Review [eng] faite pour rym
Ok, this shit is fuckin' epic.
There's the somewhat puerile idea that some albums run beyond what they actually are: they represent a little piece of history, or let's say they just grasp something from the air of time. And MBDTF appears to be today's candidate for being today's record. It is probably a puerile thought indeed. Note that Kanye West is famously puerile too. So, is that album, if at all, credible for its growing hype? The question immediately fades away. The album feels to be of a lot of meaning and personality, actually it feels blessed. So I can safely entertain the pleasure to take it seriously as the album crystallizing hip-hop feelings in 2010.
Going on from puerility and feelings, Kanye's album truly resembles the diary of a teenager confessing about his impossible dreams when, you know, you still thought being an individual meant having a special direction. It is hundred percent about fantasy, hundred percent bloated and I'll love it for that. Hip-hop has always dealt with personal ambitions and one's own tricks, but Kanye, returning from his ego-trips, is symbolically the first to fully realize the tragic vanity of it all. 'Stupidest kid becomes the first to mature' syndrome. So what he does it is at the same time push it even further, look back on it, at the same time embrace it and crash with it, and make the whole process his own art and then makes it beautiful.
This is still all form and meta, but you can hear everything everywhere in this album, you can hear that it comes from a whiny dreamer and that its message is universal, because it is so accessible and not specifically written for hip-hop heads nor to anyone in particular (it's very much a pop album). Whiny, because it has this constant frailty, feels pushed to its own boundaries, it rises and then falls immediately, and it tells us how it is all of us, and it is really moving (Hegel would weep, never mind that remark); personal because this album feels very close, intimate, like I could have come up with that piano melody and had all of these songs in the corner of my head already. Universal because even diction is with us, because we're instant-falling dreamers too and, hmm, remember the "anybody can tell you how it is" line? Kanye West is this "not-so-talented-rapper" "anybody". This is the (if I am, he is) genuine part.
And the counterpart is of course how glorious, shameless and outrageous it all is, how everything blends and just doesn't care nor does stop. Making it epic, fuckin' epic. The sound is huge, the melodies full-front, and the music is terribly good. Or maybe no, but here, right now, it is the music of our lives, and pitiful dreams and oh-so-human train of thought which Kanye naturally makes us relate to (note that I haven't read one single lyric line from the album). Kanye, maybe like Gaga, is the mediocre singing about mediocrity and making it true and beautiful, fucking art in the face and getting fucked (see cover). For some reason, (they) he can do it, (they) he can grasp it. In a way this is maybe the first true hip-hop mainstream album in history, made by the mainstream, with pretty much everyone invited. Ridicilis! I gotta love it. I'm serious.