Putting up with s— for way too long: Kanye West

To me, opulence in modern hip-hop – spending money on expensive samples and a thick, rich, luxuriant mix – sounds like Kanye’s “Good Life” and “Stronger,” the two singles from Graduation, now regarded as a holding pattern, victory lap, or whatever cliché you and I hurled at an album whose advances pale beside the artist’s confidence in his strengths. Now it’s my go-to Kanye album, to which I’ve listened most after The College Dropout. In retrospect Late Registration‘s commanding critical and popular success overrode my cavils about its length and my indifference to all its singles (except the remix of “Diamonds From Sierra Leone”).

On Dark Twisted Fantasy Kanye deserves credit for coaxing excellent performances from his guests: Nicky Minaj’s bit on “Monster,” Kid Cudi and Raekwon’s on “Gorgeous” (on the other hand, don’t look to Jay-Z beyond his tried-and-true, about which more later). After five listens I find most of this lazy if not stupid lyrically, and not particularly adventurous sonically. The tracks range from okay to terrible. While admiring, as usual, Nitsuh Abebe’s poise, I can’t agree with his review. Kanye has entered that dangerous phase of superstardom in which sonic detail compensates for lyrical vacuity; self-referentiality is a crippling thing for a rapper whose mic skills were negligible beside his studio skills. I suppose I should give Kanye credit for giving toasts to assholes and douchebags like himself, and for identifying himself as such, but, for example, the brass section and crypto-jungle rhythms of “All of the Lights” extend the paranoia of Graduation‘s “Flashing Lights” into self-parody. Jay-Z has the same problem: what else have you to write about when most of the people you meet are as famous as you? Pussy and religion are all he needs, he brags on “Hell of a Life,” and Kanye has the sonic imagination to invest his smuttiest fantasies with evangelical fervor (the album’s bombast attempts a gospel-life scaling of the heavens). But on most MDTF he sounds instead weary and crass, like Mick Jagger on Undercover — a sated hellion trying to court “outrage.”