kanye west my beautiful dark twisted fantasy shirt

The black super hero music is replaced by plangent, lonely piano notes and mushrooming bass tones. By the nine-minute sprawl of “Runaway”, the central jewel in Fantasy’s crown, the outward smile is gone. But in the next song, amidst regal herald and maddening drums, domestic violence and the court-sanctioned civility of a relationship gone sour (“Public visitation, we met at Borders.”) peeps from the backstage. I’m on my own dick.” It’s the same Kanye we always knew. In the tribal battle-cry of “Power”, he swaggers and offers pithy, tweet-length retorts, “I don’t need your pussy, bitch. Where 808s focused on introverted, bleary-eyed reminisces, Fantasy offers the whole Greek tragedy from the top. The Louis Vitton Don becomes The 21st Century Schizoid Man (‘nothing he’s got he really needs’) throwing himself on the funeral pyre. Fantasy, sequenced in the finest traditions of prog, offers the tale of the fiery descent of a man with everything felled by love and the blinding scrutiny of fame. Kanye has talked of taking this project to Broadway it wasn’t immediately obvious from the Spike Jonze short how’d that work, but here the widescreen vision is apparent. If 808s was a minimalist Mondrian then Fantasy is a gold-gilded, 9-digit value Klimt – a different approach, but equally artful. The mid-west consciousness from College Dropout, the baroque manoeuvres from Late Registration, the stadium-filling sensibility from Graduation and the emotional honesty from 808s are all here. 68 minutes long, the majority of tracks stretch over the five minute mark two posse cuts, “Monster” and “So Appalled”, occupy the heart of the album, featuring nine guests between them the song before it features Alicia Keys, Rhianna, Fergie, John Legend and Elton John – indulgently deployed to sing one refrain on the song’s outro. Only it’s downright decadent this time a cursory glance at the measurements reveals as much. The luke-warm reception was always unlikely to dent his ambition, and here ploughing on single-mindedly, chasing windmills in pursuit of his classicist ideal of ‘art’ as you’d expect Kanye to do, Fantasy represents a second try playing with high-minded ideas. For every “Say You Will”, there was a “Robocop” for every audacious three minute drum-loop outro, there was a Lil Wayne verse.

But as an album 808s was only semi-successful. Statements of intent from established artists don’t come much bigger, and it helped change the conversation in a conservative genre.

Out went the sped-up R&B samples and Chi-town consciousness, and in went stark, tasteful minimalism.

If it’s good enough for Shakespeare it’ll do for Kanye. He ruminated about loves won and lost, existential crises and death. Last time around, this distaste for previous glories resulted in the art-pop fetishising of 808s and Heartbreak. The way he frames it suggests something that can sit on a Dorian plinth and be labelled as such something that could be played back- to-back with a Beethoven symphony in an ornate hall somewhere.

Kanye west my beautiful dark twisted fantasy shirt