Even if you hate heavily produced music you have to admire Kanye’s willingness to crack open his sloppy noodle brain and let us dig in with chopsticks.
The longest cry in my life was to Runaway on repeat. It felt like my lungs were coming out of my mouth. A distorted electronic symphony clawing out the last bits of my broken heart. The song shouldn’t work but it does. The whole shebang that is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a nervous breakdown in the wake of a massive bender wrapped up in clean 1 hour and 8 minutes. Even if you hate heavily produced music you have to admire Kanye’s willingness to crack open his sloppy noodle brain and let us dig in with chopsticks. Hell of a Life still gets me up in the morning when I’ve embarrassed myself the night before. Addiction, stupidity, fatalism, self pity and hooks, lines and plinkers of pop genius. It’s also a big fat sorry if you’re at home self harming because he only wanted you for sex. Last track Who Will Survive America samples Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word “Comment No. 1” says “America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey” and this is 1970! I wonder what he’d think about Trump 50 years on. Music writer Ann Powers interprets the big theme on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to be “the crisis of the jet-lagged cosmopolitan … the exhausted cry of one who’s always new in town, chasing whatever goal or girl is in the room, fueled by consumer culture’s relentless buzz, but finally left unsatisfied” Kinda makes it sound less sexy now ya say like that…still.