Milestones: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West
We’re still watching, still debating, and still moved by this lavish, confounding, and brilliant record. Kanye West’s modern man-myth fully came to life, in all its beautiful, dark, twisted glory.
This doesn’t feel real. Kanye West unleashed an album that, by its very title, promised both grandeur and darkness. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy arrived in the wake of public crucifixion—a period when West’s outsized ego had very nearly consumed him—and it felt like a high-stakes creative resurrection. To make it, he exiled himself to Hawaii, rallied a small army of collaborators, and flooded fans with free weekly tracks in a goodwill campaign dubbed GOOD Fridays. The strategy was as audacious as the man himself. At the time, he was the most hated person in music (he’s still one of the most hated people today), yet by dropping new songs every Friday, he brought excitement back to the conversation. By the time the album finally dropped, anticipation was red-hot. And the record more than delivered—it harnessed the collision of Kanye’s bravado and self-doubt into something like a sonic epic. MBDTF stands tall not just as one of the pinnacles in Kanye’s catalog, but as a myth-making moment in hip-hop. It’s a sprawling, self-analytical extravaganza that transforms the rapper’s moments of braggadocio into confessions of vulnerability—a tightrope act between hero and villain, virtuoso and villain, that feels as vital now as it did then.
The album unveils a Kanye West deeply aware of his dueling impulses. Take “Power,” the bombastic single that served as a statement of intent. Over grinding drums and a sampled prog-rock wail, West at first sounds typically imperial: “Screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it/I guess every superhero need his theme music,” he sneers, draping himself in triumphant chants. But almost immediately, the track cracks open to reveal anxiety beneath the bravado. “No one man should have all that power,” has Kanye’s tone shifting from boastful to faintly haunted. In the verses, he pivots between chest-thumping and self-critique so rapidly it’s dizzying. “Now I embody every characteristic of the egotistic,” he admits, only to follow with a jab at himself in third person: “He know he so fuckin’ gifted.”
And in a striking couplet, Kanye lays his insecurities bare: “My childlike creativity, purity and honesty/Is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts/Reality is catching up with me, taking my inner child, I’m fighting for custody.” Here is the megastar who once brimmed with unbridled inspiration, now afraid that fame and adulthood are strangling his muse. It’s a moment of raw self-doubt nestled inside an anthem of triumph—“Power” shows West laying out both his grandeur and his fear in equal measure. Over the song’s five minutes, he flips the mirror back and forth: one moment a god gazing at his kingdom, the next a man mourning the innocence he traded for the crown. Kanye harnesses his own schizoid conflict (fittingly underscored by a sample of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man”) and turns it into musical theater. The result is as exhilarating as it is unsettling—an overture for an album about the wages of hubris.
“Runaway” is his public mea culpa—and perhaps the most beautiful toast to self-sabotage ever put on record. The track opens with a solitary, plaintive piano note repeated in simple 4/4 time, like a hesitant heartbeat. What follows is nine minutes of West at his most unguarded, oscillating between apology and defiance. “Let’s have a toast for the douchebags,” he declares in a now-iconic chorus, raising a glass to “every one of them that I know.” It’s a jarring sentiment on paper—a sarcastic salute to the very behavior that earned him public scorn—yet in Kanye’s hands it becomes oddly triumphant. “Runaway” turns his own “douchebaggery” into a strangely universal rallying cry, inviting everyone who’s ever messed up to sing along. The song was born directly of Kanye’s bruised reputation (arriving shortly after his infamous 2009 VMAs interruption), and he noted that while it “sounds like it’s talking about a girl,” it was also about his relationship with society—“people who I let down.” Across the verses, West blurs the line between addressing a lover and addressing the public at large. Over somber drums and a ghostly Rick James sample, he half-raps, half-sings admissions of immaturity and warnings to the women in his life that he’ll only hurt them.
Even as Kanye laid his soul bare, he hadn’t lost his flair for spectacle. “All of the Lights” (Chile, I’m tired of the song) arrives like a marching band on steroids—fanfare horns, martial drums, and a who’s-who of guest vocalists from Rihanna to Elton John. On the surface, it’s the album’s most ostentatious production, the kind of song that shakes stadium rafters. But here Kanye performs another twist: he uses this bright, explosive canvas to tell a story of broken promises and despair. The verses of “All of the Lights” sketch a gritty narrative of a man whose life has unraveled. “Something wrong, I hold my head,” Kanye begins somberly, referencing the real-life loss of Michael Jackson to set a tone of grief. Then he spills the character’s downfall: “I slapped my girl, she called the feds/I did that time, and spent that bread”—a blunt confession of domestic violence and its consequences (but he’s not being held accountable today). When the protagonist gets out of jail, he comes home hoping for reconciliation, only to find his lover with someone new (“To my surprise, a nigga replacing me”). He loses his family; a restraining order bars him from seeing his daughter; her mother and grandma “hate me in that order,” he laments. It’s a tragic little saga of a fallen father, delivered in punchy rhymes amid the song’s fireworks.
Kanye pushes that idea of beautiful surfaces and ugly truths even further on “Hell of a Life.” The production goes full-on rock opera—a thumping Black Sabbath-esque synth-bass, sinister laughter echoing in the background, the atmosphere lurid and grandiose. Lyrically, West dives into one of his most provocative fantasies: marrying a porn star and indulging in a life of unbridled hedonism. “No more drugs for me, pussy and religion is all I need,” he declares, a line that is equal parts obscene and revealing. This is Kanye at his most deliberately outrageous—testing how far he can bend vice into virtue. The song is suffused with dark humor (comparing sacred and profane in the same breath) and a kind of defiant joy. West raps about fantasies so extreme they border on cartoonish, yet the emotion behind them—a longing for acceptance without judgment, a desire to find love in the most warped places—comes through revealingly. Inspired in part by his breakup with model Amber Rose, Kanye blurs the line between sex and romance, love and religion, fantasy and reality until no lines exist at all. Over the woofer-melting grind of the beat, he challenges the listener (and perhaps society at large) with the combative taunt: “How can you say they live they life wrong?”
Built on a melancholic piano loop (lifted from Aphex Twin’s ambient piece “Avril 14th”), “Blame Game” unfolds a post-mortem of a relationship in free-fall. John Legend’s velvety hook (“I can’t love you this much”) sets a tone of bruised resignation, and West’s verses read like diary entries from a nasty breakup—full of bitterness, regret, and wounded pride. But what really makes “Blame Game” unforgettable is how Kanye uses vocal manipulation to deepen the sense of inner turmoil. Even the famous extended outro skit, featuring comedian Chris Rock in a profane bit of dark humor, plays into this theme: it’s funny on the surface, but painfully sad beneath as it satirizes the absurd lengths our egos go to in assigning blame after a heartbreak (even if it goes on for too long). On “Gorgeous,” West addresses big-picture frustrations—racism, celebrity, the feeling of being diminished by a society that both exalts and demonizes him. “Is hip-hop just a euphemism for a new religion?” he muses, and later says, “Face it, Jerome get more time than Brandon,” calling out racial inequity. These charged lyrics are delivered through a tinny, Strokes-like filter on his vocals, giving the impression that Kanye is coming through an old radio or shouting from behind a veil of distortion.
Fittingly, the album’s final word doesn’t come from Kanye at all, but from a 70s spoken-word recording that serves as a sobering curtain fall. “Who Will Survive in America” is less a song than a coda: a minute-and-a-half of the late Gil Scott-Heron reciting lines from his 1970 poem “Comment #1” over a bare-bones beat. After an hour of Kanye’s kaleidoscopic self-portrait, this ending hits with startling clarity and gravity. Scott-Heron’s voice—weathered, resonant, authoritative—delivers an almost mournful commentary on the American dream turned nightmare. “Us living as we do, upside-down, and the new word to have is revolution,” he proclaims, painting a picture of a nation built on violence and hypocrisy. “America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey,” he intones, in one of the piece’s most poignant lines. By the time he pointedly asks, “Who will survive in America?”, the question hangs in the air with a near-biblical weight. In the context of MBDTF, this finale works like a cold splash of water, or perhaps the stark morning-after to a feverish night. Kanye has spent the whole album dramatizing his “fantasia of heroism and sin”—reveling in the highs of fame and excess, confessing the lows of insecurity and moral failure—effectively giving us his personal saga of a modern-day troubled superstar.
This record feels in many ways like the culmination of Kanye West’s myth-making and the launch of a new chapter in hip-hop’s evolution. We can talk about Nicki’s rambling on “Dark Fantasy” to the posse cuts (“Monster,” “So Apalled”) all day, all the way through Rick Ross stealing the show on the gorgeous Bink-produced “Devil in a New Dress,” Kanye’s life and art have only added chapters to the man-vs-myth saga. He has at times leaned into the savior complex—comparing himself to messianic figures, launching gospel projects, and promising to “save” hip-hop, fashion, or even the country. At other times, he has played (or become) the villain, making statements and choices that courted public outrage and ostracism. The tension between his invincibility and vulnerability, which Twisted Fantasy captured so poignantly, has in many ways come to define Kanye’s legacy. In the years since, he has indeed tried—sometimes inspiring, always infuriating—to be all things at once.
Standout (★★★★½)