his well-known love of samples to new heights of fetishism. In more than one song, beats and rhymes, ostensibly the heart of hiphop, unexpectedly stop dead as Kanye pauses to savor a melancholy chord progression, or even the resonance of a single piano note. More than anything in pop music that I’ve heard before, these moments remind me of Charles Swann’s romantic-turned-fetishistic attachment to the “little phrase” out of Vinteuil’s sonata in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Bear with me. Just as Swann craves compulsively to hear the snatch of sad music “associated with the love he [feels]” for status-seeking Odette, Kanye searches restlessly for the phrase that will resolve his inner conflicts.
This twisted romanticism comes out most clearly in the nine-minute album version of lead single “Runaway.” Those piercing piano notes, haunting like the dry bones of a love song, coax forth stark confessions from “baller nigga” Kanye: “I don’t know what it is with females/But I’m not too good at that shit.” “Run away from me, baby”—classic r&b loverman stuff—is supposed to be the point, but sheepishness creeps in to muddle the message: “I don’t know how I’mma manage/If one day you just up and leave.” He wants both his good girl and the “hood rats” but claims “the look in your eyes is killing me.” And until this point “Runaway” offers no catharsis, just the conveyance of an inner split that is both a trap and a torture.
The wordless second half of the song, however, achieves release of a kind by following this crisis of the male ego to its logical conclusion. For several minutes, over strings and synths Kanye continues to sing the melody we know by now, but in a voice distorted far beyond mere unintelligibility by studio technology and feedback. It’s a brilliant, uncanny representation of how men under stress from within and without can withdraw self-destructively—an AutoTune OD. We shouldn’t pretend not to recognize the ego-implosion of the American male when we see or hear it. Charlie Sheen, and Ronnie and The Situation from Jersey Shore could always fill us in.
This seems as good a time as any to bring up Michael Jackson. “All of the Lights” opens with Kanye already in distress: “Something’s wrong/I hold my head/MJ’s gone/Our nigga dead.” Pitchfork’s critic wrote of these lines, “The tribute marks another chapter in West’s ongoing obsession with the King of Pop,” and, a few paragraphs deeper, “Kanye is crazy enough to truly believe he’s the greatest out there.” Truth is, MBDTF is just one of three important pop-album responses to MJ’s death released in the last six weeks of 2010. Ne-Yo’s Libra Scale addressed contemporary pop culture with an r&b/dance song cycle about the corruption of eros by celebrity—its themes expressed through MJ motifs. R. Kelly’sLove Letter went back to the King of Pop’s first inspiration—classic soul and r&b tropes—and discovered there an inexhaustible, solace-giving source of spontaneous joy in living. Kanye’s “crazy” “obsession” is, in truth, a natural response to a major event in popular culture, and Black culture. MBDTF, though, strikes me as the boldest of these three albums because it fully takes on the trauma and license of post-MJ (pop-)life.
Contrary to the complex of widely held delusions that still impede mainstream understanding of MJ, the rise of hiphop was not the beginning of Jackson’s end. The hot white light of early-hiphop anger didn’t break him down. He wasn’t trailing behind; or, if he was, he was there deliberately, serving a purpose there. As hiphop surged into the mainstream, and especially as its anger became commercially viable (setting the stage for Eminem), in the march forward, which would leave global pop culture forever changed, certain things got dropped. Pioneers rightly fear their own soft spots more than any external danger, so emotions and experiences potentially compromising to the ego were given short shrift. Throughout his later work, MJ made it his business to return to hiphop everything that it dropped during its revolutionary rise. He aimed to win for contemporary black artists (i.e., everyone) the expressive rights certain white artists take for granted, the artistic license lauded by the mainstream when it’s used innocuously.
This helps to explain MBDTF’s great closing track, “Lost in the World.” It’s built around an extended sample from Bon Iver’s a capella vocoder chorale “The Woods,” which imagines an off-the-grid idyll: “I’m up in the woods/I’m down on my mind/I’m building a still/To slow down the time.” Such a fanciful flight from contingency is an idle daydream to a hiphop star like Kanye, as much as he might envy indie artists’ media-granted license to fantasize. He has to transform “The Woods” into a blues banger that quakes with uncontainable anticipation: “I’m lost in the world/Been down my whole life/I’m new in the city/But I’m down for the night.” Any classic pop credo is also a statement of personal politics, so this leads smoothly into a sampled Gil Scott-Heron monologue that ends the album with the repeated question, “Who will survive in America?”
But the very last sound we hear is the sparse applause Scott-Heron gets for his troubles. No catharsis, but now we know the pride and fear that reside in back of Kanye’s unregenerate restlessness.