100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Dark Fantasy

02 Gorgeous

03 Power

04 All of the Lights (Interlude)

05 All of the Lights

06 Monster

07 So Appalled

08 Devil in a New Dress

09 Runaway

10 Hell of a Life

11 Blame Game

12 Lost in the World

13 Who Will Survive in America

‘End of century anthems based off inner-city tantrums,’ declares Kanye West on ‘Gorgeous’, a lengthy therapy session that moves between swimming pools, award ceremonies and the indignity of flying economy class. If that sounds ambitious, and possibly infuriating, then across this remarkable album the Chicago rapper uses his genius – and his genius for harnessing collaborators – to raise the stakes on himself and the listener. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a sweeping step forward for hip-hop, using the full scope of pop music and the idiosyncrasies of the genre to offer a vision of West’s world that opened him up even as it approached mythology.

Two years prior, in the grip of heartbreak and personal loss, West had cut his melancholic fourth album, 808s & Heartbreak, where icy electronica and Auto-Tuned vocals served as a direct distillation of his emotional state. Eventually he returned to Hawaii and set to work again, flying guests in and out and running three recording rooms in the Avex Recording Studios, so that if he was blocked on one song he could simply bounce to another tune and another recording rig. He held the framework of the songs in his head, always looking for the next improvement, and guests and co-authors alike contributed ideas that matched his vision. The atmosphere was collegial, the results electrifying.

The process can be heard in songs that are sonically expansive and fiercely attuned. Dense, muggy rhythms explode into life as a choir might offer redemption, or a fuzzed-out guitar gently weeps, and the songs move up and down through their gears until you can’t believe it’s possible that they have anywhere else to go. The surging ‘Power’ combines gospel chants, spindly, condensed percussion parts and a climactic King Crimson sample, and each part feels intrinsically connected, serving the song’s rollercoaster ride from manic dominance down to a plangent suicide fantasy.

The album appeared at a time when mainstream hip-hop had settled into a self-satisfied, eulogistic phase; pop singer hooks for commercial radio were the crux of too many songs. West had hooks, but he was just as likely to rub them in the listener’s face as caress the ear – you could be aghast and find yourself dancing, or entranced and fearful of the rapper’s next step. On the spectral jam that is ‘So Appalled’, Jay-Z and the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA transform hip-hop dilapidated extremes into a kind of moral bankruptcy; it’s Bonfire of the Vanities with a languid backbeat.

When Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung formulated psychoanalysis they described it as ‘the talking cure’, and West took the concept to its limits in a celebrity age he couldn’t stomach and couldn’t quit. ‘Ain’t no question, if I want it I need it,’ runs a solemn chorus on ‘Gorgeous’ and West would mix boasts and contrition, simultaneously wise and wired. ‘Let’s have a toast for the douchebags,’ ‘Runaway’ urges, and Kanye was more than willing to include himself. Minutes later in the same song there’s a plaintive dedication to a partner who has endured his foibles.

By the sparsely atmospheric ‘Blame Game’, monologues and extended samples are clashing like voices arguing inside West’s head, and the further My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy goes on, the more it draws you into Kanye’s worldview. The album is both exhilarating and immersive, and it was readily – sometimes painfully – apparent that its creator was intent on not just leaving hiphop in his wake, but obliterating his own back catalogue. ‘Who will survive in America?’ is the last line heard, and the unspoken but obvious answer was: Kanye West.