It’s a world that, frankly, is difficult to leave, the aural equivalent of the addictive titular film in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.Įveryone performs at the top of their games, from Nicki Minaj and Raekwon’s annihilations of “ Monster” and “ Gorgeous,” respectively, to Rihanna’s impassioned hook on “All of the Lights.” Perhaps the most stunning track is “Lost in The World,” in which West turns the Auto-tuned indie-folk desolation of Bon Iver’s “Woods” into an end-of-the-universe disco triumph. As if they had philharmonics, marching bands, and choirs on stand-by, Kanye and his dream team of producers use strings and trumpets, pianos and choruses to create momentum-building intros and glass-shattering climaxes. With “ Dark Fantasy,” West creates a vivid, disconcerting picture: “At the mall there was a séance/Just kids, no parents/Then the sky filled with herons/I saw the devil in a Chrysler LeBaron.” The sound throughout is colossal, extravagant, and rich. The rest of the album’s lyrics trade in surreality, as well. This is some Cirque du Soleil pussy now!”) (The ex is played hilariously by Chris Rock, who notes that she has taken her “pussy game up a whole ‘nother level. “ Blame Game” tells the story of a woman Kanye loves so well that when he’s gone and she returns to an ex-lover, the ex-lover can’t believe what a sexual dynamo she’s become. When, in the song “ Runaway,” he instructs a lover to “run away as fast as you can,” it’s not just for her benefit, but for his as well. He’ll love her forever because he never has to see her again. In fact, for Kanye, this is a story of true love-a burning passion that is never extinguished because it is never tested beyond the infatuation stage. As far as fantasies go, it’s not particularly twisted, but it does get dark: After watching her avian brethren served for dinner, the phoenix burns herself alive and flees Kanye’s world. West’s “fantasy” here is that a beautiful creature has been sent to him from the cosmos, and her innocence allows him to see the world anew through her eyes, making him feel alive and creative again. But its cinematography is crisp and visceral, and everything about it-from the explosion of a comet to a dinner party interrupted by two dozen ballerinas-feels like a reverie. The film is probably a bit too obvious, with its winged, barely-clad phoenix (the model Selita Ebanks) rising from the ashes. In this way, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the soundtrack to the video, which was written by Hype Williams and directed by West, and filmed in Prague. Many folks first heard it unknowingly, by way of the “ Runaway” short film, which contains almost all of the album’s songs.

It is, undoubtedly, a “Where were you when you first heard it?” record. It’s also epically satisfying, the culmination of a hard-earned artistic evolution. Like Mulholland Drive, the album is a dreamlike story that speaks in symbols, with no clear beginning or end. Instead, it surveys his subconscious, distilling his waking chaos into an otherworldly narrative, one inhabited by characters representing the hideous, the insane, and the magnificent.

It explores his reality’s truth not by assessing, explaining, or spinning the events of his day-to-day life like he felt compelled to do on his first four albums-you’ll find no talk of Taylor Swift or W. The triumph of his new album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is that it peels off most of West’s false layers. You could practically hear the groan from music bloggers across the country when he released his “Runaway” video its half-hour-plus running time felt like more than most were willing to devote to digesting it and writing it up. But in an ADD pop environment built to facilitate dance-floor hookups, Kanye deploys pauses, empty space, and other forms of musical foreplay. His genius as a producer is making radio-friendly songs at will, updating the sounds of Chaka Khan and Bobby “Blue” Bland for modern audiences, doing T-Pain better than T-Pain. In fact, he’s spent much of his career bemoaning modern failures, the ultimately unsatisfying nature of luxury cars and diamond chains, the media cloud always raining on him, and the inherent soullessness of the information age.

With his globe-spanning interruptions, pronouncements, and Twitter dispatches, he can seem like a walking publicity statement, but he actually isn’t well-suited for a world of iPhone apps, hybrid engines, metrosexuality, and cyberlove.

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