MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY

Praise for the series:

It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as signifi cant and worthy of study as Th

e Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . Th

e series . . . is freewheeling and

eclectic, ranging from minute rock- geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration

— Th

e New York Times Book Review

Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough

— Rolling Stone

One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut

Th

ese are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well- executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae.

We love these.

We are huge nerds

— Vice

A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon

Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype

[A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK)

We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork

For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/musicandsoundstudies

Follow us on Twitter: @333books

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books

For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

i

Forthcoming in the series:

Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

Th

e Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Mike Foley

Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

Live Th

rough Th

is by Anwyn Crawford

Dangerous by Susan Fast

Sigur Ros’s ( ) by Ethan Hayden

and many more . . .

ii

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kirk Walker Graves

NEW YORK • LON DON • NEW DELHI • SY DN EY

iii

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway

50 Bedford Square

New York

London

NY 10018

WC1B 3DP

USA UK

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2014

© Kirk Walker Graves, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data

Graves, Kirk Walker.

My beautiful dark twisted fantasy / Kirk Walker Graves.

pages cm. – (33 1/3)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62356-542-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. West, Kanye. My beautiful dark twisted fantasy. I. Title.

ML420.W452G73 2014

782.421649092–dc23

2014000899

ISBN: PB: 978-1-6235-6542-8

ePDF: 978-1-6235-6458-2

ePub: 978-1-6235-6770-5

Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

iv

For Whit

v

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the

world than myself.

– Michel de Montaigne

vi

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Track Listing

xi

Seven Virtues of Yeezus, Pop Christ

1

Portrait of the Monster as a Young Masterpiece

3

Th

e Narcissistic Personality of Our Time

11

Five Uneasy Pieces

23

Art as Atonement

33

University as Universe: Th

e College Dropout

43

A (Very) Brief Aside Re: 808s & Heartbreak

49

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

51

Dark Fantasy

53

Gorgeous

59

POWER ( sic transit gloria Kanye )

65

All of the Lights

73

Monster

81

So Appalled

85

Devil in a New Dress

89

vii

C O N T E N T S

Runaway

93

Hell of a Life

103

Blame Game

109

Lost in the World

115

Th

e

Yeezus Singularity: A Religion of the Self

123

viii

Acknowledgments

Th

is project would not have been possible without the

generous good faith of David Barker, Ally Jane Grossan,

Kaitlin Fontana, and the rest of the 33¹⁄³ team at Bloomsbury

Academic. For her love and steadfast tolerance throughout

the writing process, I owe my wife Jessica Graves a student-

loan-sized debt of gratitude. Our son Whit was born squarely

in the middle of the project, and I could not have asked for a

more wonderful way to procrastinate. Many thanks are also

due the Haley family – whether serving up a delectable paleo

meal or hosting a lost weekend of Netfl ix binging, the good

people of 1021 Emily Drive were always there to put wind in

my sails, and I’m proud to be part of their tribe. Th

anks also

to my sister Lori for the many years of encouragement,

patience, love, and support. Last but certainly not least, my

late mother Dean Graves was my earliest critic and reader. I

miss her sweet blandishments, her kind smile, and her soft -

spoken enthusiasm to read whatever I was working on. And

though I cannot fathom an aft erlife scenario wherein she

embraces the music of Kanye West – especially the songs on

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – I know she remains,

eternally, my biggest fan.

ix

x

Track Listing

1.

“Dark Fantasy” (4:40)

2.

“Gorgeous” (5:57)

3.

“POWER” (4:52)

4. “All of the Lights (Interlude)” (1:02)

5.

“All of the Lights” (4:59)

6.

“Monster” (6:18)

7.

“So Appalled” (6:38)

8. “Devil in a New Dress” (5:52)

9.

“Runaway” (9:08)

10. “Hell of a Life” (5:27)

11. “Blame Game” (7:49)

12. “Lost in the World” (4:16)

13. “Who Will Survive in America?” (1:38)

xi

xii

Seven Virtues of Yeezus, Pop Christ

And the faithful congregated on street corners outside loft s, in parking lots near the city stadium, shuffl

ing their feet over wet asphalt in the late spring darkness

so as to arrive at the chosen place by the appointed hour. When Yeezus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and he began to teach them.

Innocence

I’m forever the 35-year- old 5-year- old. I’m forever the 5-year- old of something.

Self-Possession

One of the problems with being a bubbling source of creativity – it’s like I’m bubbling in a laboratory, and if you don’t like put a cap on it, at one point it will, like, break the glass. If I can hone that. . .then I have, like, nuclear power, like a superhero, like Cyclops when he puts his glasses on.

Transcendence

Visiting my mind is like visiting the Hermès factory. Shit is real.

You’re not going to fi nd a chink. It’s 100,000 percent Jimi Hendrix.

Perspective

When I think of competition it’s like I try to create against the past.

I think about Michelangelo and Picasso, you know, the pyramids.

Wisdom

If you read books – which I don’t, none at all – about how to

become a billionaire, they always say, “You learn from your mistakes.”

So if you learn from your mistakes, then I’m a fucking genius.

Repentance

I spend more time watching porn and praying about it aft erwards.

Th

en I’ll put on some Louis Vuitton and leave.

Forgiveness

[My Beautiful] Dark [Twisted] Fantasy was my long, backhanded

apology. You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a

backhanded apology. It was like, all these raps, all these sonic acrobatics.

I was like: “Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back.

You want to have me on your shelves.”

1

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

During a November 2010

Today Show

interview with

Kanye West, there is a telling moment when host Matt

Lauer – redoubtable Matt Lauer, sine qua non of the aff able,

non- threatening American male – talks about regret and

transgression. “And you’re sorry,” he says, nudging Kanye

towards a full- throated apology for his nationally televised

2005 remark that “George Bush doesn’t care about black

people,” spoken during a telethon in the wake of the federal

response to Hurricane Katrina. Lauer had recently spent over

three hours interviewing the former president upon the

publication of Decision Points , Bush’s presidential memoir.

He tells Kanye the former president reserved his most

emotionally piqued response not for questions about the

Iraqi invasion, the federal bailouts, or the 9/11 attacks,

but – amazingly – for a question about the boisterous thirty-

something rapper. “Don’t even listen this time,” Lauer says,

running the clip again. “I want you to just look at his face.”

Th

e clip shows a saturnine Bush mouthing the words “I resent

it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments

of my presidency.” Kanye’s body assumes the crumpled defen-

sive posture of a publicly scolded child. Lauer gazes at him

with tender opprobrium, looking like nothing so much as a

man selling absolution for pennies on the dollar. Kanye

considers the nudge for what it is, mentally tries it on for a

moment like an ill- fi tting Prada loafer, then balks and makes

Lauer and everyone watching feel ill- fi t for their own skin.

“Yeah, I’m sorry for. . .mmm,” he mumbles, unable to fi nish.

Lauer looks on with the deadpan mortifi cation of the decent

and anonymous masses. “I think I get the point,” he says.

2

Portrait of the Monster as a Young

Masterpiece

Lurking somewhere amid the tabloid covers and reality show

cameos, in the icy silence between tweets, the periods of rela-

tive calm preceding fresh bouts of histrionics, lost within the

noxious cultural static that clings to his very name, there has

always been – in spite of his best eff orts to distract us – the

music. And in the fi rst decade of the twenty- fi rst century,

Kanye West created the best – the most consistently ambi-

tious and thrilling – pop music of any American artist, hip-

hop or otherwise, during the period. From “Th

rough the

Wire” – the fi rst single off his 2004 debut LP Th

e College

Dropout , and the cockiest anthem of survivor gratitude this

side of disco – to “Lost in the World,” the penultimate track

on 2010’s

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF ),

more mystic dare than pop song – he has staked his claim as

the digital era’s fi rst pop visionary, a multivalent talent with

an intuitive genius for collage. Best known initially as Jay Z’s

wunderkind producer at the turn of the millennium, cham-

pion of the sample- driven “chipmunk soul” beats heard in

“Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” and “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love),”

West’s music now illuminates the pop skyline with a gauche

radiance all its own.

3

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

For sheer scale and visionary brio, MBDTF is his master-

piece, the work that contains the fullest possible expression

of his aesthetic vision. Th

e album opens with a foreboding

nursery rhyme chanted in a bad English brogue by rapper

Nicki Minaj, and it ends with a relentlessly unanswerable

question – “Who will survive in America?” – posed by late

bluesologist Gil Scott-Heron, via a sample of his “Comment

No. 1.” Between those end stops lie sixty- eight minutes and

thirty- eight seconds of closed- circuit narcissism, a buff et of

sonic delights that blends rococo opulence (“So Appalled”)

with pornographic anxiety (“Hell of a Life”), suicidal ideation

(“POWER”) with feelings of omnipotence (“POWER”),

redemptive humility (“All of the Lights”) with go- for-broke

ambition (“Monster”). Th

e album unites disparate samples in

a spirit of bold experimentation, incorporating prog rock as

an enjambment here, transmogrifying a sixties radio pop

melody into a hook there. Each song crackles with the inten-

sity of a manic episode, employing every color in the sonic

palette to paint a pop fantasia that is sui generis . MBDTF is such a testament to the power of fi rst- rate American maximalism that one almost need look to literature – to twentieth

century behemoths like Th

e Recognition s and Women and

Men – for an apt analogue. Simply put, the album has few

peers in the way it stormed out of the gates and into the pop

music canon.

Th

at said, the 33⅓ series is devoted to landmark pop

albums of the past few decades. Why write a book on an

album less than four years old? How much perspective on

the music is possible? In human terms, the average four-

year-old has few tangible achievements outside toilet

4

P O RT R A I T O F T H E M O N S T E R A S A YO U N G M A S T E R P I E C E

profi ciency and a functional understanding of Velcro. And as

music is such a vital force, a phenomenon as synonymous

with life as respiration, shouldn’t we apply developmental

benchmarks to our judgment of its value? No sane person

would presume to evaluate the legacy of a four- year-old. For

most of the music we come to cherish, our love anneals in the

crucible of elapsed time. Th

e passing years trace the grooves

in the culture the music has made, put our fi rst impressions

on trial in the courts of evolved taste and popular opinion.

We hear, say, “Hey Ya” in an antiseptic department store lobby

and receive deliverance across a lost decade, borne back to

the moment of polymorphously perverse joy we felt upon

hearing it for the fi rst time. A truly great record is a miracle

of double endurance, thriving in the besieged sanctum of the

heart – beating back the new music , the competition for our

ardor – while simultaneously persisting through time in the

byzantine offi

cialdom of critical acclaim. We refl ect on where

and when a particular record became more than a record,

looking for the point at which the music’s charm collided

with our own tender susceptibility. We fi nd meaning,

prophecy, validation, and mystery in those points of connec-

tion. Time then bequeaths the music to posterity, cultivating

the growth of an intergenerational democracy, a world where

tomorrow’s grandparents can share their grandchildren’s

burgeoning enthusiasm for London Calling, Pet Sounds, Th

e

Chronic , and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea .

Th

e question, therefore, remains: Why write a whole book

about such a young album? MBDTF is a concentrated dose of

Kanye West, who, in his way, is a concentrated dose of the

still- young digital era. Ours is a period of unprecedented and

5

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

instantaneous access to books, fi lms, fashions, and ideas. Th

e

vast majority of the world’s recorded music is searchable and

streaming, just a few clicks or swipes away. Th

e arc of West’s

career refl ects this digital ubiquity as no artist before him, the

artistry of his samples a kind of transhistorical pop conscious-

ness. And as the pop music canon continues to self- codify,

new technologies have made it easier than ever to document

and endlessly share our mandarin obsessions and revela-

tions. Blogs and now apps have become clearing- houses for

the kind of serendipity that dorm rooms and college radio

stations used to provide. Kanye embodies our era’s insatiable

appetite to aggregate – to incorporate everything all at once

– and MBDTF is the operatic sound of that insatiability set to music. To promote the album in the late summer of 2010, he

even gave impromptu performances of new tracks at the

headquarters of both Facebook and Twitter, where, at the

latter, he opened his now infamous account.

Th

ere are many other compelling reasons to devote an

entire volume to MBDTF . Few compete with the album’s

greatest theme, however, which is the saga of its creator’s

pathological need for greatness. More than a panegyric to

excess or a celebration of his narcissism, MBDTF is a spiri-

tual anatomy of Kanye West. Listen hard and you fi nd that

the fundamental confl ict is between a child- emperor and his

irrational fear of oblivion. “My-Beautiful-Dark-Twisted-

Fantasy” – say it aloud. It could be the title of an essay penned

by a vengeful third grader. Th

e album is a portrait of genius

held hostage on all sides by ambition, frustration, and in-

security, an allegory about art as the only valid response to

emotional crisis and the only authentic mode of redemption.

6

P O RT R A I T O F T H E M O N S T E R A S A YO U N G M A S T E R P I E C E

If those descriptions sound a bit too highfalutin for a discus-

sion about a pop star, that is because West is no ordinary pop

star. In truth, it is unclear what he is, exactly, or what he might

become. On MBDTF he oft en seems to bear more kinship to

visual artists like Matthew Barney and Sigmar Polke than Lil

Wayne or Prince.

From its swollen roster of diverse collaborators, to its

polysemic tapestry of inspired samples and breathtaking

hooks, to its creator’s covetous wish to inherit the King of

Pop’s mantle, to the in- studio awareness during production

of the stakes for West’s career, to its yawping desire to sound

like nothing else before or since, MBDTF is a monument to

its own pursuit of perfection. For critics and fans across

demographics, listening to the album once in its entirety was

enough to ratify its status as an instant classic – more

exploding quasar than landmark – but a classic nonetheless.

Because speculation about the motives of celebrities has

become an unoffi

cial American religion, and because he has

so thoroughly knifed through most of the membranes sepa-

rating self-

promotion from self-

expression, one could be

forgiven for harboring suspicions that a critical study of

Kanye West – one long overdue, in my estimation – might be

nothing more than a PR stunt in essayistic garb on behalf of

the rapper’s camp. At this point it is worth mentioning that I

have never met Kanye West. During my time spent preparing

and writing the book, I have not attempted to contact anyone

involved with the production of MBDTF , or any other West

album, for that matter. Th

ose among my digitally ambiguous

circle of friends and acquaintances curious enough to inquire

7

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

about my subject oft en looked askance whenever I told them.

What the hell for? is what their well- intentioned looks of

concern said, each fl itting downward glance a courteous

eff ort to shield me from pity or disgust. Even among my

poptimist friends who approach records with the critical and

evaluative rigor of Stephen Greenblatt, the idea of taking

Kanye seriously for longer than the standard 750 word album

review seemed extreme. In August of 2013, two months aft er

the birth of his daughter North, Kanye was booed in Los

Angeles at a Dodgers game when a jumbotron broadcast his

image to the stadium’s crowd. Th

e incident was a metonym

for his fraught status in popular American culture, a fi tting

counterpoint to his boast on the MBDTF track “Devil in a

New Dress”: “Hood phenomenon, the LeBron of rhyme /

Hard to be humble when you stunting on a jumbotron.”

Unimpeachable as his musical output the past decade has

been, the idea of what he represents – the odor of narcissistic

aggression mixed with puerile vulnerability – is off ensive to

the general public. And though it may be tempting here to

seek similarities to Michael Jackson, West’s fallen idol, it is

impossible to envision Michael so wholly polarizing the pop

electorate at the peak of his career in 1985.

For these and various other reasons, writing in earnest

about Kanye and his art poses certain challenges. Th

e un-

offi

cial subtitle of this book, A Th

eory of Kanye West , speaks

to what I openly and perhaps naively off er: a theory, a system

of ideas – by defi nition imperfect, incomplete, and improv-

able – marshaled to make sense of something too complex

for self- evident explanation. For whether or not we dare

admit it, Kanye is an instantiation of the best and worst parts

8

P O RT R A I T O F T H E M O N S T E R A S A YO U N G M A S T E R P I E C E

of, as he puts it, “living in that twenty- fi rst century.” Taking

the measure of his music in light of that idea, we can discern

in him some of the vital contradictions that shape our own

experience, the same tug-

of-war between the obsolete

demands of analog life and the allure of digital ubiquity, of

consuming and performing possibilities on every online

platform, simultaneously, before an audience of virtually

everyone. Narcissism is, aft er all, a mirror- making of the

world. Looking into the two- way mirror of MBDTF , gazing

upon its cipher of baroque embellishment, we may be

surprised and even a little pleased at how familiar the

grotesque refl ection staring back appears when viewed at just

the right angle.

9

10

The Narcissistic Personality

of Our Time

Th

e May 2012 issue of Th

e Atlantic magazine was the annual

“Culture Issue” and two notable features received top billing.

Th

e fi rst of these, the cover story (“Is Facebook Making Us

Lonely?”), asks whether our vigorous online presence has

made us lonely digital narcissists. Th

e other feature

(“American Mozart”) profi les Kanye West, casting him as “the

fi rst true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contem-

porary American music, intent on using his creative and

emotional gift s to express the heartbreaks and fantasies of his

audience.” To open his Kanye piece, writer David Samuels

relates an amusing anecdote about an exchange he had with

President Barack Obama at a 2012 fundraising dinner in

New York. “Kanye or Jay Z?” Samuels asks. “Jay Z,” the presi-

dent says. “Although I like Kanye. He’s a Chicago guy. Smart.

He’s very talented.” Samuels presses the issue, reminding the

president he has publicly called Kanye a “jackass” in the past.

“He is a jackass,” replies Obama. “But he’s talented.”

Th

at makes two consecutive leaders of the free world who,

whether through provocation or professional courtesy, felt

the need to comment publicly and on the record about Kanye

West. What could possibly account for this? Had any pop

11

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

musician in American history ever received public rebukes

from back-

to-back presidents? During the onset of the

culture wars in the late eighties and early nineties, many

congressional conservatives stridently denounced music

deemed to be at odds with “traditional family values,” but

those attacks were largely of a political nature, not personal

aspersions cast on the character of a particular artist. Th

ere

are precedents for good pop star- presidential relations, of

course, however improbable or bizarre. In 1970 Elvis Presley

met with President Nixon in secret at the White House,

where, astonishingly, he received a Bureau of Narcotics and

Dangerous Drugs badge. For allowing “Beat It” to be used

in a public service announcement campaign against teen

drinking and driving, Ronald Reagan presented the

“Presidential Public Safety Communication Award” to

Michael Jackson in 1984. Scouring the past for a pop light-

ning rod akin to Kanye is a fool’s errand, though, unless you

expand the category of “pop stars” to include Middle Eastern

dictators, in which case we can fi nd numerous analogues.

Was it mere coincidence that the two features were juxta-

posed in that issue of Th

e Atlantic , an arbitrary editorial

choice? Or did their proximity in an issue devoted to the zeit-

geist symbolize a defi nite relationship, some indefi nable link?

What does the music of Kanye West have to do with loneli-

ness and narcissism in the digital age?

Writer Stephen Marche opens his Facebook piece by

recounting the ghoulish demise of Yvette Vickers, a former

Playboy playmate in her early eighties found “mummifi ed” in

her Los Angeles home on April 27, 2011. She was believed to

12

T H E NA R C I S S I S T I C P E R S O NA L I T Y O F O U R T I M E

have been dead for nearly a year, her computer screen still

aglow in the dim room where her body was discovered. A

subsequent Los Angeles Times story reporting her death was

shared thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter, a fact

Marche deploys to vault into his examination of the relation-

ship between loneliness and digital technology. “[Vickers]

had long been a horror- movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s

capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways;

now she was an icon of a new and diff erent kind of horror:

our growing fear of loneliness,” he writes. Th

e feature

proceeds apace with its big- canvas assessment, a lamentation

for humanity’s evolving incapacity for genuine connection.

Marche is quick to poke his fi nger into the singularity – the

throbbing contradiction at the heart of the article and the

digital era’s defi ning paradox: “We have never been more

detached from one another, or lonelier,” he writes. “In a world

consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have

less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contra-

diction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are.

We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the

drab cul- de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of

information.”

Tempting though it is to write off such a crescendo as

manufactured editorial angst, the pop intellectual’s equiva-

lent of Glenn Beck crying on television while babbling about

Woodrow Wilson and fascism, Marche is clearly on to some-

thing. Who among Facebook users with a shred of self-

honesty can deny that the ceaseless comparison of life data

between oneself and everyone else is spiritually vexing? Or

that to experience Facebook at any given moment is to fl oat

13

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

atop a churning ocean of self-

aggrandizement, self-

promotion, and self- satisfaction? In Infi nite Jest , his sprawling and prophetic novel of the digitized- to-death twenty- fi rst

century, the late David Foster Wallace coined a phrase that

captures this unique brand of dysphoria: the howling fantods .

As in, “My Facebook friend who now manages a hedge fund

won’t stop posting pictures of himself at Davos high- fi ving

Bill Clinton and Warren Buff et, and it’s giving me the howling

fantods.”

Th

ere are as many variations on this theme as there are

Facebook users, but the principle remains the same. As no

technology before it, Facebook allows the average person a

real- time means of inventing a public “self ” – a manicured

and attenuated ideal – within the voyeuristic imaginations of

others. More a nexus of competing online public relations

enterprises than a genuine virtual society, Facebook has

become a legitimate mode of our being-

in-the-

world,

whether we care to admit it or not. As Nicholas Carr notes in

his bestseller Th

e Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our

Brains , social networks have transformed “intimate messages

– once the realm of the letter, the phone call, the whisper –

into fodder for a new form of mass media. . .Th

ey’ve also

placed a whole new emphasis on immediacy.” Th

e novelty of

information disseminated via social media evaporates

quickly, in other words, a fact that has institutionalized

immediacy and newness as cardinal virtues of digital life.

Th

ese twinned imperatives, to make it new and make it now , undergird the logic of information fl ow in the digital age.

Having evolved from the ethos of insatiable consumption

that ascended unchecked during the postwar decades, we now

14

T H E NA R C I S S I S T I C P E R S O NA L I T Y O F O U R T I M E

have the 24-hour news cycle, “TV Everywhere” (the cable

industry’s mantra for feeding content to a subscriber’s many

screens), Google Glass, glib social anxieties like FOMO (Fear

of Missing Out), self-rationalizing battle cries like YOLO (You

Only Live Once), microblogs, cloud- based living, wearable

tech, and a panoply of online platforms from which to build a

digital following, or tribe , in the anthropological argot of the moment. Tiresome marketing hacks the world over chant

their credo for our age at every opportunity: Content is king . If the fundamental creative criterion for a sixties artist of Bob

Dylan’s ilk was “to have something to say” – i.e., to off er oblique

philosophizing or meaningful social commentary – today the

imperative is simpler and much more literal: “Keep talking.”

Along with the myriad conveniences that fl ow from intuitive

digital technologies, our usage constitutes an unspoken

acceptance of the associated psychosocial hazards. Th

e

conscious mind understands that Facebook is just a display

case for life sculpture, a winnowing away of all that is not

craft beer, precocious children, and the Ivy League. Yet the

unconscious mind – the id for which immediacy is the only

valid concept of time – is ill- equipped to provide perspective.

Within the theater of our insecurities, appearance is very

much the stand- in for reality. Whenever we look at Facebook

some part of us, a very childish part, believes that what we see

is what we get. By bearing continual witness to the noncha-

lant polish of other people’s socially shared lives, we feel more

remote from our own.

Th

e idea that increased Facebook usage can engender

loneliness in the user is now taken for granted, the workaday

15

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

stuff of standup comedy and headlines in Th

e Onion . Marche

develops an argument in his Atlantic piece that explodes the

cliché, though, by positing loneliness as one half of an essen-

tial contradiction in the American character. Noting that the

Pilgrims who fl ed Europe “accepted [loneliness] as the price

of their autonomy,” cowboys on the frontier “traded away

personal ties in favor of pride and self- respect,” and the astro-

naut – “the ultimate American icon” – is nothing if not alone,

Marche makes the case that loneliness is the inevitable

obverse of self- reliance, that most exalted of all American

ideals. Th

e contradiction arises from the confl ict between

this type of lonely, iconoclastic individualism – which he

likens to the Pilgrims’ rebellion – and the oppressive herd

impulse also native to the American psyche, the Salem witch

trials “now read[ing] like attempts to impose solidarity.” Th

e

implication is that, in opposition to the fabled instinct of

pioneering entrepreneurialism, Americans also possess an

unconscious will to enforce social integrity at all costs. In

Moby-Dick , Melville fi nds a foreboding power within this

psychic contradiction by invoking a geographic metaphor,

inviting the reader to “consider them both, the sea and the

land; and do you not fi nd a strange analogy to something in

yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant

land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of

peace and joy, but encompassed by the horrors of the half

known life.” Could it be that the oceanic instinct of our time,

the unconscious psychic tide of the iPhone era, is the social

adoption of the digital scale of values – superfi ciality, novelty,

immediacy, self- immersion, connectivity, and conspicuous-

ness? Th

at the same society capable of producing the world’s

16

T H E NA R C I S S I S T I C P E R S O NA L I T Y O F O U R T I M E

leading innovators and entrepreneurs has, in the process, laid

the foundation for a culture fueled by digital narcissism?

Th

e concept of pathological narcissism as a social affl

iction is

nothing new. Christopher Lasch popularized the idea with

his 1979 treatise Th

e Culture of Narcissism: American Life in

an Age of Diminishing Expectations . Diagnosing contempo-

rary American life with narcissistic personality disorder, the

book describes a society and culture obsessed with viewing

reality in terms of a mirror:

Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence,

the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-

esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His

freedom from family ties or institutional constraints does

not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality.

On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he

can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self ” refl ected

in the attention of others, or by attaching himself to

those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For

the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged

individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped

to his own design.

Th

irty-

fi ve years down the road, Lasch’s diagnosis reads more

like a prophecy of digital life than a critical analysis of

Carter- era America. Especially with regard to the spell that

celebrity has cast over the republic, the book’s assessments

have an eerie prescience. Th

e narcissistic character of social

media testifi es to the way that personal celebrity has become

a default aspiration. Literary critic David Shields comments

17

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

on this phenomenon in his 2010 manifesto Reality Hunger :

“Th

e culture disseminates greater and greater access to the

technology that creates various forms of media. ‘Ordinary’

people’s cult of personal celebrity is nurtured by these new

modes of communication and representation. We’re all

secretly practicing for when we, too, will join the ranks of the

celebrated.”

Twitter now stands as a legitimate sphere of public

discourse and an important social barometer, an idea that

only seven years ago would have been diffi

cult to take seri-

ously. While its value as a tool for social, even revolutionary,

good was on full display during the Arab Spring uprisings of

2011 and the Iranian Green Movement protests of 2009, for a

large percentage of users it’s a conduit to the spectrum of

celebrity. A live feed for personal opinions, one- two punch

lines, banal and/or venal declarations, snarky bon mots , and staccato celebrity outbursts, Twitter grants anyone with an

audience the ability to became famous (or infamous) –

locally, nationally, globally – 140 characters at a time. Th

ough

the microblogging social network is much more than that,

for our purposes its role as a trading fl oor for superfi cial

exchanges and bursts of self- promotion is most important.

Th

at metaphor – the stock exchange – captures the subtle

ways social media has altered the nature of our relationships.

Every status update, every tweet, every photo album, every

blog post, every playlist shared socially via online music

services like Spotify and Rdio – all of these choices are trans-

actions. Th

ey impart information instantaneously and

without friction, fl owing inexorably across borders, an

abstract but no less valid currency than the dollar or the

18

T H E NA R C I S S I S T I C P E R S O NA L I T Y O F O U R T I M E

yuan. Th

ey serve to purchase shares in an abstract but fully

leveraged entity: your idea of me . Each social platform facili-tates the trading process with some variation of Facebook’s

epoch- defi ning “Like” icon, allowing users to invest with a

click of approval in content that pleases them, boosting that

content’s visibility and increasing its relative value to the

poster’s social portfolio. If, in the old analog days, “social

capital” denoted one’s accumulated professional and educa-

tional connections, the amount of “real world” infl uence a

person was capable of wielding, it now signifi es something

much more complicated. In the iPhone era virtually everyone

is a social capitalist, which is a less uplift ing way of saying

that we are all connected – searchable, streaming, optimized

– whether we wish to be or not.

Once the concept of

infl uence became the organizing

principle by which to measure a person’s digital celebrity,

companies such as Klout, which assigns a numeric value to

each user’s social profi le, emerged to brand the process. By

satisfying the American appetite for rankings, Klout success-

fully appeals to its users’ innate narcissism and thirst for

personal celebrity. Th

e company monetizes this celebrity by

selling user data to marketers and advertisers eager to

promote products to the infl uential. Social media platforms

are thus not only sites of fi gural transactions, my purchasing

your attention with compelling content to buy shares in an

idealized

me

, but also literal transactions, wherein my

personal data is sold to the highest bidder who will, in turn,

attempt to sell me goods and services that fl atter and meet

the needs of my social profi le. I respond to these surgically

precise ads by purchasing items I fi nd cool or useful, sharing

19

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

my discoveries across multiple social networks, directly

aff ecting the buying behavior of my friends, which – signifi -

cantly – boosts my Klout score and level of social infl uence,

capturing the attention of those same advertisers who

purchase Klout data, and the narcissistic algorithm is

repeated ad infi nitum .

How do these twenty- fi rst century dynamics relate to what

Lasch perceived in contemporary American life circa 1979?

In an early section of his book titled “Th

e Narcissistic

Personality of Our Time,” he provides the underpinnings of

his diagnosis: “Every society reproduces its culture – its

norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing

experience – in the individual, in the form of personality.” At

this point he delves into the murky intellectual waters of

Freud and the psychoanalytic worldview, outlining the ways

that each civilized society must try to solve “the universal

crises of childhood” – separation from the mother, fear of

abandonment, competition for mother’s love, etc. Th

e

methods a society employs to confront these challenges

determine to a large extent its characteristic personality, to

which the individual submits and reconciles himself, careful

to observe prevailing social norms. For Lasch, narcissism’s

migration from the realm of metaphor to the clinic repre-

sented a paradigm shift in the social personality type. Th

ough

an entire subgenre of self- help books on narcissistic person-

ality disorder now exists (an Amazon search of books on

“narcissistic relationships” yields over 1,000 results), at the

time of Lasch’s writing the clinical concept of narcissism was

fairly new, having only been codifi ed as a psychiatric disorder

20

T H E NA R C I S S I S T I C P E R S O NA L I T Y O F O U R T I M E

in 1968. Obsessional neuroses and hysteria were the charac-

teristic pathologies of Freud’s day, extremes that mirrored the

social dynamics of early twentieth century capitalism,

including “acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a

fi erce repression of sexuality.” Th

e digital era has engendered

a set of pathologies that corresponds to the narcissism of our

daily routine, from the wall- to-wall screens we use to aggre-

gate the fragmented world at large, to the social and commer-

cial imperatives of strategic self-

branding online, to the

virtualization of huge swaths of our lives. If Lasch is correct

that every era reproduces its culture (its products and its

pathologies) in the form of the individual, what does Kanye

West’s status as superstar and pariah say about us? David

Samuels’ “American Mozart” piece in

Th

e Atlantic was

anathema to many of its readers, prompting more than a few

longtime subscribers to renounce their allegiance to the

magazine. Was the outrage purely about off ended sensibili-

ties, disgust at the various types of cultural miscegenation

(black and white, high art and low art, history and contin-

gency) implied in the comparison? Or was the response

about something more insidious and elusive, a repressed

recognition that the cultural ascent of Kanye’s personality –

grandiose, egomaniacal, restive – was inevitable? Th

at he is

not so much the voice of his generation as he is the narcis-

sistic personality of our time?

21

22

Five Uneasy Pieces

At the Los Angeles premiere of his fi lm Runaway in October

2010, Kanye West discussed artist George Condo’s MBDTF

album cover artwork with the unself- conscious exuberance

of a child: “I told [Condo] I wanted a phoenix, and that’s what

he came up with. And what I love about it is, both me and

George express ourselves with our truest vision, not based on

what society or culture feels is right, but what’s truly in our

heart, and I just know if George was in my class back when I

was in kindergarten, and he came up with something like

that, I would’ve been envious, like, ‘Man, how did you come

up with that character with no arms and the wings, man?

Th

at’s cool!’. . .And it’s simply like that. I just really love the colors. I thought the colors were just amazing, and the

imagery was amazing. I thought it was a cool, awesome cover.”

Australian critic and

frieze

magazine co-

editor Jennifer

Higgie, in a 2007 essay on the art of George Condo (“Time’s

Fool”), describes his painterly universe as:

[A] ribald world of crazed, comic engagement, theatrical

illogic and a furious indiff erence to conventional niceties.

23

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

Lush, delicate swaths of paint delineate bodies penetrated

by other bodies, pierced by objects ranging from harpoons

and daggers to carrots, or plagued by mental disquiet;

insanity is the order of the day, served with a side helping

of sly cruelty. . .Traditional subjects such as reclining nudes

and drunken men fuse with invented characters from

prehistoric, Classical, or Pop culture, including slapstick

Roman soldiers, snarling superheroes with beer bellies,

demented saints wearing opulent robes and irate cave

dwellers. . .But whatever the subject, every brushstroke

seems to acknowledge the impact hundreds of years of

painters – from Frans Hals and Edouard Manet to Otto Dix,

Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning and Phillip Guston (all

painters to whom the physicality, the possibilities of paint,

were as important as subject matter) – have had on Condo’s

technique, his exploration of space and his mind’s eye.

Having burst forth from the East Village art scene of the

eighties with fellow

enfant terrible Jean-Michel Basquiat,

Condo has spent the past thirty- plus years producing a visual

lexicon of psychospiritual grotesquerie. Th

e non- linearity of

time plays a crucial role in his aesthetic (as Higgie writes:

“I’ve never before wondered what might happen if a

cavewoman was dumped in a 1920s’ bar and thrown some

lipstick and fi shnets”), revealing a continuum of degradation

in the anachronistic fi ssures. Condo’s bizarre portraiture

insists on depravity as the salient and transcendent

characteristic of contemporary life, a style the artist himself

has dubbed “artifi cial realism.” A sinister aura informs the

fi ctive personalities in his work, the product of a confl ict

24

F I V E U N E A SY P I E C E S

between representational realism and a juvenile compulsion

toward vandalism. Take a long look at, say, Condo’s portrait

Batman and Bunny (2005). Both the Playboy Bunny and

Batman, icons of twentieth century American pop hegemony,

are desecrated caricatures in the painting – American Gothic

as seen from outside a photo booth in pop hell. Batman’s cowl

is an executioner’s hood, and the visible outline of his mouth

forms a horror- movie villain’s gaping, deranged grin. One of

the Bunny’s eyes is bulging and blue, the other brown and

demure; her nose is a bulbous pimple, her mouth a pentag-

onal graveyard for tombstone teeth. Her face looks like the

work of a gruesomely Cubist plastic surgeon. If you stare at

the painting long enough, you realize it’s a portrait defacing

two bloated and undead American fantasies. Th

e eff ect is an

embellished distortion of the kind sought by kids who draw

Hitler mustaches and satanic horns on yearbook photos. Th

e

mangling is the message. Th

e forms of physical derangement

affl

icting Condo’s subjects – the asymmetrical eyeballs, the

multiple mouths, the goofy impalements, the razorblade

grimaces – emanate from the sensibility of some cosmically

disturbed child. It isn’t diffi

cult to formulate a metaphor for

Condo’s sinister genius: Picture a preternaturally gift ed brat

with a fl air for egotistic hyperbole, a contemptuous awe for

human frailty (his own included), and a self-

consciously

refi ned aesthetic tuned in to pop’s “the past is never dead”

past. Sound like anyone we know?

On the album cover of Th

e College Dropout , Kanye’s 2004

debut LP, a forlorn bear mascot sits alone with slumped

shoulders in the empty bleachers of a college gymnasium.

25

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

Clothed in baggy jeans, a T-shirt, and a corduroy jacket, the

bear looks puzzled and depressed. A college mascot is gener-

ally an optimistic symbol, an icon of belligerent or eccentric

goodwill evoking tradition, school spirit, and brand recogni-

tion. Representing what is both accessible and intangible –

the communal masscult of athletics, on the one hand; the

cartoonish abstraction of institutional identity, on the other

– the mascot is shorthand for community. Ask any wayfaring

alumnus or alumna what an image of an alma mater’s mascot

conjures, and the response is very likely to be earnest and

sentimental. “Home,” some will reply.

What to make, then, of Dropout Bear, the complexly

ironic mascot adorning the cover of Kanye’s fi rst three studio

albums? As a synecdoche for pop music’s most notorious ego,

an approachable teddy bear seems an odd point of self-

reference. Th

e fundamental datum of the Offi

cial Kanye West

Biography is his decision in the late nineties to drop out of

Chicago State University and pursue his musical ambitions.

As success came, a personal mythology accreted around that

fateful choice, culminating in the fi rst album’s title. Dropout

Bear is a celebratory totem of the road not taken, the prover-

bial grin all the way to the bank. More than a biographic

boast, though, Dropout Bear plays a signifi cant role in fore-

grounding the psychic territory of Kanye’s music. Look at

Th

e College Dropout ’s cover art and imagine you’ve never

heard of Kanye West. Who is this cipher in the bear suit, and

why does he introduce himself to the world – honesty

wearing an irony costume – under the banner of failure?

A casual genius obtains in the idea of a loveable mascot for

the world’s college dropouts, a warm and fuzzy symbol

26

F I V E U N E A SY P I E C E S

of diffi

dence and disappointment. His major label debut LP

– the fact of its existence – is Kanye’s refutation of the middle-

class rejoinder to “get your degree,” his triumph in the face of

conventional wisdom. Yet why does he defi ne himself in the

negative? Why do his fi rst three albums loosely allegorize the

college experience, something he necessarily eschewed, to

tell his story?

Framing the image on Th

e College Dropout ’s cover is the

kind of gilded border commonly associated with eighteenth

century French painting, complete with singing cherubim

and rococo fl ora. Has any debut album cover in the history of

pop music ever captured an artist’s basic contradiction with

such exquisite honesty? Th

is Beaux-Arts presentation of a

grown man in a bear costume is quintessential Kanye, a

just- so enmeshment of the ridiculous and the sublime. Th

e

cover is all poignant ambivalence, a confl icted attempt at

simultaneous self-

eff

acement and self-

immortalization.

Originally a token of his basic insecurity, the plush embodi-

ment of his discomfort in the garb of Huxtable family values,

Dropout Bear became a commercial trademark, Kanye West

made cute and digestible. Th

e evolution of the icon – from

the physical costume worn for Th

e College Dropout ’s cover, to

the Muppet- like fi gure dressed to the boarding school nines

on the cover of Late Registration (2005), to the chromatically intoxicated “superfl at” rendering by Japanese artist Takashi

Murakami for the cover of

Graduation

(2007) – traces

Kanye’s musical evolution from cocky self- parodist (with an

insecure shadow) to fully articulated narcissistic projectile.

Murakami’s artwork for the Graduation cover seems to play

with this idea, depicting Dropout Bear – his education now

27

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

complete – blasting into space. Over the span of just

four years, the mascot shed its original ironic connotation

only to gain a new one, as a postmodern anti- logo for a pop

juggernaut.

Five diff erent George Condo paintings commissioned

exclusively for

MBDTF

became the album’s fi ve unique

covers. Th

e most notorious of the set is the one Kanye refer-

ences supra in his interview with MTV at the Runaway

premiere. In that painting a bare- breasted, armless phoenix

with fangs, a Dalmatian tail, and angel wings straddles

a naked West, who holds the telltale green bottle of the wino

in his right hand. More than the armlessness of the

mythological creature sexing him, the lecherous angles of

Kanye’s face are the most unsettling elements in the painting.

Rather than an image of false contrition – something you

might reasonably expect from a pop fi gure coming back

from the 2009 West had – we get a debauched Yeezy

self-

portrait as refracted by Condo’s brushstrokes. Th

e

unrepentant goblin on the blue sofa is the voice we’ll hear in

“Hell of a Life,” a song that reimagines libidinal excess as a

self- contained moral fantasy and means of social escape.

Condo’s genius for distilling the real through comically

grotesque distortion – his puerile devotion to artifi ce and

defacement – is on display here, but full of an odd pathos.

Who can doubt that this painting captures a necessary and

torturous contradiction in Kanye’s creative soul, viz. a lewd

acceptance of the worst parts of his nature for the sake of

a painfully won authentic art? Th

is particular cover more

than any of the other four defi nes the dramatic arc of his

28

F I V E U N E A SY P I E C E S

evolution – from the rap nerd hidden deep within the bear

suit of Th

e College Dropout to the narcissistic exhibitionist

having a fevered public wet dream – and visually sets the

table for the listener’s experience of MBDTF . A noncontro-

versial censorship controversy erupted when a pixelated

version of the phoenix cover replaced the original in big

box retail giants like Wal-Mart, prompting a series of Kanye

tweets that compared the relative obscenity levels of

Nirvana’s (uncensored) 1991 Nevermind cover to Condo’s

painting for MBDTF . Th

e pixelated phoenix cover has its

own weird resonance, though, regardless of the retail and

commercial considerations behind it. Like the fi nal three

minutes of vocoder distortion capping “Runaway,” the

pixelated Condo painting is a talisman of MBDTF ’s – read:

Kanye West’s – relationship to digital ubiquity and digital

exhaustion. Th

e cover sighs “Why bother?” Th

e large, colorful

pixels are koan-

like, articulating a non-

articulable idea,

begging the question of whether honest art is even possible

in an age of continuous online presentation and performance

anxiety, when every utterance and gesture is calibrated to

slurp up maximum attention. Kanye’s relationship to fame

and celebrity is more fraught than anyone else’s in pop or

hip- hop today, and the pixels evoke a sense of defeat at the

digital hands of overexposure.

Th

e four other Condo cover paintings compel in unique

ways. Th

e famed ballerina painting (discussed in this book’s

“Runaway” chapter) is the album cover that greeted

consumers who purchased the CD. Condo’s Cubist depiction

of West’s head as a funhouse attraction, a hive of yapping

mouths, is surely the most ingenious representation of a pop

29

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

star’s fractured ego ever conceived. Th

e cover features an

engorged head that eats up all the space in the frame. Kanye’s

eyes are stricken by Condo’s signature asymmetrical

affl

iction, with the roundly bloated right eye set to pop out

of its socket. Th

e rectangular spaces fi lling each open

mouth look variously like the interior of a coffi

n, the

proscenium of a black box theater, an empty diorama box,

and a guillotine. Some of the square- fi t teeth are white, some

are gold, all are nightmarish. Th

e cover is an astonishing

portrait of how the human ego might look if we could

capture its likeness in a fractional moment of chaos. Which

incarnation of Kanye is this supposed to be? Is this the

suicidal genius weathering dark weeks of the soul in an icy

bedroom, howling out 808s & Heartbreak in the dead of

night? Is it the mind of the interloper standing on stage with

Taylor Swift that night in 2009, in the millisecond when the

poison dart boos fi rst began to penetrate his adrenaline

barrier? Perhaps this is the schizoid voice that tells the story

of “Blame Game?” Th

e cover’s berserk intransigence, its

simultaneous openness and resistance to interpretive percep-

tion, is why it captures the spirit of MBDTF better than any

of the other Condo works.

Th

e remaining two covers are similar enough to be

easily confused. One is a picture of Kanye’s decapitated

head (which wears a king’s crown) lying sideways on the

ground, impaled by an upright sword, eyes open and fi xed on

death. A pleasantly azure sky with wispy white clouds

embraces the scene. Th

e fi nal cover features the same sword

plunged into a grassy hillock, with just the crown to keep it

company. Neither Kanye nor his head are anywhere to be

30

F I V E U N E A SY P I E C E S

found. Of course, if the aughts taught us anything, it’s that

the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, or

something along those blurred lines. Th

e narcissist has left

the building, in other words, but it’s all right – he’s in the

bloodstream.

31

32

Art as Atonement

For all his presumptions of being misunderstood, Kanye

West has received more critical adoration over the course of

a decade than most artists will fi nd in a lifetime. In the

lead- up to the deafeningly overhyped debut of Yeezus (2013), his sixth studio album, the New York Times featured him on

the cover of its Sunday Arts section (“Behind Kanye’s Mask”)

for an interview. Th

e accompanying image of West, snapped

by fashion photographer Nick Knight, speaks volumes.

Wearing a red balaclava, thick gold chain, and high- end black

T-shirt, his arms crossed and his eyes closed in the deliberate

manner of someone aff ecting impatience, he looks more like

a petulant character from Wes Anderson’s cutting room fl oor

than a self- styled agit- pop provocateur – maybe a stowaway

fashion student on Steve Zissou’s ship with dreams of

becoming a mercenary. Yet the mere fact of his presence on

the front page of the Sunday Times Arts section signaled a

crucial shift in his relationship to the public, an improbable

point at which his untethered narcissistic sensibility had

found a wider audience eager to call it art.

Writer Jon Caramanica spent three days interviewing

Kanye about his nebulous extra- musical ambitions, the arc of

33

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

his career, and the new direction indicated by Yeezus , a bleak drive down an electro- nihilist autobahn that West describes

as “aspirational minimalism.” As Caramanica notes in his

excellent introduction to the interview,

No rapper has embodied hip- hop’s oft en contradictory

impulses of narcissism and social good quite as he has,

and no producer has celebrated the lush and ornate quite

as he has. He has spent most of his career in additive

mode, fi guring out how to make music that’s majestic

and thought- provoking and grand- scaled. And he’s also

widened the genre’s gates, whether for middle- class values

or high- fashion and high- art dreams.

Th

e interview turns particularly fascinating in the discussion

of

MBDTF

and the impulses behind its creation. West

describes the album as “a long, backhanded apology” made to

regain his place on the shelves of an alienated audience. “Th

at

was the album where I gave people what they wanted,” he

says. Caramanica counters with the question, “Does that

make Dark Fantasy a dishonest album in some way?”, to

which Kanye replies with a few bumbling ideas about the

inevitable compromises of all visionaries and an implicit self-

comparison to Steve Jobs, fi nally declaring that his sense of

MBDTF as a compromised record is an example of his “never

being satisfi ed.”

Th

roughout his career, one of the most appealing and

appalling parts of Kanye’s persona has always been the

doubleness of his ego – a weirdly complicated childish streak

that charms and disgusts in the space of a single gesture.

Watching footage from the infamous 2005 Katrina relief

34

A RT A S AT O N E M E N T

telethon, you can measure the shakiness in his voice with a

seismograph. What he wants to do, his shaky voice tells us, is

gather up all of the fl oating corpses and detritus and outrage

in New Orleans, smash it into a bolus of righteous indig-

nation, and fl ing it splattering into the living rooms of an

ignorant and apathetic public. What he does is something

diff erent. Rather than bear witness to a moment of political

courage by a precocious pop star, we see an embarrassingly

inarticulate person who, though he yearns to say something

meaningful about racial inequality and America’s permanent

underclass, talks instead about feeling guilty for shopping.

Th

at tension – a struggle between self- rationalized good

intentions and reckless execution – is an animating force in

West’s life and music. So much so, in fact, that in spite of the

status he enjoys as beat maven and rap genius, a plurality of

the American public associates his name not with a corpus of

inspired baroque rap futurism, but with two high profi le and

incendiary incidents that occurred during live TV broad-

casts. Th

e fi rst of these, call it the “Bush Push” (mentioned

above), was an unsolicited verbal sucker punch to a sitting

U.S. president. Th

e second incident was, of course, the

buff oonish hijacking of Taylor Swift ’s acceptance speech at

the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. His intentions were,

once again, avowedly noble – you see, he stole Swift ’s spot-

light to shine it on the more deserving art of someone else

(Beyoncé). He was the corrective principle of the pop

universe, he was deconstructing the tastelessness of award

shows, he was etc, etc, etc. Th

e stunt was a bridge too far. Th

e

Taylor Swift brand is a sacred force in the marketplace, an

ocean of commodifi ed self- regard for millions upon millions

35

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

of tweens, teens, and twentysomethings around the world.

Th

e outburst was self- destructive on a spectacularly visible

scale, and in his usurpation of an otherwise unremarkable

moment, he may have permanently alienated an entire

generation of women. For those who already found his

records distasteful, his antics proved his music to be the

bombast of a narcissistic clown, the meretricious noise of a

child drunk on his own Kool-Aid. His reputation grew to

accommodate a host of social grievances, from incivility to

race baiting to celebrity entitlement. Th

e worst moment of

his public life got its own meme on the Internet, when people

across the globe began digitally superimposing his image on

unrelated photos, captioning each one with some variant of

his infamous interruption (“Imma let you fi nish, but. . .”).

Aft er an August during which political antagonism over

healthcare reform became a blood sport in town hall meet-

ings across the country, Americans found a vital center in

their shared disgust at West’s behavior. Watching his stillborn

come- to-Jesus moment with Jay Leno a few days aft er the

incident, it was clear that for Kanye West, atonement would

require a lot more than penance. It would take a miracle.

More than any other poet of spiritual exile, Dante gave the

world its most elegant rationale for taking time to fi gure shit

out : “Midway through the journey of our life / I found myself

within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had

been lost.” No less than Don Draper, the wayward enigma at

the heart of Mad Men , meditates on those fi rst lines from the Inferno while sunning on a beach in the show’s sixth season.

And why not? Th

e image endures down through the ages as

36

A RT A S AT O N E M E N T

a catechism of what it means to be human, a sentient and

mistake-

making creature adrift in the chaos. Given his

compulsion for grandiose analogy, and his positive genius for

self- deporting from the straightforward path, the image of

Dante’s wanderer is a fi tting one to describe the state of things

for Kanye following the Swift debacle in late 2009.

Complex magazine editor- in-chief Noah Callahan-Bever

became a Kanye confi dante over the years, and in early 2010

West invited him to spend time at Avex Honolulu Studios in

Oahu, where MBDTF was recorded. Since a prophetic 2002

profi le in Mass Appeal magazine (where he describes West as

“hip- hop enough to appeal to the most thugged- out cats, but

thoughtful enough to resonate with the underground”),

Callahan-Bever has charted West’s trajectory through the

cultural ecosystem, providing anecdotal glimpses into an

inscrutable psyche. For the November 2010 Complex cover

story “Project Runaway,” he provides an indispensable

eyewitness account of the process by which our era’s most

dynamic pop star conceived his magnum opus.

Recounting a phone call with West in mid-October 2009,

he writes: “Kanye West was over it, he said. Done with music.

He’d clearly needed a break, and his subconscious had manu-

factured one. Now, he was all about fashion – red leather, gold

details, and recapturing the decadence of late-’90s hip- hop in

design. While I encouraged his pursuit since he was so obvi-

ously enthused, I confessed that it’d be a bummer if he aban-

doned music altogether.” West was calling from Milan, having

left the country following the Leno appearance. He spent a

few weeks in Japan before jetting to Rome, where he began

an internship at the Italian fashion house Fendi. Reminded of

37

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

the trying circumstances behind the creation of the Rolling

Stones’ greatest LP Exile on Main Street in the south of France, Callahan-Bever admits he was intrigued by the possibilities

of Kanye abroad. Aft er a few months with little real commu-

nication, he received a brief email in January 2010 from the

expat rapper: “Yooooooo, happy new year fam. I can’t wait to

play you this new shit!!!!” By late March, Callahan-Bever was

“at Avex Honolulu Studios, the seaside recording studio

on Oahu where West tracked [fourth studio album] 808s

[ & Heartbreak ]” and where he had block- booked “all three session rooms, 24 hours a day” until he was satisfi ed that the

new album was complete.

One of the joys of reading NCB’s piece is his clear- eyed

rendering of both the process and the stakes interwoven in

the album’s production. He recounts matter-

of-factly the

hypomanic rhythms of West’s machinations:

Meanwhile, Kanye stares at his laptop, jumping between

email and 15 open windows of art references in his

browser. He polls those assembled on how risqué is too

risqué for his blog, and occasionally barks mixing orders

at the engineer, tuning subtle parts of the beat – all without

breaking eye contact from his computer. Th

is is how he

works: all-A.D.D. everything.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has listened to the

album, which is as much about aesthetic transformations of

manic energy as is it is about anything else. “During my fi ve

days in Hawaii,” NCB writes, “Kanye never slept at his house,

or even in a bed. He would, er, power- nap in a studio chair or

couch here and there in 90-minute intervals, working

38

A RT A S AT O N E M E N T

through the night. Engineers remained behind the boards

24 hours a day.” Even more compelling is NCB’s account of

the shared awareness among the production’s many players:

But mostly we talk[ed] about Kanye’s album: what it has to

mean, and what it has to accomplish. At its heart, beyond

the beats or rhymes, this conversation is the reason we

were all summoned to the island (no LOST ). It’s never

explicitly discussed, but everyone here knows that good

music is the key to Kanye’s redemption. With the right

songs and the right album, he can overcome any and all

controversy, and we are here to contribute, challenge, and

inspire.

Callahan-Bever expresses an unpretentious wonderment

at getting to participate in “Rap Camp,” the playful moniker

he gives to his time embedded in the album’s production.

Likening the experience to a camp – a clinic put on by some

of rap’s leading lights – makes a lot of sense. If you bother to

take a census of the dozens of artists, producers, and

engineers who worked on MBDTF , it’s easy to forget you’re

not looking at the credits of a major motion picture. In addi-

tion to the sweeping scope of the production and the vivid

aft er- images etched by its blaze of excess – the undeniable

visual dimension of the surplus sonics – MBDTF feels like visual art in other respects, as well. Th

e more one learns

about the collaborative intricacies of the production,

the more tempting it is to look at Kanye as director, as

compositional auteur. To get at this idea, Callahan-Bever

quotes legendary hip- hop producer Q-Tip, who was part of

Rap Camp in Hawaii:

39

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

In art, whether it was Michelangelo or Rembrandt or all

these dudes, they’ll sketch something, but their hands

may not necessarily touch the paint. Damien Hirst may

conceptualize it, but there’s a whole crew of people who

are putting it together, like workers. His hand doesn’t have

to touch the canvas, but his thought does. With Kanye,

when he has his beats or his rhymes, he off ers them to

the committee and we’re all invited to dissect, strip, or add

on to what he’s already started. By the end of the sessions,

you see how he integrates and transforms everyone’s

contributions, so the whole is greater than the sum of its

parts. He’s a real wizard at it. What he does is alchemy,

really.

What Q-Tip describes is an update on the dusty divine- right-

of- the-visionary idea, which holds that certain works of art

owe their status qua art not to the hands that rendered the

brushstrokes but to the presiding genius that commissioned

them. Andy Warhol’s Factory springs to mind, but so does

Steve Jobs’ Apple. Viewed in this light, Kanye’s self- comparison

to Jobs is less far- fetched. Jobs’ singular genius lay in his

capacity to creatively synthesize art, technology, and

commerce – to unite disparate and ostensibly nonessential

elements into products of transcendental beauty, eating up

market share in the process. Th

e iPod was certainly not the

fi rst portable MP3 player on the market, but it was the fi rst to

double as a functional art object. With its clean design and

sleek aesthetic polish, it made an irresistible promise to

transform an

activity into an experience

. We bear daily

witness to Jobs’ thought touching the canvas in the round

40

A RT A S AT O N E M E N T

corners and bright icons of our everyday devices. Like Jobs,

Kanye places total faith in his aesthetic ego. His production

ethos is one of frenzied collage, an ongoing wager with

himself that he can refashion (and rebrand) whatever he

fi nds – in the pop music past, in contemporary art, in haute

couture – into manifestations of his creative narcissism (his

“dreams,” as he called them during mid- show rants on his

2013 Yeezus Tour).

As an art form collage is defi ned, of course, along literal

lines of contradiction. In 1912 Picasso glued oilcloth on his

canvas for Still Life of Chair Caning, bounding the elliptical work with a length of actual rope. By sampling the alien stuff

of a foreign world, the world of everyday objects beyond the

painting’s borders, Picasso deepened the possibilities of

the medium. From the heyday of Dadaism and Cubism

onward, the most eff ective collagists, with materials as

varied as industrial detritus, voicemail messages, and ATM

surveillance footage, have used discontinuity to mirror

indwelling ideas about art. Th

rough collage, the artist

insists on exemption from generic mandates and program-

matic techniques, freeing himself to intuit undiscovered

possibility. Th

e importation of “foreign” material into a work

of art, seen in this light, is less an act of disruption than one

of correction: the slumbering sameness of expectation, the

mirage of the world’s veneer, is a necessary but limiting

illusion. Only through the personal act of selective

appropriation, the collagist asserts, can we fi nd what

we never knew we sought – the elusive pattern inscribed

within chaos, the harmony encoded in noise. As a mode

41

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

that celebrates fragmentation and obscurantism, is there

a form of art more commensurate with life in the twenty- fi rst

century?

MBDTF

embraces this idea as a

cri de coeur ,

performing a formal miracle in which brokenness of every

sort is the only prerequisite for aesthetic rebirth.

42

University as Universe: The

College Dropout

Th

e arc of Kanye’s fi rst three albums – Th

e College Dropout,

Late Registration , and Graduation – traces the through line of a hip- hop bildungsroman, documenting the evolution of a

precocious talent into a self- aware, voracious cultural ego.

Th

e College Dropout is the most uneven and charmingly

immature of the three, full of the indulgent overreach so

common in the fi rst records, fi lms, and novels of preter-

naturally gift ed artists, and for that reason it makes an ideal

counterpoint to MBDTF . Th

e album title is an obvious refer-

ence to West’s biography, specifi cally his decision to drop out

of Chicago State University in the late nineties to focus on

music production. As the son of a college professor mother

(Dr. Donda West taught English at Clark Atlanta University)

and photojournalist father (Ray West is a former Black

Panther), Kanye was the product of middle- class aspiration.

Th

e College Dropout is the canvas on which he juxtaposes the

contradicting fi gures of ambivalence and ambition at the

heart of his early career.

Th

ematically the album stays true to those contradictions

from the very fi rst track (“Intro”), a sketch performed

by comedian Deray Davis (doing an uncannily astute

43

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

impression of Bernie Mac as a college administrator)

entreating Kanye to whip up a song that will inspire class

harmony and make “the kids” sing on graduation day. Th

e

song is “We Don’t Care,” a playful and sardonic meditation on

how the deck is stacked against poor black youth in America.

Th

e ironic chorus is a singsong celebration of drug dealing as

a form of supplementary income: “Drug dealin’ just to get by

/ Stack ya money til’ it get sky high.” Constructed around a

sample of the fi rst few twinkling bars of “I Just Wanna Stop”

by seventies funk act Th

e Jimmy Castor Bunch, “We Don’t

Care” sets the tone for the rest of the record, a generous

collection of songs that pulses with comic ambivalence.

Th

ese are sanguine cuts full of a buoyant, youthful vigor that

hedge between a heavy- handed lyrical cleverness and an

earnest, transparent vulnerability. “All Falls Down,” the

album’s second single, typifi es this dichotomy. On the track

we encounter for the fi rst time one of the defi nitive Kanye

contradictions – his simultaneous critique and celebration of

his own self- conscious materialism. Th

e song’s hook is an

interpolation of Lauryn Hill’s acoustic “Mystery of Iniquity,”

and in the context of the verses it becomes a kind of melodic

sigh of inevitability (“I’m telling you all, it all falls down”).

Describing the plight of a clueless third- year college sopho-

more content to hide from life on campus (while feeding her

appetite for luxe), the fi rst verse looks outward to paint a

wryly critical portrait of a Kanye archetype, the “single black

female addicted to retail.” Th

e song’s third verse fi nds him

turning the spotlight inward, off ering an honest appraisal of

his own compulsion to consume with the same recklessness

as his sophomore: “I want to act ballerifi c like it’s all terrifi c /

44

U N I V E R S I T Y A S U N I V E R S E : T H E C O L L E G E D R O P O U T

I got a couple past due bills I won’t get specifi c.” Th

e offi

cial

video for “All Falls Down” represents this self- consciousness

with a formal conceit, using a continuous fi rst- person POV

from Kanye’s perspective to document a walk through the

airport with a shallow and materialistic girlfriend (played

with convincing fl ightiness by actress Stacey Dash). At one

point we see an earnest Kanye staring at himself in the mirror

of a terminal bathroom, scrubbing mustard from his shirt as

he raps about not being able to go in public without wearing

stylish clothes. “All Falls Down” is an exercise in comic

poignancy, showing us the world through the cocksure

vulnerability of Kanye’s perception, a perspective that

captures something elusive about the fraught relationship

between ego and society.

As a musician for whom the full- length album is still a

viable

aesthetic

category – an increasingly rare pop

commodity in the age of disposable one- click digital singles

– Kanye excels at maximizing the LP format. Coming in at 21

tracks over a span of seventy-

six minutes,

Th

e College

Dropout bursts at the seams with sonic portraits of the artist as a young man. In the middle of the album, two tracks (when

heard consecutively) paint an oddly touching and relatable

portrait of youthful arrogance and aspiration. Th

e fi rst of

these is a lovely abridged rendition of gospel standard “I’ll Fly

Away” sung with soulful doo- wop harmonies. Th

e song that

follows is “Spaceship” – a nostalgic daydream where unrec-

ognized talent and unrequited love are identical. Like a few

of the other standouts on the album, “Spaceship” derives its

sonic texture from a soul sample (Marvin Gaye’s 1973

“Distant Lover”) whose howling Eros has been sublimated

45

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

into egotistical striving. Th

e fi rst verse is a trip back in time to

Kanye’s experience working in a mall with a reference to the

Gap. Th

e song proceeds to highlight the indignities familiar

to anyone who has ever worked a retail job – the asshole

managers, the awkward de facto racism, the general malaise

of malls. Where “Spaceship” transcends its own potential

banality, though, is in the hook. Th

e appropriated bits and

pieces of “Distant Lover” create a melody that tiptoes toward

the idea of escape, a measured ascent that traces the distance

between the prison of facts and the freedom of fantasy. Th

e

hook works so well because it sounds like the inner logic of a

reverie. Listening to it, you can almost see a wounded bird

struggling to fl y skyward in a convoluted helix. Th

is kind of

melodrama – the kind that has fun with its earnestness – is

what gives Th

e College Dropout its endearing glow.

With “Th

rough the Wire,” the album’s signature track and

lead single, a near tragedy becomes the basis of Kanye’s fi rst

great Song of Himself. Th

e facts surrounding the track’s

genesis have passed into the realm of pop legend: Aft er

leaving a recording studio in Los Angeles during the early

morning of October 23, 2002, Kanye was involved in a

head- on car crash near the W Hotel. Rushed to Cedars-Sinai

Medical Center where his fractured jaw was wired shut, he

wrote and recorded “Th

rough the Wire” a mere two weeks

aft er the accident. Punning on the title of the sped- up Chaka

Khan sample (“Th

rough the Fire”) in the song’s hook,

“Th

rough the Wire” is the joyful story of its own creation, a

triumph of creative opportunism. Lyrically the song is a deft

balance of self-

eff acing humor (rhyming “an Ensure for

dessert” with “just sip the sizzurp”) and self- serious morbidity

46

U N I V E R S I T Y A S U N I V E R S E : T H E C O L L E G E D R O P O U T

(an allusion to Emmett Till), more of the sharply attuned

comic ambivalence that defi nes so much of the album. By

dramatizing the aesthetic principle that distinguishes Kanye’s

best music – its intuitive orientation toward possibility –

“Th

rough the Wire” possesses a sonic exuberance insepa-

rable from its creator’s. On the most obvious level, the song is

an end zone dance by a hungry young artist poised for a

breakthrough, an anthem to cheating death at the moment

life is about to begin. (A useful context for just how much

Kanye struggled before making it as a solo artist is given on

Th

e College Dropout ’s fi nal track, “Last Call,” an oral history of nearly thirteen minutes.) In his choice of Chaka Khan’s

“Th

rough the Fire” as a spiritual commentary on his own

ambition, though, West transforms his song into something

like a hymn to the human spirit. Where “Th

rough the Fire” is

a soulful ballad consecrating a hungry lover’s perseverance,

her relentlessness in the pursuit of her beloved, “Th

rough the

Wire” is a goofy love song to Kanye’s future, to what his own

egoism and vision will achieve. Th

e track is a fusion of

elements equally boisterous, personal, and fun, the embry-

onic sketch of a career- to-be.

47

48

A (Very) Brief Aside Re: 808s &

Heartbreak

808s & Heartbreak (2008) is the most underrated album of

its decade. Th

e icy, cavernous netherworld of Kanye’s

stripped- bare fourth studio LP was broadly derided as an

emotionally indulgent misstep. Critics and fans alike

scratched their heads in confusion at the Auto Tuned vocals,

the bleak sonic winterscapes, and the mournful lyrical

gloaming that coated the whole aff air. And, to be honest, the

album is something of a self- pitying monologue performed

in the dark, a grief counseling session with no grief coun-

selor. Yet in spite of all that – because of it – 808s endures as an avant electropop masterpiece and a frozen refl ecting pool

of self- doubt. You can spend hours inside Kanye’s fi ve other

albums and you won’t fi nd anything to approximate the

unguarded intimacy, caustic despair, or emotional riskiness

of this record. From the neurotic plaint of “Say You Will” to

the fl ickering infl ections of hope in “Street Lights”; from the

danceable codependency of “Paranoid” to the android talking

blues of “Bad News,” 808s & Heartbreak deserves a 33⅓

volume of its own. May it grace our shelves before too long.

49

50

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

51

52

Dark Fantasy

How else do you kick off an album called My Beautiful Dark

Twisted Fantasy except by fucking up a fairy tale?

I guess you think you know this story

You don’t. Th

e real one’s much more gory.

Th

e phony one, the one you know

Was cooked up years and years ago,

And made to sound all soft and sappy

Just to keep the children happy. 1

Th

e six lines above comprise the beginning of “Cinderella,” a

Roald Dahl poem from Revolting Rhymes , his 1982 collection

of revisionist fairy tale spoofs. Dahl’s version of the tale paro-

dies the courtly romantic idealism of the original, trans-

forming the eponymous heroine from a demure diamond in

the rough into a shrill entitled wench. Th

e prince in Dahl’s

poem is a homicidal sociopath, decapitating Cinderella’s two

hideous stepsisters in quick succession when they claim the

lost slipper as their own. He calls Cinderella a slut and demands

1 Roald Dahl, Revolting Rhymes (New York; Knopf, 1983), 1–7

53

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

her head, too, but – disillusioned with the toxicity of her own

fairy tale – she makes a wish to her fairy godmother for a life

of anonymous decency, far from the trappings of wealth and

monarchy. She lives happily ever aft er as the hausfrau of a

“simple jam- maker” in a home full of laughter and smiles. Th

e

poem makes us laugh and smile because it validates the confi rmation bias of adulthood. Th

e condescending voice in those

fi rst six lines drips with the cynicism of experience. Th

e tale

we learned as children was sanitized and distorted, a necessary

fi ction meant to mollify vulnerable psyches. Now, of course,

we’re old enough to hear the unpleasant truth, which – being

adults who learn the hard way – we already know. Blind faith

in the eventual triumph of perfect justice and true love is a

dangerous delusion. (You can get beheaded!) Th

e true fairy

tale, the poem says, is a life free from the bondage of fairy tales,

a quiet mind and a content heart. Dahl’s comedy fl ows from

the idea of someone ballsy enough to revise something so

deeply interwoven in the culture – for what is a fairy tale if

not just a petrifi ed public wish? – along the lines of a private

epiphany.

“Dark Fantasy” opens with an Auto Tuned gospel chorus of

digitally altered angels fi lling the celestial space with “oohs”

and “ah-

ah-ah-

aahs” while what sounds like a deranged

English kindergarten teacher trying to harrow her classroom

narrates a story that sounds, well, strangely familiar.

Th

e voice we hear narrating belongs to rapper Nicki

Minaj, interpolating the introduction to Dahl’s “Cinderella”

by twisting the language to suit this version, Kanye’s version,

of the fairy tale. “Dark Fantasy” is Kanye defi ning the distance

54

DA R K FA N TA SY

between where he started and where he is, a strut from the

wide- eyed Midwestern incredulity of Th

e College Dropout to

the glutted bloodshot narcissism of MBDTF . He delivers the

song’s opening bars with a defi ant contempt, recalling his

youthful fantasy to one day look at the world from behind

the wheel of a Lamborghini Murcielago. Th

e memory is

quaint now, the car a nostalgic talisman of what he used to

want. He wants greatness now – straight, no chaser – that’s

his version of Dahl’s transformed “Cinderella” ending, the

only antidote (he imagines) to his restlessness.

Because Kanye West is equal parts imagist and musician, a

collagist whose primary medium happens to be music, a

brief digression is necessary. Any thoroughgoing exploration

of MBDTF has to take into account the visual textures of its

sound. Th

e best way to do this is by referencing Runaway , the

thirty- fi ve-minute short fi lm he directed that doubles as a

marathon music video. Bearing the same title as MBDTF ’s

keynote track, Runaway contains all of the album’s maddening

contradictions. It is self-

mythologizing, rife with hubris,

assertively “artistic” to the point of unintentional parody; it is

also the work of a pop visionary, a rapturous fairytale- as-

emotional- autobiography overfl owing with sensual delights

whose climax fi elds a fully choreographed ballet. Filmed on

location in Prague, Runaway is West’s egoism reimagined as

art house cinema, a self- contained dream fugue that subli-

mates his personal saga into an opera of gaudy regeneration.

Opening with an image of Kanye sprinting down a dim

forest path to a soaring excerpt from Mozart’s Requiem Mass

in D minor, the fi lm announces itself as a baroque allegory

55

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

of the album’s creation. Th

e tongue- in-cheek reading goes

something like this: In the wilderness of his exile from the

American mainstream, the disgraced pop genius discovers

his muse to be nothing less than the fi res of his own narcis-

sistic ambition. Th

rough a series of forays into the most

exotic and far- fl ung locales in his imagination – leading to a

fully consummated relationship between ego and id – the

prodigal brat is reborn as the sonic maximalist destined

to reclaim his rightful perch atop Olympus, a demiurge of

decadence. Hence, MBDTF .

Th

e fi lm’s principal conceit revolves around the relation-

ship between Griffi

n (played by West) and a phoenix (super-

model Selita Ebanks), who – in the form of a fi ery projectile

from the heavens – collides with Griffi

n as he drives his MTX

Tatra V8 sports car through an enchanted twilit forest. Th

e

heavy- handed mythological allusions here are commensu-

rate with Runaway ’s subject, which is, aft er all, the regenerative grandeur of Kanye West’s ego. Th

e track playing during

the fi lm’s opening sequence is “Dark Fantasy,” and the hook

samples vocals (provided by former Yes lead singer Jon

Anderson) from Mike Oldfi eld’s dated 1983 spacewalk “In

High Places.” Th

e voice in the sample is clambering toward

heaven, embedded within a soaring chorus that critic Chris

Richards ingeniously describes as “a mutant gospel crescendo.”

Th

at crescendo is a gnostic swell of aspiration, the restive

yearning of a man who fancies himself pop music’s Alexander.

Th

e question the sampled voice asks in the hook – “Could we

get much higher?” – is both rhetorical and earnest, a recogni-

tion of standing atop the highest mountain while pining for

still greater peaks. As Griffi

n carries the phoenix in his arms

56

DA R K FA N TA SY

away from the scene of the collision, his slow- motion silhou-

ette emerges from the darkness as a fi restorm billows skyward.

Th

e explosive image recurs throughout the fi lm, a leitmotif

and proxy for the artist’s volatile ambition.

Th

e bridge in “Dark Fantasy,” sung by folk pop icon Justin

Vernon of Bon Iver, contains some of the album’s oddest and

most intriguing lyrics: “At the mall, there was a séance / Just

kids, no parents” and “Th

en the sky fi lled with herons / (I saw

the devil) in a Chrysler LeBaron.” To fi nd this kind of inscru-

tably suggestive surrealism in a rock or pop lyric, you need

reference the Dylan of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” – the

images here smolder with the same otherworldly dream sense.

Coming late in a song that takes a preemptive victory lap

(“Could we get much higher?”), the words summon the dread

of a greensick tornadic sky, a portentous glimpse of the storm

to come. Th

at the devil makes an appearance here is signifi -

cant, an adumbration of the cosmic psychodrama we’re already

witnessing. Th

e fi restorm that dominates the “Dark Fantasy”

sequence in Runaway now assumes a wholly diff erent aspect, a decadent holocaust that consumes Kanye from within. A

primary component of his creative narcissism, the decadence

is as much threat as asset – Faust and Christ in the same

small room.

With this contradiction in cryptic high relief, MBDTF

unveils its high wire act of impossible tensions.

57

58

Gorgeous

Th

at

hook .

From the cold- open instant of its fi rst shimmering rever-

beration, the bitches brew hook embodying the song’s title

sweeps us into the drama of “Gorgeous,” Kanye’s cultural

vendetta and scattershot mission statement for My Beautiful

Dark Twisted Fantasy . As the second track on the album, it

arrives with the fully formed abruptness of lightning before

thunder, a score-

settling swagger that draws a clear line

between the miracle of this moment’s excellence and every-

thing that came before. Sewn together with the indelible

hook craft ed by Kanye collaborator Kid Cudi – built from the

sample of a yearning guitar melody in the Turtles’ 1969 hit

“You Showed Me” – “Gorgeous” is a methodic mountain

climb up the north face of Mount Olympus. In as much as

MBDTF was, by design, the work of art that would redeem

Kanye in the public imagination, “Gorgeous” sets the album’s

stakes. Th

e song is a relentless push of lyrical dexterity and

Kanye’s fi nest moment as an MC.

What’s to love about “Gorgeous?” An obvious point of

departure is the modulation of Kanye’s voice, a tinny divina-

tion from within a Campbell’s Soup can fl oating through

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

interstellar space. Th

e eff ect lends urgency to the lyrics and

reinforces the notion that the track is a transmission from a

faraway realm, a dispatch from the future or the surface of

the sun. Th

e layers of sound in “Gorgeous” – which, despite

its intentional strutting, is the soberest track on an album

intoxicated with its own grandiose neuroses – are lush and

fecund enough to overload the brain’s pleasure center. A

melodic piano chord romances a monomaniacal electric

guitar riff while full- bodied cellos sway seductively in the

background. Th

e guitar riff is the earworm here – that trans-

fi gured snippet of sound from 1969 – and it sounds like a

dance craze for brooding obsessive- compulsives, three steps

forward and one step back. Th

e light percussion that steadies

the ship is so subtle as to go unnoticed, keeping its head

down while pop’s moody captain delivers his soliloquy on the

quarterdeck.

Kanye takes a lot of heat for presenting such a perpetually

self- serious scowl in public, and the question of whether or

not he has a functional sense of humor remains open. Th

e

2009 “Fishsticks” episode of South Park left no doubt about its writers’ opinion, depicting him as the only person in

America who doesn’t get a crude joke that becomes a wildly

popular national phenomenon. Narcissistically refusing to

allow anyone to explain the dimwitted joke to him (he self-

identifi es as a “genius” and “voice of a generation” throughout

the episode), Kanye stubbornly insists on decoding it for

himself. Th

e episode ends with him misinterpreting the

punch line in such an egregious fashion that his whole iden-

tity is altered, and he sets out to begin a new life as a “gay fi sh.”

60

G O R G E O U S

Th

ough I generally fi nd topical South Park episodes stri-

dent and unfunny, “Fishsticks” is brilliant. Th

e idea that

Kanye’s ego is a joke he can’t decipher , a punch line that any buff oon on the street recognizes as hilarious but that Kanye

can’t make head or tail of, resonates with anyone who’s

ever paid attention to his interviews, his antics, his Twitter

feed, or his lyrics. In articulating that notion through humor

(always the most effi

cient delivery system for a complex

idea), the “Fishsticks” episode off ers an inadvertently empa-

thetic portrayal of how confounding the world must oft en

be to a bona fi de narcissist. Kanye’s pride has, in moments,

erected barriers meant to protect the sanctity of his rigidly

inscrutable intentions (cf. the self-

detonated

Today Show

interview described supra ), the result of which is a stalemate between the genius of his ego and the opprobrium of the

public. “Gorgeous” is a chink in those walls allowing light to

spill into the psychic dark, and the rewards of a close listen

pay huge dividends in understanding.

Th

e hook’s lyrics are the fi rst we hear, delivered by guest

collaborator Kid Cudi, and they set the table for the rest of

the album. Man- on-the- verge phrases like “I can feel it slowly

drift ing away,” “I’m on the edge,” and “I will never ever let you

live this down” suck the oxygen out of the song’s antechamber,

and Kanye’s delivery occurs in that state of menacing breath-

lessness, a polemic that barely escapes.

Th

e ambiguity of who is speaking in the hook – a type of

fi gurative ventriloquism – is an important motif on MBDTF .

Th

roughout the record Kanye indulges in certain impulses,

moods, and refl ections via the remove of a collaborator’s

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

voice. Th

e hook’s lyrics serve as a complicated emotional

confession of deepest turmoil. In it, we get Kid Cudi

performing the central anxiety at the album’s core, the

reimagined affi

rmation in Kanye’s mind that everything

depends on MBDTF . An overpowering prescience that the

result will be binary, deliverance or destruction, haunts the

refrain, calling to mind images of imminent threat – a plunge

from a great height, perhaps, or an undertow sweeping him

away from shore. “I will never ever let you live this down,

down, down” is an intrusive and unwanted thought, a vague

recrimination whose origin is untraceable, words that could

plausibly come from anyone – Taylor Swift , George Bush,

Kanye himself.

Th

e fi rst verse is a fl awlessly delivered onslaught of embit-

tered cool, wherein Kanye aligns the righteousness of his

return with his indignation at institutionalized racism. Two

phrases – “penitentiary chances” and “inter- century anthems”

– are the organizing principles. Th

e fi rst four bars – outlining

the “penitentiary chances” of the urban poor – transcend the

familiar hopeless sigh at the drug game’s death grip by inter-

locking with the next fi ve bars (which defi ne institutional-

ized racism as a social branding campaign) to decode a chain

of historical consequences. Th

e term “branded” is a doubly

pejorative allusion to (and confl ation of) the old wounds of

slavery and the new wounds of marketing demography.

Th

e hip-

hop “anthems” that glorify lawlessness, violence,

misogyny, and materialism are less the result of refl ected

realities than the wholesale branding of “black urban despair”

as a market category. (Kanye will pick up this thread again,

albeit with much more clumsiness and rage, in “New Slaves”

62

G O R G E O U S

on 2013’s Yeezus .) Th

e inner city “Jeromes” who buy into the

category and aspire to live its lie wind up behind bars, while

the “Brandons” of the world, the kids who listen to the

“anthems” from a safe suburban remove and who form a false

identifi cation with the music’s images, get off with light

sentences when push comes to shove.

Kanye delivers every word of every bar in “Gorgeous”

with an icy determination and numb conviction in the track’s

principles. Th

e second and third verses showcase a host of

unforgettable metaphors, viz. hip- hop as the language of a

new religion, the “soul music” desperately needed by the de

facto “slaves” of a new era; MBDTF as a “road to redemption”;

the fusion of Kanye with Malcolm X in a pop stew; Kanye as

a “black Beatle.” Th

e fi rst time I heard the “black Beatle” line,

I wondered who had made such an invigorating comparison.

Googling it, I learned that – who else? – Kanye had. Th

e

plosive conviction of his delivery makes the analogy, in the

thrill of the moment, a fact. “Gorgeous” amends the old adage

to claim that being great (more than living well) is the best revenge. He even settles the score with South Park when he

imagines choking one of its writers “with a fi shstick,” recy-

cling the show’s crude pun (“fi sh dick”) as an insouciant

aft erthought. Th

e self- appropriated Malcolm X mantle is one

we fi rst encountered in “Good Morning,” the intro track off

Graduation . In that song Kanye boasts about being a fashion-

forward update of Malcolm, less an obnoxious trivialization

of the icon’s legacy than a silly nod to West’s own value system

(i.e., the clothes very much make the man). By the time

of MBDTF , though, the invocation of Malcolm X is no longer

a clever joke; it’s a bold assertion of cultural identity.

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

Rhetorically asking whether hip-

hop is an encoded new

religion – stylized reincarnations of slave spirituals – Kanye

appoints himself its high priest. In the devastating fi nal four

bars of the third verse, he dismisses the aggregate of his

detractors with a lewd pun. Confi dence is sexy and this is the

sexiest song on the album, less a dark fantasy than a fi t of

magical second sight that foretells the shape of the album’s

true ambition.

64

POWER

( sic transit gloria Kanye )

At some point in the tenth or eleventh grade, virtually every

high school student in America studies a unit on the great

Romantic poets. Bundled in countless anthologies with Keats’

“Ode to a Nightingale,” Wordsworth’s “Daff odils,” and Byron’s

“She Walks in Beauty,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

is one of those poems that can feel like the drably comforting

wallpaper in your grandmother’s upstairs bathroom – an

index of the unnoticed and the overfamiliar. Th

is is a shame,

because “Ozymandias” is easily one of the weirdest, most

penetrating meditations on the tragedy of human egotism

ever produced. Th

e poem:

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.… Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

Th

e hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

65

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

Th

e lone and level sands stretch far away. ”

Nothing beside remains – in those three words fl oats the

ancient lump in humanity’s throat, the world’s singular fact.

Nothing lasts, life is fl eeting, sic transit gloria mundi – thus passes the glory of the world. Th

e poet’s voice is not conde-

scending or didactic or full of the sort of unctuousness an

elder sibling might savor while ruining the Santa Claus myth

for a little sister. No, the voice is numb, fl attened by the awe of

escaping everyday busyness long enough to fully engage the

ultimate fact. You can imagine the voice narrating his

encounter on a street corner to no one in particular, a man

lost in the most existential sense who must remain inside the

poem to survive its truth. Th

e voice belongs equally to a

grandmother on her deathbed who shares the story with a

favorite grandchild, a bitterly won nugget of fi nal wisdom to

be cherished alone, later, in a private place.

Th

at the average high school student learns “Ozymandias”

as a simple moral takeaway, a souvenir to be tucked away

somewhere and then forgotten, is tremendously unfortunate.

More than a refl ection on the triumph of entropy or the

brevity of life, the poem is about how fantastically sad it is to

be a human being, a creature given an ego – a miracle tool

capable of devising the most intricate and ornately ambitious

projects – with a built- in awareness of its own futility. Anyone

66

P OW E R  S I C T R A N S I T G L O R IA K A N Y E 

who reads the poem with an eye toward having a laugh at the

vanquished king’s expense (“What an asshole! Boy oh boy

was he wrong in the end!”) is already a piece of that “shat-

tered visage,” an ironic accomplice to his own ignorance. We

resent hubris on the level of Ozymandias’ at our own peril,

because his wasted empire instantiates our own lives. Th

e

poem is about power, certainly, but it is about power in a very

particular way – the unique and defi nitively human tragedy

of possessing both power (self-

aware vitality) and the

certainty of its demise (senescence and death). Shelley’s

compassion for humanity in “Ozymandias” is neither melo-

dramatic nor insincere; it is infi nite, a transcendent wind that

will blow and stir the sands of our beautiful ruins forever.

If we are paying attention, we know that “Ozymandias” is

always a part of contemporary life in one form or another.

While in offi

ce George W. Bush unwittingly nodded to it

during an interview with Bob Woodward, responding to the

question of how history will view the war in Iraq. As

Woodward shared with 60 Minutes while promoting his 2007

book Plan of Attack : “And [Bush] said, ‘History,’ and then he took his hands out of his pocket[s] and kind of shrugged and

extended his hands as if this is a way off . And then he said,

‘History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”’ Th

e Flaming Lips

in 2002 released the song “Do You Realize??” – a pop hymn of

humility and ultimate perspective amid the void, with earnest

lyrics about death and human smallness – and it became one

of their most widely known and beloved cuts. More recently,

serialized TV masterpiece

Breaking Bad

confronted the

poem head on in a July 2013 advertisement for the show’s

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

fi nal eight episodes. A series of time- lapse shots depicting

New Mexico’s scarred expanse is overlaid with the voice of

Bryan Cranston’s meth emperor Walter White. He recites

“Ozymandias” in a detached voice that passes over a slow and

barely audible thud in the background, a discomfi ting sound

that feels like the fi nal stone beatings of the ravaged king’s

heart.

It should come as no surprise, then, that My Beautiful Dark

Twisted Fantasy – a record about the transformative deca-

dence of a fully indulgent ego – also engages the poem’s

legacy, though through the prism of Kanye’s narcissism.

“POWER” is a twenty- fi rst century rendition of “Ozymandias”

as told from the king’s point of view, at the summit of his

reign. Where the speaker in Shelley’s poem depended on a

chance encounter with a traveler to learn the awful irony of

Ozymandias, millennia aft er the end of his rule, we don’t

have to wait that long. Th

is is the age of on-

demand-

everything- right-this- minute, and “POWER” is a song about

Kanye’s self- conscious delusion of omnipotence, a fantasy

too aware of its own extravagance not to come undone. Th

e

track is a wrecking ball of egotism that, by song’s end, has

toppled the Ozymandias statue it just helped erect.

A brief pause here to look at Kanye’s two offi

cial visual

representations of “POWER” is useful, because both get at

something fundamental to the music. Th

e fi rst comes early in

his Runaway fi lm. During the “Gorgeous” sequence – in

which a pensive, furrowed- brow Griffi

n observes the phoenix

lost in wonder among the menagerie of animals in his back

68

P OW E R  S I C T R A N S I T G L O R IA K A N Y E 

yard – we get a snapshot of the fi lm’s symbology, with Griffi

n

our proxy for overburdened, self-

serious Kanye and the

phoenix a token of his fenced- in creative purity. Hard cut to

a shot of Griffi

n making love to an MPC2000XL machine, his

fi ngertips massaging the chopped sample of Continent

Number 6’s “Afromerica” into the primitive tribal wail that

pulsates throughout “POWER.” Th

e improvised hook he

creates on his device casts an incantatory spell over the

phoenix, who gives herself bodily to the beat, a spellbound

cobra in thrall to the master’s charms. Th

e sexual self-

aggrandizement here is palpable, which is precisely the point.

At his fi nest, Kanye is hip- hop’s most soulful practitioner, a

shaman who communes with the samples he channels and

the beats he conjures. His sonic collages have a boastful phys-

icality, and in this scene we get to witness an erotic dramati-

zation of his music’s allure and – yes – its power over the

listener.

Th

e other signifi cant visual rendering of “POWER” comes

courtesy of Marco Brambilla, the renowned video collagist

whose works of eschatological excess pack multiple fi lmed

images into the space of a single frame. As reported in 2010

by Dave Itzkoff on the New York Times Arts Beat blog, Kanye

was inspired to collaborate with Brambilla on the music

video for “POWER” aft er seeing his installation Civilization

hanging in the elevators of the Standard hotel in New York. A

motion picture collage of looped images derived from

hundreds of diff erent fi lms, Civilization

reenacts Dante’s

Divine Comedy

with gaudy pop referents like Arnold

Schwarzenegger peopling the spaces of hell, purgatory, and

heaven. Brambilla was quoted by Jori Finkel in a 2011 Los

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

Angeles Times profi le describing the painterly quality of his work: “It’s like I’m making a video canvas where the

brushstrokes are loops or samples taken from fi lm.” Like the

collaborations with Murakami and Condo on album covers,

Brambilla’s “POWER” video ventriloquizes the raw aesthetic

drive of Kanye’s music in the language of visual art. As Itzkoff

describes the video: “Mr. West is seen standing imposingly

with a heavy chain around his neck. As Mr. West raps, the

camera slowly zooms out in one continuous, unedited take to

reveal him in a classical structure, surrounded by female

attendants who are partly or entirely nude; some kneel before

him on all fours, others wear devil horns and still others are

suspended upside down from the ceiling. Th

e sword of

Damocles hangs precariously over Mr. West’s head, and

behind him an unseen executioner is preparing to strike him

with a blade.” Th

e video is a stunning work, a “moving

painting” (as Kanye tweeted) that Brambilla described to the

Times as “his and [Kanye]’s attempt to answer the question,

‘How do you visually paint a portrait of power?”’ Th

e further

out the camera slowly zooms, the more clearly we see how

imperiled Kanye’s Ozymandias fi gure is, how suff ocated by

decadence, how threatened by his own narcissistic illusions.

Notably, the fi gure of Kanye – at the center of the painting,

naturally – is stony, proud, unmoving.

He looks like a statue.

“POWER” opens without warning, layering the sampled

hook of an obscure 1978 French disco song (“Afromerica”

by Continent Number 6) to pave the way for pop music’s

Ozymandias. A sudden staccato eruption of clapping hands

70

P OW E R  S I C T R A N S I T G L O R IA K A N Y E 

and atavistic chanting creates a sensation of worship, and as

the fi rst verse begins, Kanye locates himself in the pantheon

of history – a self- proclaimed superhero for the twenty- fi rst

century – while a piercing tornado siren howls in the back-

ground. Th

e rolling tank tread of a beat comes in at twenty-

four seconds, sampling elements of funk act Cold Grits’ song

“It’s Your Th

ing” (a cover of the 1969 smash hit by the Isley

Brothers). A martial fury drives the song forward, Kanye’s

ego mobilized and on the march to wage war against. . .what,

exactly? Th

e easy response is to say that “POWER” was the

fi rst single from MBDTF and, as such, needed to be a shot

across the bow, an unambiguous announcement of his return.

Th

e second verse bolsters this idea, taking aim at the cast of

Saturday Night Live (and, by extension, the American audi-

ence) for mocking him aft er the Swift incident. He gives a

brief account of the impulse behind his self- exile to Hawaii

before delivering the song’s version of Shelley’s pedestal

inscription, a metaphorical custody battle with Reality for his

creatively unbound “inner child.” Th

is Ozymandias doesn’t

ask us to look upon his works and despair – he does it himself.

Th

e innermost contradiction that makes Kanye who he is,

the one that makes him both a great artist and a great boor, is

his overindulgence of everything childish within himself.

Th

e “custody” lyric evokes images of warring adults, and

Kanye becomes one of them in his fi ght to maintain dominion

over his empire of creative egotism. Th

e implosive pressure

is enormous, enough to push this Ozymandias toward

thoughts of taking his own life with a sparkling handgun.

Th

e song’s hook expresses profound doubts about even being

Ozymandias at all and then stamps a sonic exclamation point

71

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

on the whole aff air with a sampled quote from the epony-

mous King Crimson song. Th

e line punctuates the new

Ozymandias epitaph for the digital era: “My name is

Ozymandias, 21st century schizoid man . Join me in looking

upon my works and despairing.”

Th

e plagued Ozymandias of “POWER” seeks to avoid the

inevitability of decay by redefi ning power. He isn’t asking us to tremble at the sight of his empire, he’s trying to convince

us (unsuccessfully) that he doesn’t care about its legacy. He

tries to defi ne power as the will to acquiesce at the moment

of triumph, but no one is buying it. Th

is is pop music’s poet

of narcissism, aft er all. A question he poses in the song’s outro

(“You got the power to let power go?”) comes as part of a

generic suicide fantasy in the outro (another ventriloquist act

via collaborator Dwele) – a last- ditch eff ort to somehow elide

the fate of all kings. Th

e fantasy ends with the song, though,

and Kanye wakes with a terrible hangover on a bed lined

with soft est Egyptian sheets.

72

All of the Lights

At one minute and two seconds, “All of the Lights (Interlude)”

is the shortest track on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy .

Th

e fi rst time you listen to the album from beginning to end,

the unexpected instrumental feels funereal. Aft er the adrena-

line rush of “POWER” and the suicidal discharge of its

ending, the interlude’s melody – defi ned by a weight- of-the-

world cello ascending from the depths of some gloomy god

– feels like the release death grants the affl

icted. Th

e interlude

carries within it a sadness rinsed of all impurities, an idea

of grief as the known world, a perpetual winter of the soul.

Th

e Hype Williams- directed offi

cial video for “All of the

Lights” – which includes the interlude as an essential preface

and visual counterpoint to the song – opens on black and

white images of winter in an unnamed inner city housing

project. (Th

e sequence was fi lmed in Rochdale Village,

Queens.) Th

e cold- open shot of a plastic board full of face-

less surnames and residential unit numbers cuts to the face

of an innocent young girl leaving her building. She makes her

way onto a wet sidewalk lined with the kind of fi lthy snow

you only see in large cities, snow of the dreadful hue that

makes an oversensitive passerby pause to refl ect on her own

73

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

loneliness. Not so with the young girl on the sidewalk,

though, trudging her way with sweet purpose to wherever it

is she’s headed. As a visual accompaniment the sequence is

perfect, that rare coincidence between an artist’s visualiza-

tion of his music with your own imaginings. Th

e interlude is

a foreground, an approach to the record’s most spectacular

vista. Nothing else on MBDTF comes close to capturing the

absolute clarity, the purity, of its vision. Like the “Let’s Go

Away for Awhile” instrumental on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds

(an album that’s a plausible analogue to

MBDTF for

sheer transformative force, both in generic terms and in the

evolution of its creator), the eff ect is ponderous. Th

e

cello’s richness and yearning are impossible not to follow,

and we wander with the girl through the dim geography of

nightfall.

“All of the lights!” Like the alarum of a sentry warning the

present about a future come too soon, the call is sounded and

the song begins, exploding the interlude’s protective cocoon

and leaving us raw and bewildered in a place of blinding

neon. A full brass section cannibalizes the interlude’s melody,

absorbs it and refashions it, transforming the solitude of a

walk through the city at dusk into an event broadcast glob-

ally on every screen. “All of the Lights” is the grandiose

central node of

MBDTF

, the singular structure that ties

together a skyline full of dizzying skyscrapers. From the

instant of its self- announcement, the song is a full- tilt sonic

assault on the listener’s capacity for wonder. An actual

warning message precedes the offi

cial video – “Th

is video has

been identifi ed by Epilepsy Action to potentially trigger

74

A L L O F T H E L I G H T S

seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy” – but it feels

appropriate for the music, as well.

To grasp the signifi cance of “All of the Lights” – to under-

stand what it represents both for the album and for

Kanye’s metamorphic ego – the visual banquet of Runaway

again proves indispensable. Th

e sequence of the fi lm’s

soundtrack corresponds roughly to the song order on

MBDTF , and during Runaway ’s “POWER” sequence, when

the “Afromerica” sample blends with a string arrangement,

the fi lm cuts to an image of a young boy clad only in red – red

shirt, red shorts, red boots – who sprints across a blighted

industrial landscape at dusk. Held aloft in his right hand is

a scepter that streams a wide column of bright red smoke in

his wake. Th

e piercing sound of trumpets signals a corona-

tion, or a funeral dirge, or a warning. “All of the Lights,” which

scores the scene that follows, encompasses all three possibili-

ties as a single event.

We join Griffi

n and the phoenix at a night parade so

Felliniesque that its participants demand enumeration. We

see, in no particular order, a Czech marching band clad

in bright red coats, a phalanx of red-

hooded Klansmen

in black robes, acrobatic circus performers with sparklers,

stilt-

walking yin and yang angels wearing stolid bronze

masks, a fusillade of pyrotechnics, and – in a weirdly moving

tribute to the fallen king – a giant effi

gy of Th

riller -era

Michael Jackson’s head, complete with red jacket. Th

e tableau

crams everything fascinating, repellent, distinctive, and

wonderful about Kanye’s art into a parade he throws for

himself. Th

e fi lm cuts between shots of the spectacle and the

75

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

faces of Griffi

n and the phoenix, the fi reworks above

dissolving onscreen into a pair of elementary school year-

book smiles. Th

e scene is a stunning metaphor for the entire

album, an orgy of orchestrated excess that signals West’s self-

conscious transformation from an aspirant to the throne into

the card- carrying king. “All of the Lights” is a cocktail of

detonated sonic energies that, taken together, signify that

transformation. From the opening lines of the fi rst verse,

there is no mistaking why we’re here: “Something wrong, I

hold my head / MJ gone, our nigga dead!” Th

e specter of

Michael Jackson has haunted Kanye’s music since Th

e College

Dropout

, when, on “Th

rough the Wire,” he compares his

near- fatal car wreck to the hair- on-fi re scare Michael had

while fi lming a Pepsi commercial in 1984. Th

ere are MJ refer-

ences in multiple songs across multiple albums. For the 2008

twenty- fi ft h anniversary reissue of Th

riller , Kanye remixed

“Billie Jean” (arguably Michael’s signature song), slowing the

tempo and adding string arrangements and a thumping

backbeat. Little wonder, then, that on his fi rst album since

Michael’s demise, he uses the fact of MJ’s death as a personal

and cultural fulcrum.

What gives the night parade in Runaway such ardor is the

scene’s saturating epiphany of redness – the way Kanye

presses the very idea of the color red into the service of a

single evocative memory: the incomparable greatness of

Michael Jackson in his prime. In the annals of rock and pop

music, perhaps only the color black, as a shadow land for

Johnny Cash’s brooding immensity, can rival MJ’s world-

conquering relationship to red. Th

e red leather jackets of

“Beat It” and “Th

riller” were always much more than pop

76

A L L O F T H E L I G H T S

touchstones of a time and place, slickly overdetermined

tokens of a supernatural fame. For those of us who spent

childhood enthralled by his spell, red belonged to Michael as

an associated fact, an extension of his mystique and the color

of his greatness. Kanye nods in deference to that idea with his

parade, a chromatic obsession to rival Gatsby’s lust for the

green luminescence.

At its core “All of the Lights” is an ironic ode to greatness and

celebrity, empathetically told from the perspective of a

desperate man just released from prison who scrambles to

reassemble the pieces of his life. Th

e song is unique on

MBDTF for being a narrative that Kanye inhabits as someone

else. If you detect a messianic impulse here – Christ among

the lowliest of us – you’re not alone. On an album so single-

mindedly self- involved, a fantasy imagined through the eyes

of someone who is not Kanye West burns with a righteous

contrast. Having done time for assaulting his old lady, the

fi rst verse opens with the ex- con delivering the linchpin MJ

lyric. In the absence of Michael Jackson from the world, the

man fi nds the only metaphor big enough to distill his hope-

lessness and dread. Determined to make things right in a

decentered universe, he returns to his broken home with

nothing but an urgency to make up for lost time. He climbs

the stairs to his apartment and fi nds a stranger has replaced

him. Th

e pre- hook is a litany of overstimulation, lights of all

sorts trapping the ex- con at every turn, setting up the freefall

of the hook, the bright shiny object that ironizes the glamour

of fame, recasting the visibility of celebrity as a spotlight

shone from atop a prison guard tower. Th

e idea of escape

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

under cover of darkness is an illusion, because the lights are

built into the fabric of the culture. Th

ey exist to capture and

broadcast every fuckup, every stumble, every mistake. Th

e

ex- con is as much a prisoner now as ever, and his narrative is

an obvious metaphor for Kanye’s best laid plans, a parable of

good intentions eroding in the face of his own entrenched

resistance.

Th

e moving second verse features the ex- con, against

whom a restraining order is now in place, meeting up with

his estranged family at a Border’s Books (an unintentionally

poignant reference to the now- defunct chain) for a public

visitation with his daughter. He makes a searing, penitent

plea to whomever will listen, and the force of his earnestness

and desperation feels like Kanye breaking the fourth wall and

addressing us as a collective audience. Th

e sincerity tumbles

out of his mouth (“I made mistakes, I bumped my head”),

it’s all he has left , and the gulf between what’s happening

lyrically – a lonely man dangling on the lip of the abyss –

and musically – a polyvocal, multi- instrumental tsunami of

more – swallows Kanye’s ex- con in a miasma of excess. Th

e

small tale of an outcast’s struggle to hustle some dignity

comes wrapped in a production so awesomely decadent it

would make Marie Antoinette blush, and the contrast links

the song inexorably to its cultural moment, to the Great

Recession and Wall Street v. Main Street. Th

is idea is made

explicit in the third verse (sung by an exquisitely strung- out-

sounding Fergie), in which a benumbed voice, pushed

beyond the brink by credit card debt and unemployment,

straddles the void. Th

e trance the singer falls into by the end

of the verse is total – we are stranded in the echo chamber of

78

A L L O F T H E L I G H T S

an anonymous desiccated woman’s consciousness, as far

from the glittering untruth of fame as humanly possible. It is

unclear what exactly she’s prepared to do “this time,” but

whatever it is, we sense the fi nality of the consequences. A

choir of voices sings the hook one fi nal time before the song’s

outro, a soaring lamentation of powerlessness belted by Sir

Elton John and Alicia Keys – “I tried to tell you but all I could

say was. . .ohh ohh” – that leaves us alone again on a sludge-

strewn city street at night.

79

80

Monster

Who or what is the monster of this song’s title? Is it indie folk

shaman Justin Vernon, whose macabre and distorted intro

vocals snuff out the lights of the preceding track with sadistic

glee? Is it the obese monstrosity Rick Ross, whose lion attack

of an intro verse nearly swallows the rest of the song whole?

Is it Kanye West, a swaggering and concupiscent pharaoh

from the future? Is it Kanye’s less artistic but more respon-

sible big brother Jay Z, whose monstrous wealth and power

as the eminence gris of hip- hop have made him the target of

countless insatiable vampires? Surely the monster is Nicki

Minaj, who – in a verse riven with dissociative identity,

cannibalism, and demonic possession – delivers the most

virtuosic MC performance on My Beautiful Dark Twisted

Fantasy ?

Th

e song is the real monster here, of course, a “Monster

Mash” of sorts – the fi rst of two consecutive posse cuts in the

middle of the album. Th

e

posse cut is a track on which four or

more artists rap, and it has a long and venerable tradition in

hip- hop music. Originally a viable way for an MC to garner

exposure for members of his posse (by allowing them to

rap on his song), the posse cut morphed over time into

81

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

gatherings of already established A-list rappers eager to break

bread over rhymes. A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” (1992)

is the oft - cited exemplar of this type of collaboration. What

we hear in “Monster” is a diff erent species of four- headed

creature, however. Reviewing

MBDTF

for the

Chicago

Sun-Times , critic Th

omas Conner uses the metaphor of social

media to distinguish Kanye’s get- togethers from those of

everyone else:

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy .. .may be the world’s

fi rst social media album. . .Th

e overall content is guided

by Kanye, the account holder, but friends and followers

pop in all the time with their comments and contributions,

pokes and posts. . .But these aren’t guests like on every

other hip- hop record, nor are they collaborations. Every

sound on [the album] is a sample, a sonic fragment West

uses to build his set pieces. . .Each guest’s participation

seems particularly purposeful, not just some babbling

to fi ll in a blank left behind for whenever they make

it by to the studio. Th

ey’re not performances, they’re

contributions . . .

What “Monster” does better than any other track on MBDTF

is evoke the raw thrill of the chase, the ravenous ego’s blood-

lusty hunt for ever more satisfying (and grotesque) forms of

embodiment. Ross throws us to the lions with nothing but

our wits in his boom bap intro verse. “Bitch, I’m a monster,

no-

good blood sucker,” he foams aft er a bestial roar,

proceeding to call himself “fat motherfucker” while chasing

the listener “through the jungle” with the threat of a rumbling

Kanye West sample. “Monster” is one of only two tracks on

82

M O N S T E R

MBDTF (“All of the Lights” is the other) that does not use an

element or sample from another song. Th

is fact adds a nice

layer of connotative irony to the title, viz. in Kanye’s sonic

universe a song not constructed Frankenstein- style from the

various and sundry body parts of other tracks is the real

aberrant creature. Th

e beat in “Monster” – throbbing madly

in the middle distance – invokes a conspiracy of malignant

forces, a rotational implement of death spinning somewhere

deep within the jungle dark. Th

e beat is a continuous threat,

never veering too close, never receding too far in the back-

ground, only looming, idling, rattling around in your head as

the song’s bad conscience.

Kanye’s verse is a strutting manic episode, opening with

his deadpan claim to be the “best living or dead hands down”

and proving it with lines like: “No matter who you go and get

/ Ain’t nobody cold as this / Do the rap and the track / Triple

double no assist.” We hear a lascivious echo of the ruler theme

from “POWER” when he asks a sexually self- congratulatory

question, then – unable to restrain himself – follows it up

with an even cruder punch line, a gilded misogynist over-

eager to shove his ego down his subject’s throat. In the next

two lines he plays with that idea linguistically, punning

goofi ly on a slang term for oral sex to confl ate academic

excellence with sexual entitlement. Finally, by way of a quick

couplet to explain his origin, this monster returns to the

jungle depths a greater enigma than when his verse began:

“I’m living in the future so the present is my past / My pres-

ence is a present kiss my ass!”

Untethered as Kanye’s verse is, the pathology that distin-

guishes “Monster” from the rest of

MBDTF

is Minaj’s

83

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

show-stopping contribution in the song’s fi nal verse, a fren-

zied psychotic dialogue between her two alter egos (Roman

Zolanski and Barbie) that threatens to hijack the entire album.

Th

e only recent scene- stealing performance of this caliber was

Kendrick Lamar’s assaultive turn on Big Sean’s 2013 song

“Control,” a verse that set fi re to moribund hip- hop blogs the

world over. Minaj subs her alter egos in and out of the verse

with the recklessness of a baseball coach on acid, and the result

is a hostage situation that happens in the basement of the

song’s grindhouse. Th

e Jake Nava- directed video attempts to

do justice to Minaj’s virtuosity, depicting the pink-

haired

Barbie alter ego bound in a chair and tortured by Roman’s

S&M vampire, black gothic lace and leather in a life- or-death

struggle with white tulle. Th

e verse is too combustible for any

single representation, though, and the more you listen to it, the

more dumbfounded you become that it doesn’t eviscerate

everything else on the record. Has any verse in a pop song of

the past twenty years so perversely affi

rmed Whitman’s ultra-

American maxim “I contain multitudes”? Minaj’s monster is

too far gone to worry about questions of feminism, though she

exhorts us to “watch the queen conquer” while she collects

“50K for a verse” without an album to her name. Whatever she

is, we think to ourselves, she isn’t human. What she accom-

plishes in a few bars is too vicious and unforgiving to be

human.

“Monster” gambols into the exhilaration and terror of an

ego gaining self- awareness, a paean to what it feels like to

activate the potential energies lodged within pure confi -

dence. Th

e result is a schizophrenic horror show, and one of

the strongest tracks on the album.

84

So Appalled

Th

e British prog rock outfi t Manfred Mann’s Earth Band

(MMEB) reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in

February of 1977 – four months before Kanye West was born

in Atlanta – with a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by

the Light.” It’s the version of the song you know best, most

likely, the one you can hear today on any ecumenical

commercial FM station lumping pop songs from 1960 to

1999 under the generically depressing aegis of “oldies.” Th

e

cover’s organ and overpowering Moog synth lend the MMEB

version a certain narcotic urgency, a windblown scent of

seventies spiritual desperation, that you won’t fi nd on

Springsteen’s cut. Part of the song’s legacy is the confusion it

spawned by changing some of the lyrics from the original

chorus. Springsteen’s “cut loose like a Deuce” became “revved

up like a Deuce,” and the slurred sibilance of MMEB’s lead

singer prompted legions of pre- Internet listeners to mishear

the line as “wrapped up like a douche” and waste precious

moments of their lives debating the possibility.

Th

irty- three years later pop music’s best known douche

was in the studio channeling MMEB, sampling the bridge

from the band’s translucent, lovely oddity “You Are – I Am”

85

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

for “So Appalled,” the seventh cut on My Beautiful Dark

Twisted Fantasy . Th

e sample is soaked in the revelatory

paranoia of a sci- fi thriller’s denouement, and a feeling of

sustained dread becomes the song’s condition of possibility.

Producer and sometime rapper Swizz Beatz delivers the

intro, an agonized parody of a hip- hop cliché that sounds, by

design, “ridiculous.” Th

e eff ect is a pronounced cognitive

dissonance between the intro’s lyrical content and its sonic

enfoldment – between the hype- heavy signifi ers of a tradi-

tional Top 40 hip- hop song (“Th

row your hands in the air, if

you’s a true player!”) and the doomy hellstorm happening

just outside your window. Th

e nuclear fallout atmospherics

of “So Appalled” are heavy with thickness and haze, the beat

full of trepidation, and we lurch forward with the spastic

wariness of a child in a haunted house (the song’s doom-

eagerness made it the obvious choice to follow “Monster” on

the album). Th

e soundscape evokes a sense of movement

through peril – a strategic escape from a burning building,

perhaps, or a one- breath-at- a-time trek through a combat

zone.

“So Appalled,” like “Monster,” is a posse cut, with fi ve

diff erent artists (in addition to Kanye) providing a verse,

hook, or bridge. Lyrically speaking, the track is the weakest

on MBDTF . Each verse is a semi- ironic ode to the opulence

made possible by success, but none has the compressed

ferocity or single- minded delirium of the verses on “Monster.”

What makes the song exceptional is its temperamental fric-

tion, its utterly original deconstruction of tired hip-

hop

tropes through a prism of fear and trembling. Kanye raps his

verse in a subtly altered register and sounds like a completely

86

S O A P PA L L E D

diff erent person, a self- styled stranger in a land he’s deter-

mined to defamiliarize. In his verse Jay Z parses the contra-

diction in hip-

hop’s heart, paraphrasing Aaron Eckhart’s

Harvey Dent character in the bleak 2008 Batman sequel Th

e

Dark Knight (“You either die a hero, or live long enough to

see yourself become the villain”). We rarely get this kind of

candor – disgust at the zero sum game of popularity and

authenticity – from a major league hip-

hop artist. “So

Appalled” would be the easy standout track on countless hip-

hop records, but on MBDTF it merely fascinates, convection

waves rising from the scorched earth.

87

88

Devil in a New Dress

Th

e magic hour is that bleeding gash in time just before

sunset, that nether part of the day when a heartbreaking light

limns the horizon with color, and the sky seems to absorb

and refract the world’s most sorrowful possibilities. Day

cedes its dominion to night as shadows lengthen past the

point of maximal distortion, severing their ties with the

realm of rational objects. A kind of opaque fl uid washes over

the edges of our awareness. Mystery rather than clarity

becomes the governing principle. Th

is is a place of hybrid

convergence, a literal twilight zone, where the world’s irra-

tional forces are poised to overtake the natural order, or –

worse still – reveal themselves to be the most essential part of

what we thought we knew.

“Devil in a New Dress” opens with a glint of sound, a falsetto

voice hitting a high note of ecstasy. Th

e voice sounds like

dying light, like starlight cutting through coldest space across

incalculable distance. Th

e magic hour is upon us, and the

sensation is one of fl oating. Th

e falsetto belongs to Smokey

Robinson, a sample of his 1973 quiet storm transformation

of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”, originally made famous

89

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

by girl group the Shirelles in 1960. As pop songs from the

Brill Building era go, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” is

needier, more insecure than many of its peers. A tragic aware-

ness haunts the lyrics, and in the Shirelles’ version of the song

we hear a child’s fi rst apprehension that everything – people,

civilizations, romances – is bound by fi nitude. Smokey’s

cover arrived thirteen years later, all sexual atmospherics and

soulful savoir faire . His song is sung for mature audiences,

consenting adults who understand impermanence all too

well but are too turned on to care about it right now. Th

e

earnest doubt of the Shirelles has been replaced by a

languorous seduction. Th

e song’s basic question, as posed by

Smokey, is emptied of its original content, warped into an

ornament of sensitivity worn to close the deal with his lover.

“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”’s genealogy is a palimpsest

that foregrounds the simmering fantasy of “Devil in a New

Dress,” with the former’s title an unspoken rhetorical ques-

tion the latter attempts to answer.

Returning to the magic hour and the timeless moment of

“Devil in a New Dress,” what image does the sound conjure?

Th

e song’s glittering arrangement is, to my ears, a Benz

convertible moving steadily into twilight, an enormous

desert sky swallowing the landscape. Kanye is behind the

wheel and in the passenger seat sits the Devil herself in

haute couture. Th

e couple are on what will be their fi nal

date, and Kanye is wistful, even playful, about the demise of

their union. “Put your hands to the constellations / Th

e way

you look should be a sin, you my sinsation,” he implores

ironically in the hook, knowing she’s in no mood. Th

e

evening is an echo of another ride- with-the- devil fantasy,

90

D E V I L I N A N E W D R E S S

the unimpeachably sexy 2007 “Flashing Lights” video he

co- directed with Spike Jonze. In that version of events (a

three- minute continuous shot) – also occurring in the magic

hour – his fi nal date with the Devil is a grim joke. She is the

one driving in the desert at dusk, and he is nowhere to be

seen. Aft er stopping to get out and strip down to lingerie, she

lights her clothes on fi re and struts back to the car in her

stilettos, the lights of Las Vegas twinkling in the distance.

When she opens the trunk, we see a bound and gagged Kanye

in a tux looking up with bulging, terrifi ed eyes. Tenderly

caressing his face, she reaches to pull out a shovel. Th

e camera

recedes in slow motion as she plunges its tip repeatedly into

his body.

Th

e terms of the fantasy for “Devil in a New Dress” are

diff erent, though, more ambiguous and mature. In place of an

erotic death wish, this break- up is a waltz full of dreamy

elegance. Time is malleable in the magic hour, subject to the

systolic and diastolic rhythms of memory and deformed

scraps of dream. Th

e song transpires in both the past and

present. At times Kanye speaks directly to the Devil and she

is physically present beside him; at other times she is part of

the past, a spectral blur he still addresses in his mind. Th

e

couple’s car ride is one of those masochistic exercises in

mutual defi ance familiar to anyone who has ever been in a

doomed relationship. Both parties are full of loathing – for

each other and for themselves – and both operate from a

place of maximum pettiness, each knowing that the very act

of going through with the date is a surefi re way to infl ict

discomfort on the other. Kanye acknowledges this with the

song’s fi rst words, declaring “I love it though / I love it though,

91

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

you know?” Doing his best to sublimate the bitterness, he

tries to engage the Devil with some levity, addressing her in

both the second and third person within the same verse, as

though, in the midst of reminiscing with her in the car, he is

suddenly somewhere else telling the story before an audience

who don’t laugh at what, to them, isn’t supposed to be funny.

Th

e eff ect brings to mind the bizarre jump- cuts in dreams

wherein the dreamer’s conversation with a familiar acquain-

tance continues, uninterrupted, in spite of the acquaintance’s

total physical transformation into someone else. Frustrated,

Kanye gets more aggressive with the Devil in a half- mocking

singsong voice, and the magic hour’s uncanny mutational

power takes over: “Haven’t said a word, haven’t said a word to

me this eeeevening,” he needles her, echoing the looped

refrain from the Smokey Robinson sample – “Tonight with

words unspoken / Don’t have to say a word to me, Baaaaby,”

Smokey intones in his lovely falsetto. Th

e magic hour melds

the two versions into something unnatural, inserting a

sardonic complaint into a generous moment of tenderness

shared between lovers. Satisfi ed with that perversion and

willing to cut his losses, Kanye speeds off alone into the night,

leaving the Devil by the side of the road to recede in the

distance. A regretful electric guitar riff signifi es the jagged

break, and Rick Ross is left to clean up any loose ends in one

pitiless fi nal verse.

92

Runaway

To understand the song, to gain some rough sense of its place

in the transhistorical pop republic, you could do worse than

begin with a Charlotte Observer article from April 11, 2012.

Th

e piece is a local interest story and profi le in miniature of

Paul “Mickey” Walker and the Backyard Heavies, the

Charlotte band for which Walker played drums in the early

seventies. “Th

ey had a single coming out [in 1971] called

‘Soul Junction,’ and they needed something for the fl ip side,”

writes the Observer ’s Tommy Tomlinson. “Th

ey came up with

an instrumental based on a piano groove and a drum lick

that Walker calls ‘a funky march.’ Th

ey called it ‘Expo 83.”’

Th

irty- nine years later, the band had long since gone their

separate ways. Walker was a social worker dedicated to

helping the mentally ill homeless population in Charlotte. He

received a phone call from his old band mate Roger Branch

in September of 2010. Branch had been in communication

with an attorney representing Def Jam Records. A famous

rapper, Branch told Walker, had sampled a drum loop from

“Expo 83” in a song. Walker was unclear as to who the rapper

was, “texting his wife that his drum lick had been sampled by

some guy named Kenya.” Th

e story ends on an optimistic

93

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

note, with the three surviving members of the band receiving

modest royalties from the revival of their old B-side, even

making plans to record new material.

As an old- fashioned hymn of resurrection – that is one

way to listen to “Runaway.”

Imagine yourself standing onstage at a concert in Long Beach

in July 1981. You are performing before thousands of people,

and the river of narcotics in your system has breached the

synaptic levies. Th

is shit is gorgeous , you think to yourself,

aroused in a holy moment of contemplating how sexy you

must look from out there in the crowd. You are in the middle

of singing “Mary Jane,” one of the best songs from your debut

album three years earlier, and while bantering with the audi-

ence you suddenly feel so good that you have to discharge

some of the surplus energy before it evaporates your brain.

“Look at ya!” you exclaim, parsing the ineff able high of being

you into a throwaway of boisterous inclusion. You’re Rick

James, bitch, the funkiest motherfucker on the planet, and

though in twenty- three years you’ll be dead, tonight there is

only you and this audience and the fl eeting spontaneity of a

joyful noise to hold it all together. Twenty- nine years later the

moment is excised and transplanted in stereo into the heart-

beat of the twenty- fi rst century’s most ambitious pop song.

Severed from the bonds of time, that happy exclamation –

Look at ya! – is a specter that haunts its new home. No longer

the sound of a cup running over, it has become an accusation.

Whatever hermetically sealed sense of connection and trans-

action the outburst once contained is gone. What is left is an

ice pick of self- disgust.

94

RU NAWAY

Another way to listen to “Runaway” – as the atrophy of

context.

Forget Walker’s drum lick. Time is the funky march, the

syncopated breakbeat played back to you at odd tempos by

your memory. Time samples your life, compresses and

extends and loops whole chunks of it. Time can amplify the

overtones of a long gone lover’s sigh, rewrite the lyrics to

your marriage vows. Manipulating the shape of our experi-

ence, time heals our wounds by changing the way we

remember them. Th

e site of today’s demoralizing collapse is

the groundbreaking for tomorrow’s greatest triumph.

Kanye understands this principle, experiments with it. His

best samples play with the idea of time’s weirdness, its trans-

formative irony, discovering the sonic vernacular of the

future in the scattered potsherds of the past. Th

ose who

complain his songs are recycled pop throwaways are, in a

manner of speaking, correct. Th

e drum sample from “Expo

83,” for example, forms the chassis of “Runaway,” but it does

so once removed, subsumed within another sample, the

breakbeat intro to “Th

e Basement” from Pete Rock and CL

Smooth’s 1992 debut LP Mecca and the Soul Brother . Time

enfolds upon itself in the beat, 2010 via 1992 by way of 1971.

Th

ree separate histories are compressed into a single sonic

pulse, yet this nested interdependence fosters the creation of

a unique living thing, something far greater than its parts.

Th

e pop persona in “Runaway” is heir to an amalgam of ego

gestures and bravura performances stretching back at least as

95

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

far as 1968, the year of Elvis Presley’s televised comeback

special, and – recall – narcissism’s breakthrough into the

psychiatric mainstream. Th

anks to YouTube, the video repos-

itory for global collective memory, a quick search yields

multiple edited versions of the special. Watching it with the

knowledge that nearly half a century has passed since its

recording, one seeks in vain to account for the force of the

performance. In

Mystery Train

, his classic of American

cultural criticism, Greil Marcus cites the comeback special as

a high point of Elvis’s engagement with his own ego: “It was

the fi nest music of his life. If ever there was music that bleeds,

this was it. Nothing came easy that night, and he gave every-

thing he had – more than anyone knew was there.”

A deity bedecked in black leather insouciance, Comeback

Special Elvis understands the audience’s collective stake in

his mythos. His performance is a generous egomania that,

rather than viewing the world as a mirror, refl ects the culture’s

most vital and inchoate fantasies back to it as a fl esh- and-

blood fait accompli. Th

ere is a brief moment during the

special, between song sets, when Elvis, sitting in a small circle

with his band members and reminiscing about the world he

created, has a laugh at his own expense. “Now wait a minute,

wait a minute, something’s wrong with my lip,” he mumbles,

a reference to his signature facial gesture. He fumbles with

his upper lip. “You remember that, don’t you?” he asks, raising

it in the old, archetypal way, awash in the contingent silliness

of history. “I’ve got news for you, baby. I did twenty- nine

pictures like that.” Th

e audience laughs and applauds with a

reverential awe, and we understand this is not so much a

comeback special as it is a revival. Th

e ego on display is

96

RU NAWAY

something regenerative and communal, a sublimated social

wish to play fast and loose with unlimited freedom. Elvis

turns a trademark into a throwaway for the sake of a laugh,

and we realize the potency that a supreme American pop

fi gure has – that it takes an Elvis to eff ace an Elvis, even if

only for a moment.

In his eponymous hagiography of “Like a Rolling Stone,”

Marcus describes the song’s opening sound – a drumstick’s

rifl e report on the surface of a snare – as an “absolute

announcement” of something new. “Th

en for an expanding

instant there is nothing,” he writes. “Th

e fi rst sound is so

stark and surprising, every time you hear it, that the empty

split-

second that follows calls up the image of a house

tumbling over a cliff ; it calls up a void.” “Runaway” is a

descendant of “Like a Rolling Stone,” a kaleidoscopic

epic constructed with an equally keen sense of egotistic

precision. Both songs are caustic valedictions. Dylan bids a

fond and annihilating farewell to an ex- love amid the scene

of her crumbling false ideals; Kanye pushes his lover out the

door with an emotionally shambolic full- on confession of his

failings. “Runaway” is an inversion of its forebear’s world-

straddling bravado, however. Where Dylan’s ironic fairy tale

expands and ascends with a gleeful contempt, a complete

satisfaction that submerges the world beneath a fl ood of

riotous fi nal judgment, “Runaway” tunnels inward to the

diamond- encrusted core of West’s self- pity. “Like a Rolling

Stone” is the sound of an expanding universe; “Runaway” is

the singularity of narcissism’s black hole. If we hear an echo

of forgiveness in the boundless, timeless joy of Dylan’s “total

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

song,” we feel, listening to Kanye’s, the frostbite of self-

contempt.

“Runaway” opens with its own starkness, a single repeated

note of lonely insistence. An E key sounds fi ft een staccato

times on a piano. Th

e immediate feeling is one of real threat,

a foreboding that the lonely E will be the only sound you will

ever hear again until, mercifully, a transitional lower E is

struck, followed by three D sharps. Th

e progression is a

descent, a numb walk down the soul’s Weimar staircase.

“Th

at which God is to use He fi rst reduces to nothing,”

Kierkegaard writes, and that idea is given fl esh in these

opening moments – an absolute reduction is precisely what

we hear. In an album overfl owing with fantastical embellish-

ments of every sort, there is real pathos in the choice to open

a song this ambitious with a single repetitive note. Once at

the bottom of the staircase, in the serene darkness of a large

room, the beat enters and it’s like someone turns on the lights.

Th

e ghostly Rick James Look at ya! encircles the room from

above, both an ambush and a vulture. Th

e eff ect is reminis-

cent of the cartoonish trope in eighties sitcoms, wherein a

child’s bad conscience is depicted as the fl oating head of a

disapproving adult. Your eyes adjust to the light and you see

that the room is a banquet hall with row upon row of white

linen tables and seated guests. Th

e guests are silent, though

their faces familiar. As your mind catches up to cognitively

make sense of what you’re looking at, you have an awful real-

ization: Th

e faces belong to all the people you’ve ever

wronged, hell’s version of Th

is Is Your Life , collected here in

one place to crush you with the weight of their aggregated

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RU NAWAY

judgment. Outmatched and outnumbered, wholly vulner-

able, you do the one thing you never did in your dealings

with them. You tell the truth. You own up to how destructive

your solipsism has been, how toxic to everyone else.

Uncharacteristically, the admission does not arrive couched

in evasive gestures or grandiose rationalization. Some of the

guests’ heads start to nod in recognition at the sound of your

honesty. You do fi nd fault in everything, they think to them-

selves. We have tolerated your behavior beyond reasonable

limits. Your voice is a plea. An odd humility diff uses

throughout the banquet hall, and the guests can tell that you

mean it. To truly acquit yourself, however, you know that you

need more than remorse. You need a grand ironic gesture, a

demonstration that – though no lesson has been learned, no

moral imparted – you are, in your ambivalent way, sorry. You

package your basic contradiction into the shape of an apology

that is not an apology, a champagne toast not to all these

people you’ve disappointed, but – unbelievably – to your own

shortcomings. You use the words “douchebags,” “assholes,”

and “jerkoff s” in your toast, plurals all, as if your grandiosity

will not allow you to seek a reprieve for yourself alone, but

for the very idea of the overstepping narcissist as a type of

human being.

Th

e kicker, the part that no one except you could have

predicted? Th

ey forgive you.

Th

e fi nal three minutes and six seconds of “Runaway” are

what drive it beyond the outskirts of a potentially radio-

friendly pop town and into the lawless hill country of art.

Th

e fi nal third of the song – a wrenching and distorted

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

recapitulation of the previous six minutes as fi ltered through

a vocoder – alienates anyone who expects not to be alienated.

As so many critics and fans noted upon hearing it for the

fi rst time, the fi nal part of “Runaway” should in no way

succeed. It is overlong and confusing and frankly un-

necessary as a coda to an already stunning pop master-

piece. Attempted by just about any other major artist, the

same three minutes and six seconds would likely generate a

week- long meme fest mocking it on Twitter and then fall

promptly into oblivion. Yet it does work. It works so well

that, without it, the song’s entire emotional economy would

be systemically fl awed; the value we extract from the fi rst

two- thirds would be the worthless currency of a failed state.

Th

e vocoder part of “Runaway” is analogous to a defi nitive

life choice, the kind that indicates unambiguously to the

world exactly who you have decided to be. As it drones

anxiously over an exquisite string arrangement: It sounds

like a suicidal android at open mic night. It sounds like a pilot

reading the beatitudes through a broken intercom to the

passengers of a doomed fl ight. It sounds like a dial-

up

connection confessing its love to a pay phone. It sounds like

a warning message from the near future sent by a race of

bodiless digital posthumans. It sounds like the feeling of

having something vitally important to say and not having

language to say it. It sounds like a hangover swearing off

alcohol. It sounds like a long- in-the- tooth iPad lecturing a

class of drones on empathy. It sounds like the failure of logic

in a moment of distilled emotion. It sounds like a lonely

person’s digitally scrambled sense of himself in a culture of

total connectedness.

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RU NAWAY

During the banquet scene in Runaway , a discontent Griffi

n

gets up from the table and walks across the room to an

ancient white piano. He pauses and, with the calculated

impatience of a stubborn toddler, bangs his fi nger on a lonely

out- of-tune E key twelve times. A second or so of silence

persists between each note. With the sounding of that fi rst

haggard note, we become captives within the confl icted heart

of who Kanye West is. As his fi nger repeats the note with a

kind of despairing force and we fi nd ourselves staring into

another void, something remarkable happens. A fl ying “V” of

ballerinas in black leotards comes rushing across the concrete

warehouse fl oor to accompany Griffi

n and his white piano.

An androgynous blond-

bobbed prima ballerina quietly

sidles up to the piano, extends her leg high above her head,

and the performance begins. Kanye stands behind the weath-

ered instrument crooning in his cream- colored tuxedo jacket

with rounded black lapels and black bow tie, the ballet before

him a choreographed expression of his basic confl ict. Th

e

scene is full of an exotic heartbreak, each self- suffi

cient

movement of each ballerina a gesture of opacity, a rendering

in fl esh of unknowable human motivation. Why does Kanye

West act the way he does?

Th

e Condo album cover painting of a startled, doe- eyed

ingénue with a handlebar mustache wearing a black tutu, a

glass of red wine in her delicately extended hand, contributes

to the iconic association of the ballerina with the song.

Condo’s ballerina is toasting, of course. “Runaway,” we are to

understand, is a work of art as fully choreographed as a ballet.

Its place on a pop music album is almost incidental to its

aspiration for self- transcendence. Th

is is because art does

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

more than imitate life for Kanye West. Listening to “Runaway,”

wholly engrossed in its nine minute apologetic of the self, we

learn that art justifi es Kanye’s excesses. It gives sublime

context to the consequences of his worst mistakes, translates

his inscrutable motives into boldly comprehensible language.

Incorporating the raw material of his necrotic emotional

tissue, art performs miracles of healing that no amount of

public apologies, press junkets, stints in treatment centers,

therapy sessions with Oprah, or trips to Paris could ever

achieve. Th

at look of astonishment on the face of Condo’s

ballerina captures the experience of hearing this song for the

very fi rst time, and every time thereaft er.

102

Hell of a Life

Th

e fi rst throbbing fi ft een seconds of distorted bass signify

the mind of someone premeditating his own depravity. Th

e

sound is the feeling of arousal, biological on the level of

instinct, the rush of quickening blood fl ow as heard from

deep within a human skull. “Hell of a Life” begins its sonic

binge with a dragged- through-molasses sampling of “She’s

My Baby,” a juke joint blues- inspired song from 1966 by

minor San Francisco psychedelics the Mojo Men. In this

fantasy Kanye has eschewed the glamorous and ironic

posturing of “Runaway” for a life less contorted. Th

ere will be

no more kowtowing to the wide off ended world. He has

taken his own advice, fl ooring his Lamborghini at top speed

away from the social acceptance he fl irted with in “Runaway.”

Th

ough every track on MBDTF guides the listener down

a glittering corridor in the service of one ego need or another,

this is Kanye at his most lascivious, his most reductively

libidinal. (Only Yeezus ’ debauched romp “I’m in It” is more

licentious.) Where “Devil in a New Dress” moves at the

leisurely pace of a fop in his garden, taking its time to savor

the blurred ironies of the magic hour, “Hell of a Life” rushes

headlong into Kanye’s pornographic lost weekend with both

103

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

feet bound to the pedal. Th

e song is impatient to court your

disgust, and the fi rst line – “I think I just fell in love with a

porn star” – is tame by comparison with what follows. Th

e

fi rst verse goes to extraordinary comic extremes in the

interest of representing the fantasy’s power – a nun reaches

spontaneous orgasm, a priest faints, an elderly man develops

an ulcer from desire. Th

e porn star of this song is the patron

saint of sexual excess, a pornographic rendering of Too Much

made fl esh and blood and thong. Th

is saint has blessed/

cursed Kanye with egoistic powers beyond human under-

standing; by the end of the fi rst verse he’s levitating and

taunting the Devil, delaying the eventual moment that hell

will consume him.

Th

e song’s hook samples one of the most beloved riff s in all

rock and roll, the introduction to Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”

In recent years the riff has achieved mainstream currency

again with the release of the Iron Man fi lms, though as anyone conversant with Sabbath will tell you, the song was written by

band member Geezer Butler about a time traveling witness

to a future apocalypse who, upon returning to the present, is

transformed by a magnetic fi eld into a lumbering and inele-

gant steel golem. Mute and thus unable to warn us about

what’s coming, contemporary society fi nds him an odd

amusement and has fun at his expense. Th

is enrages the iron

man and he has his vengeance by destroying civilization, thus

serving as the catalyst of the horror he witnessed in the

future. Th

e story is one of the tried and true tropes of science

fi ction, a classic causal loop whereby the would- be agent of

change is predestined to set in motion the series of events

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H E L L O F A L I F E

that produce the undesirable outcome. Th

e song’s original

working title was “Iron Bloke,” which – thankfully for the

sake of the riff ’s immortal cool – was not the preordained

fi nal result.

As sampled in “Hell of a Life,” the interpolated riff buoys

the hook, whose lyrics indicate Kanye defl ects the disap-

proval of an enfeebled superego by doubling down on his

fantasy, convinced his depravity can sustain the fantasy. We

hear an echo of the “Iron Man” lyrics in that fi rst line with the

question of whether sanity has fl ed, only now it’s interiorized,

the outside world’s collective voice of reason as ventrilo-

quized by Kanye to himself. He is punch drunk with the

pornography of excess. “Pussy and religion” are eff ectively

identical, the only reasons to live in the world of the song’s

fantasy. Th

e hook’s fi nal entreaty is addressed to the profes-

sionally erotic muse, Saint Too Much, and it puns morbidly

on the phrase “hell of a life,” signifying both the illusion of an

eternally titillating debauch and the ineluctable reality of

escapism’s abyss.

Late in the second verse, in a free associative cascade of

rhyming images, Kanye has another intrusive moment of

foreboding. Commenting on the weird economics of a porn

star’s repertoire (viz. that anal sex and group sex, or “gang

bang,” fetch about the same price on the market), he launches

into a twisted syllogism that equates group sex, gang brutality,

slavery, and death by gunfi re with the emotional hell of

coming down from his fantasy. Th

e sound of his “bang, bang,

bang, bang” is fl accid and depressive, a subtle nod to the truth

that the Lamborghini will one day run out of gas. By the third

verse Kanye is all in, though, pushing the fantasy’s logical

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

extension past its breaking point. Wanting to have it all, both

the fantasy of asocial decadence and the more realistic

American version with a yard and a baby, he imagines what

married life to the porn star might look like. Th

e obvious joke

to be made here about an open marriage is not too obvious

for Kanye, who has a laugh at the idea of both husband and

wife sleeping with the bridesmaids. Life will be an endless

succession of role- playing sex, he imagines, sex so devastat-

ingly great that it sidelines him for whole days at a time. He

wonders which Oscar party they’ll attend together as a

couple, ponders what she might wear when they step out in

the world with nothing to hide from anyone. During a fl ash

of tenderness and compassion, he even imagines an Oscar de

la Renta employee publicly shaming his wife for trying on a

dress in the store. He imagines scolding the judgmental

employee with a rhetorical question that doubles as a ques-

tion posed to the world judging him, his own version of

Christ’s “plank in your own eye” comment in the Sermon on

the Mount. Finally, by the song’s outro, the compressed

fantasy fi nally walks out of the strip club and into the nervous

light of Sunday morning. Kanye is recounting to himself the

events of the night, compressing the fantasy into a set of

three hilariously digestible images – a marriage in a bath-

room, a dance fl oor honeymoon, and a quickie divorce later

the same night. Th

e party is over.

Why is this song stationed on the record between “Runaway”

– the soaring and triumphal “backhanded apology” for the

contradiction of Kanye’s persona – and “Blame Game” – a

trek into his own emotional Chernobyl? “Hell of a Life”

106

H E L L O F A L I F E

operates like the bridge between two distinct states of feeling,

the only way to get from one to the other. Picking up exactly

where “Runaway” ends, gathering the loose threads of sonic

distortion, “Hell of a Life” gives them shape and form. Both

on the run from and toward the day of his emotional reck-oning, he overdoses on sexual excess, using the fantasy to

escape as far within himself as possible. Th

e specter of

Sabbath’s mute iron bloke, encased within an impenetrable

shell and dying to be understood, never trails too far behind

in this song, one that fi nds West so deeply and narcissistically

ensconced within his own indulgent fantasy that it takes the

harrowing annihilation of “Blame Game” to extract him.

107

108

Blame Game

Th

e wrenching melody we hear in “Blame Game,” the most

painful cut on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy , comes via

a sample of electronic musician Aphex Twin’s elegiac “Avril

14th.” A piano composition just under two minutes long,

“Avril 14th” is a glimmer of unnamable sadness, a whispered

idea that seeps into the soul’s cracks and quietly drowns the

listener from within. Exquisitely spare, beautiful in the way

of Siberian sunsets, the song is all pressurized heartache, a

grief burst struggling to escape. Th

e piano melody ambles

through the two minutes in a sublime daze, a newly minted

widower shuffl

ing through the hallways of his house. “Avril

14th” carries within it that most insidious type of sadness, the

kind so world- altering – so annihilatingly complete – that its

awed victim comes to associate it with beauty. Any trauma or

tragedy that could precipitate a melody this haunting is

somehow aligned with fi nal things, we sense, somehow in

league with death.

“Blame Game” translates the utter psychological degradation

of a failed relationship into a pop record. Opening with a

heavy sigh and the sampled piano melody from “Avril 14th,”

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

we are immediately in a cordoned- off zone of emotional

crisis, a triage center of the mind where Kanye’s splintered

ego works to piece together a series of unhappy facts into a

tolerable perspective. Pushing the song forward beyond its

own sickly- sweet inertia is a percussion sample, the whis-

pering drumroll and understated beat from J. J. Johnson’s

“Parade Strut” – an instrumental off the offi

cial soundtrack

of 1974 blaxploitation fi lm Willie Dynamite

. Guest R&B

singer John Legend lends the smooth dignity of his voice to

the hook, an ironic lyrical entreaty addressed to the song’s

estranged lover. Th

e “blame game” is a masochistic blood

sport, and the singer is addicted to playing. Th

e fi rst verse

fi nds Kanye scribbling a quasi- romantic cliché (“I’d rather

argue with you than be with someone else”) on a bathroom

wall, then immediately negating it by fi nding someone else

to take home. At 2 a.m. his will breaks, however. He calls his

lost love and hangs up before she can answer, and the soul’s

dark night plays tricks on him, as is its wont. He begins

to blame himself for the way things ended and he cries out

for help. John Legend fl ies into the room to rock him to sleep,

the heart- rending hook a sudden lullaby for the terminally

grief- stricken.

A whiff of desperation, of bargaining, taints the start of

the second verse, with Kanye promising new levels of inti-

macy to his lost love if she’ll stick things out a while longer

and see what happens. He gets sentimental about how much

time has passed since they had rough sex in public, and it’s at

that thought of sex – the realization that she is now having it

with other men who are not Kanye West – when “Blame

Game” takes a breathtaking schizoaff ective turn toward

110

B L A M E G A M E

conceptual art. With manipulated vocals that sonically enact

the psychosis of a scorned lover and embody his faltering

capacity to think clearly – a mind clouded with rationaliza-

tions, shards of memory, second- guesses, and recriminations

– Kanye falls apart before our very ears, losing even his sense

of where he is in the album when he briefl y begins singing

the hook of “All of the Lights” in a vocoderized aside. Th

e

voices claw into the song’s interior space like demons eager to

ransack an altar. Some of the voices are high- pitched and

thin, stretched across a Procrustean bed of self- loathing.

Some are dense and massive, rising from below to swallow

any thought not wholly dedicated to vengeance and rage.

Coming from every direction, these voices assail and suff o-

cate Kanye, overwhelming him with their relentlessness.

When the hook fi nally arrives we wonder if there is enough

of him left to fi nish the song.

For the third verse he recites part of a prose poem (“Your

Bitter is My Sweet”) by Chloe Mitchell, the self- proclaimed

“Basquiat of Poetry” Kanye commissioned to write some-

thing specifi cally for “Blame Game.” Th

e poem is a thematic

restatement of the song, a riff on that saddest of emotional

mysteries whereby the love between two people – once an

indestructible organism of fearless intensity – can double

back on itself in the form of an all- consuming hatred. We

hear the words and realize it’s been there all along, the idea of

erasure and annihilation, in the sparkling austerity of the

“Avril 14th” sample. We recognize “Blame Game” as an answer

song willing to tell the Shirelles the truth fi ft y years too late,

to respond to the pleading question at the heart of “Will You

Love Me Tomorrow?” with a tone so fi nal, so devastating, that

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

not only their question but the very idea of their needing to

ask seems silly and absurd. Th

e song’s brief second hook,

which precedes the fourth verse, is the evisceration that

accompanies letting go. John Legend has left the building and

Kanye is all alone. He sings the hook “I can’t love you this

much” twice for good measure – and it functions as a kind of

catharsis, freeing him to fi nish the job of offi

ciating this

funeral.

At seven minutes and forty- nine seconds, “Blame Game”

is second only to “Runaway” for the title of longest track on

MBDTF . And, as in “Runaway,” the fi nal third of the song is a brash experiment pitting style against substance. Where

“Runaway” ends with a three- minute vocoderized soliloquy

reenacting the song’s drama as distortion, “Blame Game”

ends with “Th

e Best Birthday Ever,” a skit featuring the over-

heard conversation between Chris Rock – who plays the

fi ctional new fl ing of Kanye’s lost love – and the gone girl

herself. As a blood- and-guts portrayal of unremitting bitter-

ness, it is only fi tting that the song’s fourth and fi nal verse

leads into what happens next. Kanye understands that his

lost love is out there somewhere living her life; it could not be

otherwise. He is coming to terms with that fact, steering his

mind in the direction of acceptance, though he’s not quite

there and still obeys a compulsion to call her. Th

e phone

rings and rings and she does not answer. Introduced through

the clever conceit of her phone accidentally butt- dialing him

back, we listen along with him (“And I heard the whole

thing”) as the scene unfolds on the other end of the line:

Chris Rock’s lothario is eff usively praising his lover post-

coitus for her newly evolved sexual dynamism. It’s his

112

B L A M E G A M E

birthday, and in addition to a watch he had been coveting, his

girl has given him the most life- affi

rming sex of his life. His

disbelief is palpable, and he seeks ever cruder and more

hilarious ways to express his awe at how far she’s come. Her

reply to each of his obsequious rhetorical questions? “Yeezy

taught me.”

For some, the skit is comic relief to off set the song’s

harrowing fi rst fi ve minutes. Having just plumbed the depths

of Yeezy’s disintegrated consciousness and borne witness to

the oozing sores of his regret, who among us doesn’t need a

laugh? Yet the skit is also a play on the irrational male horror

of feminine sexuality. In Barry Hannah’s eternal short story

“Water Liars,” the narrator struggles to accept his wife’s

admission of having a sexual past that predates their own:

My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and

see every shadow. Th

e movement of every limb in every

passionate event occupies my mind. I have a prurience on

the grand scale. It makes no sense that I should be angry

about happenings before she and I ever saw each other.

Yet I feel an impotent homicidal rage in the matter of

her lovers. She has excused my episodes as the course of

things, though she has a vivid memory too. But there is a

blurred nostalgia men have that women don’t.

You could not believe how handsome and delicate my

wife is naked.

I was driven wild by the bodies that had trespassed her

twelve and thirteen years ago.

Th

e decision to conclude “Blame Game” with the gory details

of such an explicit encounter, the choice to reimagine it

113

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

with such masochistic zeal, belongs to the same species of

self- destructive horror that plagues Hannah’s narrator. Just as

the vocoder outro is integral to the emotional superstructure

of “Runaway,” “Blame Game” would fail to cross the fi nish

line without “Th

e Best Birthday Ever” bringing up the rear, as

it were. We laugh because Rock’s performance is full of his

signature abrasive generosity. His character in the skit is

dumbstruck with gratitude for inheriting so many wonderful

things from the death of Kanye’s relationship. He sees himself

simply as the winner in a zero sum game, someone tickled by

his own good fortune. He is so bowled over by the benefi ts

accruing to him as a result of Yeezy’s loss that he vows to seek

Kanye out and thank him. He promises to buy MBDTF in

multiple formats. Th

e voice of his lover is nasal and harsh;

she sounds like a fembot from a caricatured Long Island. Yet

the whole thing is suddenly unfunny when imagined from

Kanye’s vantage point, his trembling hand working to keep

the phone steady enough at his ear for him to hear clearly,

unable to hang up on the nightmare unfolding at the other

end of the line.

He distracts us with lowbrow, off ensive comedy while

demanding our empathy, a contradiction that – you could

reasonably argue – is what makes him the artist he is.

114

Lost in the World

“Th

e rumors are true. And then some,” critic Ryan Dombal

blogged in a Pitchfork post from August 13, 2010. “Bon Iver

mastermind Justin Vernon laid vocals down on ‘at least

10 songs’ during three separate week- long trips to record

with Kanye West in Hawaii earlier this year.” Th

ree months

later Dombal would earn a very specifi c form of celebrity

among Pitchfork readers when he gave My Beautiful Dark

Twisted Fantasy a perfect 10.0 rating – the fabled and elusive breakdancing unicorn of online music criticism. Dombal’s

blog post features an interview with Vernon, who distills the

surreality of his experience working on the album thusly:

“Th

at whole fi rst week I was there we worked on the ‘Woods’

song, which is called ‘Lost in the World’. We were just eating

breakfast and listening to the song on the speakers and

[Kanye]’s like, ‘Fuck, this is going to be the festival closer.’

I was like, ‘Yeah, cool.’ It kind of freaked me out.”

It’s an image that makes you smile by virtue of its seeming

unlikelihood. Sitting at a breakfast table overlooking the

Pacifi c somewhere in America’s most paradisiacal environs,

the world’s biggest pop star talks shop over huevos rancheros

with one of indie music’s most distinct voices. Th

at fi rst

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

blush of improbability quickly vanishes, of course. We know

that the arc of Kanye’s musical ethos is long and bends

continually toward art, regardless of where he fi nds it. Th

e

backstory surrounding the critical role Vernon played in the

creation of MBDTF has passed into the stuff of millennial

music nerd lore, a Venn diagram space shared by thick beards

and thicker gold chains. Th

e indie rock darling renowned as

the creative impetus behind Bon Iver’s self- released 2007

debut For Emma, Forever Ago , Vernon’s best songs are lone-

some winterscapes of asphyxiating clarity.

For Emma ’s

conception has become a burnished indie talisman “nearly

eclipsed by its own (endlessly repeated) mythology,” as critic

Amanda Petrusich wrote reviewing Bon Iver’s 2009 EP Blood

Bank . Battling a case of mono and the fallout of a failed

romantic relationship, coupled with the dissolution of his old

band, Vernon exiled himself from his Raleigh, North

Carolina, home to spend the winter alone at his father’s cabin

in the northwestern Wisconsin woods. While there he wrote

and recorded every track on For Emma , self- releasing it to

wide acclaim in 2007. Kanye heard “Woods,” the standout

track from the Blood Bank EP, and wanted to sample it on MBDTF . As Vernon relates in the interview, “[Kanye] was

like, ‘I like how you sing so fearlessly. You don’t care how your

voice sounds. It’d be awesome if you could come out to

Hawaii and hear the track. . .’ I said, ‘When should I come

out?’ And he said, ‘How about tomorrow?’. . .So I head out

there and he plays me [“Lost in the World”] and it sounds

exactly like how you want it to sound: forward moving,

interesting, light- hearted, heavy- hearted, fucking incredible

sounding jam. It was kind of bare so I added some

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L O S T I N T H E WO R L D

choir- sounding stuff and then thicked out the sample with

my voice.”

“Woods” is the harrowing fi nal track on

Blood Bank .

Lyrically it comprises just four stark lines repeated like a

depressive’s mantra: “I’m up in the woods / I’m down on

my mind / I’m building a still / To slow down the time.”

Th

e song is a sonic hallucination occurring in the deepest

parts of the self. It begins with the gingerly pace of someone

carrying live ordnance across a minefi eld. Vernon’s a

cappella voice caresses each word with the utmost care,

as though to stray even slightly from the prescribed

syllables would mean annihilation. Th

e fi rst few vigilant iter-

ations of the mantra feel like a test of the singer’s steward-

ship, a spiritual rite of passage that, once complete, will

grant him access to the song’s holiest mysteries. Vernon uses

a vocoder to achieve this eff ect through the subtle and

steadily accreting attenuation of his voice. Layering the

mantra upon itself in various unnatural pitches and levels

of falsetto distortion, the singer’s voice by song’s end

has evolved into an array of harmoniously emergent

phenomena – an angel, a wolf, a ghost, a monk, and a baby

among them – all of which are emanations of the voice’s

sudden self- discovery that it contains multitudes. Th

ere is

a metamorphic power in the words, yes, but also in their

persistence – in the voice’s faith that salvation will eventually

occur through disciplined repetition. Th

e song’s mystery

is the mystery of self-

transformation in solitude, an

allegory of exile’s capacity to broaden the spirit and remake

the mind.

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

“Lost in the World” echoes the multitudes found deep within

“Woods,” but it does so by a miracle of imaginative tran-

substantiation. Th

e intro begins almost exactly like that of

“Woods,” with the same supplicating voice (albeit in a slightly

higher pitch) off ering up its mantra/prayer to the infi nite

wilderness. Once again we are in the territory of Dante’s

pilgrim, far from the straightforward path and acutely aware

of our dislocation.

As samples in Kanye West songs go, this one is barely

altered from its original state. Th

e fi rst forty- two seconds

could even be mistaken for the ur-“Woods” by an incurious

ear. It is only at the forty- three second mark that we know

where we are – at the still point of Kanye’s creative powers,

the control room of his ego. In the transitional second

between the sample’s death and its reincarnation, its passage

from “Woods” to “World,” we bear witness to a sonic miracle,

listening with rapt incredulity as Vernon’s melted snow magi-

cally changes to a river of rosé. Th

e genius of MBDTF ’s

narcissism lies in its regurgitation of the world as a sacred,

gold- embossed, red leather refl ection of itself. As gravity

sucks the sampled voice downward into the abyss (the sound

is not unlike Kubrick’s HAL losing consciousness, that arche-

typal wheeze of digital devices shutting down), Kanye mat-

erializes to seize the “Woods” mantra and refashion it into a

declaration of unconditional freedom. No longer a quiet

prayer handled delicately by a seeker, the new lyrics – which

replace “woods” with “world” and remake the image of

pastoral solitude into an urban labyrinth – burst forth with

the bombast of the true believer. Th

e hook is alternately

soaring and freefalling, a Greek chorus of carnal ambiguity,

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L O S T I N T H E WO R L D

one voice commingling with many, all of them uncertain

where things are headed. Th

e song’s sole verse features a

transformational Kanye embracing that unknown and

reconciling the album’s contradictions (devil/angel, heaven/

hell, lies/truth, freedom/jail, etc.), fusing them in a fever of

literal consummation before chanting “mama- say-mama- sa-

mama- makossa” (a pointed reference to Michael Jackson’s

sample in “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” of Cameroonian

musician Manu Dibanoga’s 1972 afrobeat single “Soul

Makossa˝) and making promises about bountiful sex in the

aft erlife. Amid the exhilaration of the verse’s delivery it’s easy

to hear the end of Kanye’s chant as “mama-Michael- son,” a

productive misprision that links MBDTF with Th

riller in a

line of literal ancestry.

Th

e real thrill of “Lost in the World,” though, the secret

wish given fulfi llment by the song’s vertiginous plunge, is the

coincidence of intention and execution. Needing to be an

ungainsayable exclamation point on a perfect album – a truly

great song sophisticated enough to assimilate and synthesize

the album’s palette of mixed yearnings – “Lost in the World”

succeeds beyond doubt. Strategically placed at the exit of the

young century’s most ambitious pop record, the song’s sound

is impossibly large, containing within it the entire MBDTF

genome. Th

is idea is palpable in the ascending circular

motion of the main verse, with Kanye manically fusing

contradictions like stacked base pairs in a DNA molecule.

Th

is is an album obliquely about the genetics of pop music,

aft er all, a document about the knowns and unknowable

unknowns that go into production. Could any other song

wrap things up so defi nitively?

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

“Lost in the World” samples fi ve diff erent artists to achieve

the lushness of its sound. Th

e “Woods” sample – still intact in

its original form throughout the repeated hook, just more

recessive – lends the song its essential melodic scaff olding, as

discussed above. Th

e “Soul Makossa” sample provides the

aforementioned moment of Michael Jackson Zen, a fi nal

wink and nod to Th

riller ’s legacy at the moment of MBDTF ’s

own transcendence. Just past the one minute mark a much-

mined sample of the Lyn Collins soul classic “Th

ink (About

It)” – immortalized by Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock in their

1988 platinum hit “It Takes Two,” with its signature “Yeah!

Woo!” squeal as recognizable today as ever (and used to a

diff erent end in “So Appalled”) – joins the combustible hook

of house beats, tribal drums, gospel- choir-styled backing

vocals, and chanting. Add to that mix the opening drum

break from Eddie Bo’s “Hook and Sling – Part I” and you

begin to get a sense of the song’s thickness and complexity.

Th

e fi ft h and fi nal sample, one that has the literal last word on

the album, is an excerpt of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1,”

wherein the pleading unanswerable question – “Who will

survive in America?” – makes an intrusive cameo as “Lost in

the World” downshift s into a thrum of tribal percussion and

chants.

At this point it’s worth noting that, technically speaking,

“Lost in the World” is not the fi nal track on MBDTF . Th

at

honor goes to a one minute thirty- eight second coda whose

title – “Who Will Survive in America?” – comes from the

Scott-Heron sample we hear poking holes in the end of “Lost

in the World.” As a rhetorical fl ourish wrapped in the same

swirl of throbbing atmospherics, “Who Will Survive in

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L O S T I N T H E WO R L D

America?” is an extended meditation on “Lost in the World.”

Th

e track comprises large chunks of Scott-Heron performing

“Comment #1,” composed in 1970 as a scathing indictment

of the student- led New Left ’s racial and historical naiveté.

Th

e repurposed lines leave that context largely behind,

serving instead to imbue the album’s fi nal moments with the

legitimacy of social prophecy. More than one critic noted the

incongruous melding of the two works – MBDTF is a narcis-

sistic opera about one man’s millions of contradictions;

“Comment #1” is an acerbic plaint about the world- historical

contradictions of racial injustice. What better means of

putting a golden capstone on a work this narcissistic, though?

In a record devoted to the idea of redemption through excess,

to the notion that an ambitious enough ego can translate the

universe into a song cycle of the self, the choice to feature

“Comment #1” succeeds. Th

e poem as recast in “Who Will

Survive in America?” is one such translation, with Gil Scott-

Heron’s ghost ventriloquizing Kanye’s angst and self- doubt.

Th

e existential uncertainty of the title, stripped from its

original context, is no longer about the grim prospects for

America’s poorest citizens. Th

e new uncertainty is about how

and whether Kanye West will survive – as an artist, as a celeb-

rity, as a man – and, should he make it, what kind of America

would have him.

121

122

The Yeezus Singularity: A Religion

of the Self

“What is this shit?”

As immortal rock criticism goes, the fi rst four words in

Greil Marcus’ Rolling Stone review of Self Portrait are like the fi rst four notes of Beethoven’s Fift h – they contain all other

generic possibilities. Marcus had spent the sixties vitalized by

the evolution of Bob Dylan’s genius, and Self Portrait arrived in 1970 like a dull fart punctuating Lincoln’s Second

Inaugural. What had happened? Dylan’s fi rst post- sixties

album suddenly called into doubt what the critic and his like-

minded friends held most sacred: “Were we really that

impressionable back in ’65, ’66? Was it that the stuff really

wasn’t that good, that this is just as good? Was it some sort of

accident in time that made those other records so powerful,

or what?” An unfortunate axiom of both criticism and

fandom is that, on a long enough timeline, even a defi nitive

artist like Dylan will, inevitably, disappoint. If philosophy

was born the moment man understood suicide to be a choice

among other choices, genuine pop criticism begins and ends

with the critic’s admission that even the greatest artists are

capable of making bad art. How do you follow up a decade of

music as bold, ambitious, and generative as Dylan’s sixties,

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

Michael’s eighties, or Kanye’s aughts? As a deviation from a

burnished ideal, Self Portrait was disappointing in the way of all pop music disappointments. Time’s funky march is always

on parade, though, and the subsequent decades have trans-

formed it into a fascinating meditation on the self- conscious

limits of Dylan’s multiplicity and minstrelsy. Michael Jackson

released 1991’s Dangerous , another record time has refash-

ioned into an appreciating asset, an undervalued snapshot of

a pop titan at a racially fraught cultural and historical cross-

roads. How do you follow an album as close to “perfect,”

though, as MBDTF ? If you’re Kanye West, you negate it.

To promote the release of Yeezus , his sixth studio album,

Kanye managed to confl ate performance art with projectile

narcissism through an ingenious global conceit. On the

Friday before his featured appearance as musical guest on the

May 18, 2013 broadcast of Saturday Night Live , he tweeted: NEW SONG AND VISUAL FROM MY NEW ALBUM BEING PROJECTED

TONIGHT ACROSS THE GLOBE ON 66 BUILDINGS, LOCATIONS 

KANYEWEST.COM

His website off ered visitors a cryptically simple black map of

the globe with tiny red dots representing each of the ten

cities where projections would take place. Th

e graphic had

the minimalist grimness of a Soviet nuclear war protocol,

which was precisely the point. Clicking the red dot on

Chicago, for example, yielded the various times and locations

(Wrigley Field among them) where the “song and visual”

would strike. Th

e track at the heart of this campaign was

“New Slaves,” an interesting but ham- fi sted diatribe on the

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T H E Y E E Z U S S I N G U L A R I T Y: A R E L I G I O N O F T H E S E L F

Jim Crow antinomies of hyper- conspicuous consumerism.

Th

e projection featured a stark, enormous black and white

image of West’s face, a thick gold chain around his neck. A

random passerby could have been forgiven for mistaking the

event as a Mr. T publicity stunt, the A-Team alum reincar-

nated as Big Brother in a guerrilla marketing campaign for

toothpaste. Th

e video projections were a lot more than mere

commercial ploys, however. Th

ey were never intended to

foster a sense of local or global community, or to collapse

the tremendous distances between cities and people. Th

ey

were performances of that distance, a stylized estrangement

of commodity from consumer. With

MBDTF

Kanye re-

established his place in pop music, and Yeezus is his back-

biting and ungenerous manifesto from the mountain peak,

twenty- fi rst century pop music’s anti-Sermon on the Mount.

It bears the unique honor of being the only underproduced

album in his oeuvre, Rick Rubin’s contributions to the record

notwithstanding. Search for a nook or corner of warmth on

Yeezus , a space for tapping into the kind of orchestral possi-

bility that defi nes Kanye’s best music – you won’t fi nd one. (A

possible exception is “Bound 2,” which owes its human

element to two incredible samples: the guileless teenage

melody of 1971’s “Bound” by the Ponderosa Twins Plus One,

punctuated with a one-

second come-

hither Brenda Lee

moan of approbation – “Uh huh, Honey!” – from her 1959

single “Sweet Nothin’s.”) Critics gushed over Daft Punk’s

contributions to the album’s serrated post- industrial sound

– all the buzzsaw bleeps and bloops and sonic laser beams

and roboticized synth drones. Even the late, great Lou Reed,

whose Metal Machine Music – the Yeezus of its time – had 125

M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

tortured Lester Bangs so mercilessly way back in 1975,

penned a generous review for Talkhouse magazine:

Very oft en, he’ll have this very monotonous section

going and then, suddenly — ‘BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP!’ —

he disrupts the whole thing and we’re on to something

new that’s absolutely incredible. Th

at’s architecture,

that’s structure — this guy is seriously smart. He keeps

unbalancing you. He’ll pile on all this sound and then

suddenly pull it away, all the way to complete silence, and

then there’s a scream or a beautiful melody, right there in

your face. Th

at’s what I call a sucker punch.

Hailed though it was by virtually every major critical outlet,

landing at the top of dozens of year- end lists, Yeezus seemed to me upon fi rst listen to be hollow, rushed, unfelt – a hurried

response to an unspoken dare. Reed addresses that notion in

his review, but he examines it from a standpoint of awe: “And

now, with this album, it’s ‘Now that you like me, I’m going to

make you unlike me.’ It’s a dare. It’s braggadocio. Axl Rose has done that too, lots of people have. ‘I Am a God’ – I mean, with

a song title like that, he’s just begging people to attack him.”

Th

ese days, it’s almost impossible to hear or see the word

“unlike” without connotations of Facebook’s binary toggle

switch of endorsement/estrangement, and, for Reed, that’s

why the album’s gambit is so successful. “Kanye West is a

child of social media and hip hop,” Reed begins his review.

But isn’t a bet made against your “audience” (social media’s

raison d’être ) an act of bad faith? We know that Yeezy is driven by an ever more complicated self- conception of capital “A”

art. Can a concept album’s concept be a gestural “fuck- you,”

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T H E Y E E Z U S S I N G U L A R I T Y: A R E L I G I O N O F T H E S E L F

and does that choice – in its sheer anti- commercial rudeness

– make it somehow more

artistic

than an artist’s other

records? Is Yeezus a performance piece, the minimalist jewel

case album cover (more accurately, lack of an album cover,

bound shut with a piece of red tape) a comment on the

emptiness of what’s inside, a refl ection of our depthless

culture’s indiscriminate hunger for new content? Or, equally

plausible, is Yeezus just a half- baked turd casserole, its hype the disingenuous enthusiasm of a salesman whose fervor for

his wares belies their certain inferiority? Th

ese are not easy

questions, especially given the thrilling productivity of West’s

previous engagement with established artists. If

MBDTF

achieved nothing else, it earned its creator the benefi t of our

doubt regarding questions of artistic intention. One may

harbor suspicions that the music on Yeezus is arbitrary or

bankrupt of vision, but we owe it to Kanye’s genius to at least

conduct a thorough investigation.

And so when the album leaked four days early on June 14,

2013, I listened all the way through, and then I listened again.

I listened on the treadmill, and I listened in the car on the

way to meet my wife at childbirth class. Just over a week later,

our son was born. Th

e twinkling, heart- swollen hook of

“Return to Pooh Corner” immediately replaced the “gnarled

dancehall vocal sample and paranoid sawtooth synths” (as

Ryan Dombal wrote reviewing Yeezus for Pitchfork ) of “I Am a God.” During the subsequent days and weeks, on the rare

occasions when lullabies weren’t streaming from every

speaker, a few songs on the album (“Blood on the Leaves,”

“Black Skinhead,” “Handle My Liquor”) got better with each

listen. On balance, though, Yeezus still felt irresolute and

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

noncommittal, an exercise in aesthetic contempt or – perhaps

more accurately – the onset of a contemptuous aesthetic.

Kanye deemed the sound “aspirational minimalism” in inter-

views, and he may be on to something. It is music that aspires

to a kind of libidinal void – a whorl of aff ective blankness –

and I didn’t like it at all.

Again, the timeless question returned: What is this shit?

Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena is an immense glass and

concrete structure whose design could have been taken from

one of the sci- fi comic books George McFly reads in Back to

the Future . A cantilevered dome rests atop the arena’s rectan-

gular fortress, abutted in the front by a glass turret on top of

which a radio tower ascends like a spaceman’s helmet

antenna. Home to the NHL’s Nashville Predators and one of

the busiest venues in North America, the arena has hosted

everything from big ticket acts like Taylor Swift and Lady

Gaga to the U.S. Gymnastics championships to the Country

Music Association (CMA) Awards. On the bitterly cold

Wednesday night before Th

anksgiving 2013 – while millions

of my fellow Americans had already begun drinking in

earnest as preparation for a weekend of extended family –

my mother- in-law Ruth and I stood in line to get our tickets

scanned at the entrance. Th

e

Yeezus Tour had found its way

to Music City, and we were there to be witnesses.

We certainly weren’t the only ones, but the crowd was far

from capacity. During Kendrick Lamar’s dynamic Compton

Roadshow opening performance, we wondered whether the

multiple bald spots around the arena – the rows upon rows of

empty seats – would fi ll up when Yeezus himself descended

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T H E Y E E Z U S S I N G U L A R I T Y: A R E L I G I O N O F T H E S E L F

from Pop Heaven. More people did arrive later, but not

enough to counter the feeling that Kanye – easily the most

important artist of his generation – was unappreciated in a

city whose chamber of commerce trumpets Nashville’s

musical eclecticism and “It City” status at every available

opportunity. Th

is was more complex than the city’s calcifi ed

grudge over the Swift incident, or the inconvenience of a

concert falling on the night before a major American holiday,

or even the fact that Corrections Corporation of America

(CCA) – name- checked as a social scourge on “New Slaves”

– is headquartered in Nashville. Like the boos he received at

the Dodgers game a few months earlier when his image

fl ashed across the jumbotron, the unfi lled seats were an

expression of collective social disgust, an (ironic) rejection of

the idea that narcissism is a proper religion. Th

e erstwhile rap

nerd in the Dropout Bear suit had anointed himself a Christ

of culture, and now he had come to descend like Zarathustra

onto the buckle of the Bible Belt with his message of holy

transformation.

Th

e various Yeezus Tour T-shirts on sale in the arena – a

few of which featured some combination of a death’s head,

the Confederate fl ag, and redneck secessionist sloganeering

(“I AIN’T COMIN’ DOWN”) – gave form to this idea. Here

was one of the most controversial and successful black artists

of all time, playing one of the most heavily traffi

cked venues

in the South – a location just a stone’s throw from where the

lunch counter sit- ins had occurred more than half a century

earlier – and on sale at his merch table were gonzo carica-

tures of the nation’s racist past. Th

e painful symbol of

America’s original sin had been expropriated, rebranded, and

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

commodifi ed – $35 a pop – an object lesson in the power of

cultural capital and the ahistorical force of Kanye’s ego. Like

Elvis’s capacity to unmake himself with a joke during his

comeback special in 1968, Kanye’s ability to turn the

Confederate fl ag into a personal logo is a testament to his

power. On more than one occasion during the Yeezus Tour,

the artist referred to himself in interviews as the “nucleus of

culture.” Th

e fl ag shirts tested the limits of that nuclear power,

cramming his abiding fascinations – the mass commercial-

ization of avant- garde fashion, the idea of provocation as a

personal brand, the divorce of personal intention from social

consequence – down the throat of a receptive mainstream.

Asked about the controversy surrounding the shirts on Los

Angeles radio station 97.1 AMP, West said: “You know the

Confederate fl ag represented slavery in a way – that’s my

abstract take on what I know about it. So I made the song

‘New Slaves.’ So I took the Confederate fl ag and made it my

fl ag. It’s my fl ag. Now what are you going to do?”

Th

e performance that night at Bridgestone Arena was a reve-

lation, the clarifi cation of my own dimly apprehended ideas

about the music on Yeezus . Th

e Internet had been over-

fl owing with images of the show’s Wagnerian theatrics – the

towering white mountain and the protruding glacier; the

ashen-

haired demon with glowing red eyes that paces

anxiously at a distance; the harem of women wearing trans-

lucent masks, white acolyte vestments, and fl esh- toned body

stockings; the orgiastic evocation of the Sistine Chapel

ceiling; Kanye’s multiple bejeweled face masks; black and

white projections of gerunds like “FIGHTING” and

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T H E Y E E Z U S S I N G U L A R I T Y: A R E L I G I O N O F T H E S E L F

“FALLING” with eerie, inscrutable defi nitions; the appear-

ance of a Caucasian Jesus Christ – but I was unprepared for

their cumulative eff ect. Th

e visual conceit of the Maison

Martin Margiela masks Kanye sported for most of his perfor-

mance signifi ed something along the lines of, as Rolling Stone

put it, “look not upon the face of Yeezus, mere mortals.” Th

e

genre- melting poet of narcissism has set his sights far beyond

the bounds of pop music, and Yeezus – as song cycle, as

persona, as prophecy – is the next evolutionary leap forward.

During the middle of the show, West delivered an unscripted

sermon while the motif from “Runaway” looped soft ly in the

background. Th

ough many in the audience were visibly

fl ummoxed, irritated by an unexpected stoppage in the

show’s machinery, I was thrilled. Th

is was “Sinners in the

Hands of an Angry Mogul,” Yeezus among the lowly speaking

not about gentleness or humility but lambasting corporate

elitism as an impediment to his creative omnipotence. He

made headlines that night by calling out Mark Parker, CEO

of Nike, for declining to bring Kanye’s Air Yeezy sneakers to

market. Animating the harangue was the fury of a thwarted

child, a creatively pure entity of limitless imagination who

cannot fathom the cruelty of a world with limits. My diffi

cul-

ties trying to understand and love Yeezus had been frustrated by my conviction that records made only one demand – to

be loved. Certainly many do exist to be loved, but many

more demand to make money, or draw boundaries, or win

friends. What Kanye wants and what Yeezus demands, I fi nally

understood watching the show, is a life of frictionless

self- expression, a harmonic convergence between all of his

“dreams” and the myriad gaps in the marketplace waiting to

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

house them. Yeezus is a manifesto dedicated to that impera-

tive, the crumpling- metal sound of his total commitment to

a religion of Kanye West.

As he scaled the white mountaintop on stage and raised his

hands to the heavens – 2-D storm clouds skittering above

him on an enormous circular projection screen – Kanye was

full of godlike defi ance as the familiar intro to “POWER”

blared. An arena in a mid- sized southern city had been trans-

formed into one man’s berserk Valhalla. Less than a half hour

into his performance, and everyone felt the same sensation of

mystery, the hunch that anything could happen next.

Here’s to more of that feeling.

132

Also available in the series

1. Dusty in Memphis by

11. Th

e Velvet Underground

Warren Zanes

and Nico by Joe Harvard

2. Forever Changes by Andrew

12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo

Hultkrans

13. Live at the Apollo by

3. Harvest by Sam Inglis

Douglas Wolk

4. Th

e Kinks Are the Village

14. Aqualung by Allan Moore

Green Preservation Society

15. OK Computer by Dai

by Andy Miller

Griffi

ths

5. Meat Is Murder by Joe

16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy

Pernice

17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik

6. Th

e Piper at the Gates of

Davis

Dawn by John Cavanagh

18. Exile on Main Street by Bill

7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth

Janovitz

Vincentelli

19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

8. Electric Ladyland by John

20. Ramones by Nicholas

Perry

Rombes

9. Unknown Pleasures by

21. Armed Forces by Franklin

Chris Ott

Bruno

10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by

22. Murmur by J. Niimi

Michaelangelo Matos

133

S E R I E S L I S T

23. Grace by Daphne Brooks

39. Daydream Nation by

24. Endtroducing . . . by Eliot

Matthew Stearns

Wilder

40. Court and Spark by Sean

25. Kick Out the Jams by Don

Nelson

McLeese

41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and

26. Low by Hugo Wilcken

2 by Eric Weisbard

27. Born in the U.S.A. by

42. Songs in the Key of Life by

Geoff rey Himes

Zeth Lundy

28. Music from Big Pink by

43. Th

e Notorious Byrd

John Niven

Brothers by Ric Menck

29. In the Aeroplane Over the

44. Trout Mask Replica by

Sea by Kim Cooper

Kevin Courrier

30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan

45. Double Nickels on

LeRoy

the Dime by Michael T.

Fournier

31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario

46. Aja by Don Breithaupt

32. Th

ere’s a Riot Goin’ On by

Miles Marshall Lewis

47. People’s Instinctive Travels

and the Paths of Rhythm by

33. Th

e Stone Roses by Alex

Shawn Taylor

Green

48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar

49. Achtung Baby by Stephen

35. Highway 61 Revisited by

Catanzarite

Mark Polizzotti

50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by

36. Loveless by Mike

Scott Plagenhoef

McGonigal

51. Pink Moon by Amanda

37. Th

e Who Sell Out by John

Petrusich

Dougan

52. Let’s Talk About Love by

38. Bee Th

ousand by Marc

Carl Wilson

Woodworth

134

S E R I E S L I S T

53. Swordfi shtrombones by

69. 69 Love Songs by L. D.

David Smay

Beghtol

54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by

70. Facing Future by Dan Kois

Drew Daniel

71. It Takes a Nation of

55. Horses by Philip Shaw

Millions to Hold Us Back by

56. Master of Reality

Christopher R. Weingarten

by John Darnielle

72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan

57. Reign in Blood

Charles

by D. X. Ferris

73. Highway to Hell by Joe

58. Shoot Out the Lights by

Bonomo

Hayden Childs

74. Song Cycle by Richard

59. Gentlemen by Bob

Henderson

Gendron

75. Kid A by Marvin Lin

60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash

76. Spiderland by Scott

by Jeff ery T. Roesgen

Tennent

61. Th

e Gilded Palace of Sin by

77. Tusk by Rob Trucks

Bob Proehl

78. Pretty Hate Machine by

62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate

Daphne Carr

63. XO by Matthew LeMay

79. Chocolate and Cheese by

64. Illmatic by Matthew

Hank Shteamer

Gasteier

80. American Recordings by

65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton

Tony Tost

66. One Step Beyond . . . by

81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell

Terry Edwards

82. You’re Living All Over Me

67. Another Green World by

by Nick Attfi eld

Geeta Dayal

83. Marquee Moon by Bryan

68. Zaireeka by Mark

Waterman

Richardson

84. Amazing Grace by Aaron

Cohen

135

S E R I E S L I S T

85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton

91. Entertainment! by Kevin

86. Fear of Music by Jonathan

J.H. Dettmar

Lethem

92. Blank Generation by Pete

87. Histoire de Melody Nelson

Astor

by Darran Anderson

93. Donuts

88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed

by Jordan Ferguson

and Philip Sandifer

94. Smile by Luis Sanchez

89. I Get Wet by Phillip

95. Defi nitely Maybe by Alex

Crandall

Niven

90. Selected Ambient Works

96. Exile in Guyville by Gina

Volume II by Marc

Arnold

Weidenbaum

136

137

138

139

140

Document Outline

Cover page

Halftitle page

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Acknowledgments

Track Listing

Seven Virtues of Yeezus, Pop Christ

Portrait of the Monster as a Young Masterpiece

The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time

Five Uneasy Pieces

Art as Atonement

University as Universe: The College Dropout

A (Very) Brief Aside Re: 808s & Heartbreak

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Dark Fantasy

Gorgeous

POWER (sic transit gloria Kanye)

All of the Lights

Monster

So Appalled

Devil in a New Dress

Runaway

Hell of a Life

Blame Game

Lost in the World

The Yeezus Singularity: A Religion of the Self

Also available in the series