My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye… My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West

Def Jam

Rocks like: Hip-hop from another universe

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Kanye West’s latest album is not, as he claimed in August, a masterpiece in contention with the pyramids. It does, however, tower above the current hip-hop landscape.

Despite the unanimous critical acclaim it’s garnered over the past couple of weeks — including Pitchfork’s first non-reissue 10.0 rating since Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — West’s new record, titled (deep breath) My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, falls short of being a flawless work.  Even so, it remains one of the most innovative hip-hop albums of all time and a compelling justification for Kanye’s insufferable ego.

An indulgent, flamboyant and delightfully depraved LP, Fantasy largely forgoes West’s signature soul samples in favor of grandiose orchestration and multi-part anthems. And while the awards-show crasher is still prone to boasts — “My presence is a present/Kiss my ass,” he declares at the beginning of “Monster” — West is, more often than not, incredibly self-critical; both the arena-sized “All of the Lights” and the poignant “Runaway” ruminate fitfully on the rapper’s somewhat transparent personality flaws.

As for the songs themselves, several tracks — “Power,” “Monster,” “Lost in the World” — scrape the edge of perfection. Others — like the opulent opener “Dark Fantasy” and “Runaway” — are fresh enough to excuse their ugly moments (an inexplicable false ending in the former; a three-minute vocoder solo in the latter). Even the laziest of the songs, “Devil in a New Dress,” has an irresistible luster.

In fact, the album’s dizzying array of instrumentation, percussion, samples and guest stars — most excitingly, Nicki Minaj, who massacres the final verses of “Monster” in a personality-shifting lyrical rampage — ensure there’s something for everyone to appreciate in its hour-plus runtime.

Fantasy is so expansive and dabbles in so many genres that it seems more appropriate to compare it to pop landmarks — The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Michael Jackson’s Thriller — than hip-hop ones. Nevertheless, fans and certain publications — Slant, for instance — are giddily posing the big question: Is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy the best hip-hop album ever?

Probably not. West isn’t a lyricist on par with Nas — though as “Gorgeous” and “Power” demonstrate, he’s no Soulja Boy either — and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is not as deftly realized as the ’90s masterpiece it’s being pitted against, Nas’s Illmatic.

But West is easily one of the most creative artists to ever grace the game, and if Fantasy fails to cement its position as the best album in the genre’s history, it might well claim a more substantial title: the most influential.