My Rating: 7 of 10
Summary
In Season 2 of Dissect! Cole Cuchna dives into Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The podcast explores Kanye’s magnum opus on the underbelly of fame, celebrity, and power.
Notes
I cover the most impactful episodes in the notes below.
Episode 1
[00:30-01:36] We saw how Kanye’s innovative soul-sampling production of The College Dropout, matured with the inclusion of orchestral textures on Late Registration. It was augmented with brassy arena-filling synthesizers on Graduation. We also saw how his mother’s passing and the disillusion of his marriage engagement influenced the departure album 808’s and Heartbreak. Here, a unique instrumentation of 808 electronic drums, various synthesizers, and traditional acoustic instruments backed Kanye’s lamenting, auto-tuned vocals.
Finally, we saw how the 2009 VMA debacle vilified Kanye and sent him on a self-imposed exile. First to Japan, then Rome, and finally to Hawaii.
Here, Kanye indefinitely black booked all three session rooms of the Avex recording studio in Honolulu. He would import some of the world’s best producers, emcees and artists to form what he called “rap camp”. He would rarely sleep, working long hours through the night, moving from room to room, as he directed what would become his come back album. His back-hand apology album. The album many argued to be one of the greatest albums ever created.
Of course, we’re talking about Kanye West, My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy.
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Kanye started writing poetry at five. He got his keyboard at 12. He started sampling at age 14. And he got this sound program on his computer. He used to draw. And then he realize he could do sampling. The first thing that he sampled was James Brown.
In high school through his work ethic and his relationship don’t like the tiny became known as a highschooler who is selling beads to local emcees for $50 a beat. Meanwhile he was honing his skills as a lyricist rapper. He admits he was the worst rapper out of everyone, but he had a passion that none of them had. That’s why he was successful.
When Kanye was 20 years old, he thought he was finally going to get his record deal with Capitol Records. He flew out to sign, but in the room, he said he’d be bigger than Michael Jackson and he was better than Germaine Dupree. The executive he met with was related to Dupree. He didn’t get the deal.
Eventually, Kanye left Chicago and went to NY. That’s where he met Jay-Z, and he played his beats for him.
He’s literally been laughed out of rooms where he would play his beats, stand on the table, and rap over them.
When he finally got his deal with Rockafella, it was only because they wanted to secure his beats.
[30:15-32:00] Twisted Fantasy is a deliberate sonic spectacle. A Sistine Chapel approach to hip-hop. And Dark Fantasy is the initial brush strokes.
From his opening moments, Dark Fantasy establishes the sound, themes, and narrative that will be explored throughout My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy. Sonicly, it consolidates Kanye’s entire musical palette and creative powers developed over his first four solo albums. It’s a beautiful amalgamation of soul, hip-hop, R&B, classical, and gossipal. I went seemless and juxtaposed, and utterly grandiose. It’s music made to leave us in awe; to marvel at its sheer magnitude and depth of craftsmanship.
Lyrically, we find Kanye at perhaps his most economical. Woven within just two compact verses and a brief bridge, Kanye establishes a complex character who on the surface appears confident and living a luxurious life of fame and fortune, but veiled beneath the surface is a struggle between good and evil, someone who finds escapism through drugs, sex, and materialism, and someone who shows glimpses of deep introspection, but is too adolescent-minded at this point in the narrative to mediate too long on anything that would cause him real pain.
There’s multiple references to devils and demons. The dream imagery and juxtapositions leave us somewhere between fantasy and reality. Indeed, Dark Fantasy repeatedly asks, “Can we get much more higher?”. By the songs end, we are questioning our initial interpretation of ascending triumph and wondering whether Kanye is just experiencing a drug-induced revery.
Simply put, Dark Fantasy is one hell if an opener. The bar is set so high, so early, we wonder how the rest of the album won’t pale in comparison. Well, it doesn’t.
Episode 2 – Through The Wire
He fell asleep at the wheel, crashed his car, and broke his jaw in 3 places. After getting out of the hospital, 6 days later, he recorded “Through the Wire.” A play on words of Shaka Khan’s “Through the Fire,” where he is literally rapping with his mouth wired shut. It’s an ode to how hard he’d work to make it.
He took matter in his own hands. He released his own mixtape, “Get Well Soon,” which had an early version of Through The Wire. He spent $40K of his own money to create a music video for the song, and in Nov 2003, hosted a premiere party in Jay-Z’s club in NYC. The Rockafella team had to come. It was a huge hit.
Dane Dash, the head, was impressed. “I was proud of him. It was something I would have done.”
- Rockafella pushed it through. Within 4 months, they debuted The College Dropout: Went double platinum
- Sold 2m copies in 5 months
- 10 grammy noms
- Topped year end lists
This was the vindication that Kanye sought for years.
Re: My Dark Twisted Fantasies – “No matter how much they hate me even if they hate me the most I can write something that they have to respect the song.”
Episode 6
Our serialized examination of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West continues with the album’s third song “Power.”
From its meticulous, heterogeneous production to its tightly wound lyricism and complex, metaphoric thematic content, “Power” is a detailed, intricately chiseled marble statue approach to songwriting. Kanye simultaneously explores power both as a concept in and of itself, as well as its personal affects on his life and mind. It’s something Kanye clearly struggles with.
He’s smart enough to recognize power’s ability to deteriorate his spirit, but also recognizes his own inability to let it go.
[37:00 to 41:00]
Power is produced by Kanye West and Dallas based underground producer Symbolic One AKA S1. Additional production credits are given to Mike Dean, Jeff Bhasker, and Andrew Dawson. The framework of the track was created by S1 who originally gave the B2 rapper Rhymefest to use. Who was also Kanye’s friend and collaborator. Rhymefest played the number of S1 beats for Kanye while in Hawaii in the Twisted Fantasy sessions. As S1 tells it he received a text out of the from Rhymefest saying “Kanye is loving your stuff. He said he is about to change your life.” Two days after receiving this text S1 got an email saying that his flight to Hawaii leaves in one hour. When he had arrived Kanye had already recorded some vocals to what would become Power as well as added some additional production elements. Power is truly a master class in modern hip hop production. The focal point of the track is based on afro America’s 1978 song Continent number 6.
“In a song like Power we spent 5,000 hours writing and its really phycology behind the lyrics too. It’s not just blankly I got all the powers, no one man should have all that power. It’s worded in a really sensitive way that you know opens it up for everyone.”
From its meticulous header of Genius production to its tightly wound lyricism and complex metaphor content. Powers is a chiseled statue approach to songwriting he simultaneously explores power both as a concept in and of itself.
As well as its personal effects on his life and mind. It’s something Kanye clearly struggles with. He’s smart enough to recognize that powers is an ability to deteriorate his spirit but also recognizes his own ability to let it go.
By his conscious use of Greek mythology and symbolism and perhaps his unconscious use of the heroic struggle key signature of C minor, Kanye’s Power is textured with antiquity breathing new life into old themes.
A twenty-first-century presentation of ancient ideas, in the end, power borders on Greek tragedy as Kanye imagines his death as a beautiful release of vice-like clutches of power and fame. Which at this point in the album narrative may have gotten the best of Kanye West. At the very least has him on the ropes.
Interestingly for all self-center philosophizing, Kanye ultimately loses power by breaking the third wall and asking his listeners the same question he asked himself.
“Do you got the power to let power go?”
It’s a question we can interpret in many ways. It certainly asks us not to serve judgement until we have put ourselves in Kanye’s shoes. If you accrue enormous power, how would you hand the pressure? The constant scrutiny, how strong is your skin in the face of adversity? If your mother died and your engagement ended how would you behave while the whole world was watching?
We often reserve empathy for those lower on the social and economic pole. For people’s circumstances who are less fortunate than our own or for people who are facing tragedy. What about the people “above” us? The fortunate, the powerful, the ones that seem so well off at a distance? What do we make of them? Is there a threshold or limit on empathic capacity? Is it possible to empathize with a homeless person in the same way we would a millionaire?
The definition of empathy is simply the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It says nothing of who is deserving of empathy because empathy is a concept objective and without biases. In its pure state empathy is equally applied to all things because when practiced empathy is infinite, a well that never runs dry.
Our culture seems to love to tear down the same statues that we helped erect. We love a good rags to riches story but equally love a fall from grace because with success and celebrities comes an inherited dehumanization, the famous become objects on a screen, talking points.
Points of debate, larger concepts, trends or movements but somewhere lost in those constructs is our capacity to empathize our ability to understand and share the feelings of others. In the case of Kanye West it would seem he believed wholeheartedly in the invents ability of success.
When achieved he still found himself vulnerable to the basic human feelings of lost, hurt, depression, pressure, stress, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, the whole human experience. On power he begins as an egocentric and ends in a suicidal skits zone.
The end of the track is enrooted with empathy as it forces us to ask ourselves the same question he’s asking himself. Do you got the power to let power go? Well do you?