Kanye West, dressed in an all-red suit, approached a music production center drum machine on the 2011 Coachella main stage.
Before he pressed the first note of “Runaway,” a song off of his newest album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” he paused to look at the cheering audience. The audience’s approval contrasted the public backlash West received during the years leading up to the album’s creation.
Sunday marked the five-year anniversary of Kanye West’s fifth album, the 2010 masterpiece “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” In addition to winning the Grammy for Best Rap Album and receiving critical acclaim, the album catalyzed Kanye West’s self-reinvention after the fiasco of the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.
“My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” marked the transition from Old Kanye into New Kanye: the celebrity with a god complex, the rapper-turned-fashionista and the man who announced aspirations to run for the presidency in 2020.
Old Kanye entered the music business as a producer whose signature was the use of old soul songs as choruses. His production on Roc-A-Fella Records mogul Jay-Z’s 2001 album “The Blueprint” revitalized Jay-Z’s career.
West came into his own as a rapper with the release of his first three albums, “The College Dropout,” “Late Registration” and “Graduation.” The albums saw West’s signature production paired with sociopolitical lyrics, which differed from the gangster image that the charts championed at the time.
But as backlash from the media ensued after West interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video, West took a hiatus from the public eye. In a sense, this is when Old Kanye died.
While any other artist might cower after public disgrace, West responded to it by starting a new project: “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”
The album saw West abandoning his old style of production in favor of a new collaborative approach. He flew in artists he had worked with in the past like Kid Cudi, No I.D. and new artists that inspired him like Nicki Minaj and Justin Vernon. The input from different artists gave West a new style of production, a style which layered samples upon samples like a collage.
This new production style influenced West to also change his approach to lyrics. While Old Kanye does make appearances in the more socially conscious moments of the album, such as the lyric “Face it Jerome gets more time than Brandon” on the track “Gorgeous,” the majority of the album is lyrically more introspective. In opener “Dark Fantasy,” West reflects on his public infamy and wishes to “refresh the page and restart the memory.”
Throughout the album, the lyricism focuses on the theme of self-examination and comments on society through his own self-deprecation. Within the self-deprecation, West still holds onto hope personified in Kim Kardashian. He revealed on Power 106 that the opening lines of “Lost in the World” – “You’re my devil, you’re my angel, you’re my heaven, you’re my hell” – were written to Kim Kardashian, who is linked to New Kanye’s public image. Unlike Old Kanye, the girl that New Kanye raps about is given a name, making his lyrics more personal.
Through both production and lyrical reinvention, Kanye West made an album that both fans and critics appreciated. “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”’s fifth anniversary marked the five years since the second coming of Kanye West, an artist who fell out favor with the public eye but resurrected himself to win it back.
– Sean Lee