Most records are made by a person. This one was made by a machine somebody built on purpose, in a rented building, five thousand miles from anywhere he could be reached.
Released 22 November 2010. Recorded mostly through 2009 and 2010 at Avex Recording Studio in Honolulu, with additional work in Burbank and New York. It debuted at number one, went on to five times platinum in the US, and holds a Metacritic score of 94 — the best-reviewed album of its year.
Where it came from
In September 2009 Kanye West walked onto the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech and took the microphone off her. What followed was, in his own description, a personal exile. He left the country, spent time in Japan and then Rome, and eventually settled in Hawaii to make a record.
So the album arrives from a specific position: a man whose public standing had collapsed, with money, access and nothing to do but answer for himself in the only language he is fluent in.
The camp
There is one document that matters here, and it is not a review. In November 2010 the journalist Noah Callahan-Bever published a cover story in Complex called “Kanye West: Project Runaway”, written from inside the sessions. It is the load-bearing eyewitness account of how the record was made, and what it describes is less a recording session than an institution.
All three of Avex’s rooms, block-booked twenty-four hours a day, indefinitely. Work continuing around the clock, with ninety-minute naps taken in studio chairs rather than beds. House rules posted on the wall — no tweeting, no pictures. Communal breakfasts. Basketball. And a rotating population of the best rappers, producers and singers available, brought in and kept there: Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Jay-Z, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, Rick Ross, John Legend, Bon Iver, Raekwon, Elton John, with Mike Dean, No I.D., Jeff Bhasker and RZA among the producers.
Reported budget: around three million dollars.
I think this is the single most useful fact in the whole project, and it cuts against the romance rather than feeding it. The obvious story about MBDTF is that humiliation produced great art — that the wound is the engine. The documentary evidence says something less mystical and more impressive: a man with resources built an apparatus designed to produce a masterpiece, staffed it with the best people alive, and ran it continuously until it did.
That is not sublimation. That is project management at a scale most artists never get to attempt.
Maximal by design, and by period
The other thing worth knowing is that the record’s excess is not only temperament. The critic Simon Reynolds argued in 2011 that digital production software has an inherent pull toward maximalism in a way that the analogue hardware behind early house and techno did not — you can keep adding, so people do. He was writing about Rustie and Hudson Mohawke and Flying Lotus, but MBDTF sits in the same technological weather.
Which means the album is maximalist twice over: because of who made it, and because of when.
If you want a framework for what that excess is doing, the literary critic Stefano Ercolino catalogued the maximalist novel — Pynchon, Bolaño, DeLillo — and named ten features that co-occur. Two of them describe this record almost exactly. Dissonant chorality: a work built from many competing voices that do not resolve into one. And paranoid imagination, which is “Monster” and “Blame Game” in a phrase.
Why it belongs in this project
Because it is the one where the purpose is fuelled by something we would rather it were not. Whiplash asks whether suffering can produce transcendence. This one asks whether ego can — whether a thing of real and lasting value can be built out of defiance, grievance and an unwavering belief in yourself that nobody around you entirely shares.
The album’s answer is yes, and it does not apologise. That is what makes it uncomfortable and what makes it worth including.
Where this comes from
- Noah Callahan-Bever, “Kanye West: Project Runaway,” Complex, November 2010 — the eyewitness account of the Hawaii sessions
- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — Wikipedia — dates, credits, chart and critical reception
- The 2009 VMAs, an oral history — Billboard — the incident is 13 September 2009, not the later date some sources give
- Simon Reynolds, “Maximal Nation,” Pitchfork, December 2011
- Kirk Walker Graves, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (33 1/3, 2014) — book-length, and good on the record’s fragmentation
- Stefano Ercolino, The Maximalist Novel (2014) — where dissonant chorality and paranoid imagination come from
Two things I could not confirm and have left out of the prose: the widely repeated story of a Fendi internship in Rome during the exile, which I could not trace to a first-hand source, and the claim that Pitchfork’s 10.0 was its first perfect score for a new album since 2002.