"We're Not Above Reviewing Leaks": Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

On 2007's Graduation, Kanye West seemed to have learned something important about making great albums: focus is key. Unfortunately, that album suffered from a soft second-half and, despite the album's focus and unified sound never managed to reach the heights of West's first two albums. And let's talk about those albums for a moment--The College Dropout and Late Registration are both fine albums, classics even, but they suffer from too many skits and lame jokes that don't quite add up to anything. Kanye's first two albums, it seems, are prime examples of made-for-iPod albums and the song-is-God mentality of many contemporary music fans. Fortunate for us and Kanye, most of the songs are good enough that we keep going back and sitting through the fluff to get to the meaty stuff. Then of course, in 2008, Kanye released 808's and Heartbreaks and album full of drum machines and autotune. An album about loss and heartache and misogyny. Okay, sure, misogyny isn't anything new to hip hop, but the confessional nature of 808's and Heartbreak made the violence and hatred a little more real than was comfortable. Unfortunate, as sonically, this was easily Kanye's most unified, engaging moment.

So why the history lesson? Well, it's because the dirty version of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy made it's way on to the internet last night, and I'm going to make a pretty bold claim about how it stacks up to the Kanon. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, pound for pound, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is Kanye West's best album. But how can that be, you say? It doesn't have the firepower of those first two albums' highlights. While "Power," "Runaway," and "Devil in a New Dress," are all stand-outs, they don't quite match the immediacy of old jams like "Spaceship," "Through a Wire," "Jesus Walks," "Golddigger," "Touch the Sky,"...etc... etc...you get the point. So how can anyone possible say that MBDTF is Kanye's best album? Because it is a tight, focused album in which every song pops on its own, but
which flows as a unified whole. The dirty guitars and distorted vocals of the Nuggets-esque "Gorgeous" are exquisitely crashed by the percussive chants of "Power," which ends on a King Crimson sample that gives way to the quiet elegance of "All of the Lights (Interlude)" which explodes into it's own magnified echo that is "All of the Lights," the actual song. The album's pacing and transitions are impeccable. Despite the long run times of most of the tracks ("Runaway" is 9 minutes long), each song's moving parts keep us moving and pushes the minutes by faster than they have any right to move.

As for thematic content--this is a lot of album to digest, and I'm not sure I'm ready to do this heavy lifting yet. But I'll offer this: as we might have guessed, MBDTF is an album about celebrity, about indulgence, but mostly about self-interrogation. We still get those misogynistic moments ("I slapped my girl/she call the feds")but rather than coming from a place of anger, they're now rooted in odd moments of self-loathing. "Runaway" is probably the best example of this, in which West famously notes that he "sent this bitch a picture of [his] dick." And while this line is dark, and weird, and dripping with sexual harassment, because the rest of the song is fairly self-critical ("Baby I got a plan/Runaway as fast as you can") the end result is almost cathartic. We get a sense that West is trying to exorcise his demons and while he isn't always successful, by drawing this battle out in big, vibrant strokes for everyone to see he has made one of the most impressive hip hop albums of the last ten years.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy will never be confused with a quiet or small album. To borrow a phrase from the album, this thing is a "motherfuckin' monster." It's big and brash and exhilarating--everything hip hop can and should be. Hell--it's everything pop music can be. And maybe that's why MBDTF is such a success, it feels like another shift for pop music, a move beyond the current mainstream toward a bigger, fuller idea of what the mainstream is. As such, MBDTF is a flat-out masterpiece and will be hard to top one most year-end lists, and will most likely be in the top 5 conversations 9 years from now when we're all older and border and making out best of the 10's lists. Welcome back, Kanye.

Late to the Party: Aziz Ansari's "Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening" (2010)

It has been quite awhile since I bought a new comedy CD. Aside from the spate of posthumous Bill Hicks releases from the late 1990s and early 2000s, I think the last one I bought was David Cross's appropriately titled It's Not Funny (2004), which I later sold on Amazon.com for like $5 when people were still buying CDs.

Well, the other night, I was flipping through the channels and landed on a stand-up performance on Comedy Central. I recognized the comedian, Aziz Ansari, from a bit part in an episode of Flight of the Conchords (where he plays a man who runs a fruit stand and has an irrational hatred of Australians) and from his turn as "Raaaaaaaandy" in the sluggish Judd Apatow dramedy Funny People. He's probably most known for his role as Tom Haverford on NBC's television show Parks and Recreation.

What makes his comedy CD (also available on DVD) Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening so hilarious is his infectious delivery, his mastery of fairly complex and quickly delivered bits, his handle on contemporary pop culture (especially his relation to it as a comedian and actor with some decent media exposure), and the musical cadence of comedic voice. Ansari never sounds angry, though he can get animated, especially during his most sarcastic routines. His voice is reminiscent of Mitch Hedberg, but is delivered with the bravado of a rapper. His observational humor tends toward the surreal, especially as he expands on the minutia inside of his bits. For instance, in a sketch called "Sheets," while discussing the mundane topic of "thread counts," he relates buying sheets that were advertised as having a thread count of 600. But, after doing some online research, he finds the actual thread count of the sheets is 296. His response: "Are you shittin' me, man? I almost slept on that shit. 296 is sandpaper as far as I'm concerned. If that was a drug deal, I would have shot Hotel Luxury Linens in the face." His observations about race, particular as a first-generation American, from South Carolina, whose parents immigrated from India, are insightful. While doing a promotional interview for a TV show, he tells his audience that an interviewer asked him if he was "psyched" about the success of Slumdog Millionaire, which is an odd question considering Ansari was not in the film. He is asked the question simply because of his Indian ancestry. He then asks: "Are white people just psyched all the time? It's like, 'Back to the Future. That's us. Godfather. That's us. Godfather Part II. That's us. Departed. That's us. Sunset Blvd. That's us. Citizen Kane. That's us. Jaws. That's us. Every fuckin' movie BUT and Slumdog Millionaire and Boyz N the Hood. That's us. We're white people. Suck our dicks!'"

Ansari hits his stride when talking about his cousins Harris and Darwish and how he complicates their lives by "messing with them" on Facebook. These intimate yet oddly universal tales are reminiscent of the best comedy in that it touches on the mundane and familiar with remarkable and silly detail. This leads into a bit where Ansari describes hanging out with the rapper Kanye West. Similar to Richard Pryor's account of similar interactions with larger than life figures (in his instance, football player and movie star Jim Brown and boxer Muhammad Ali) or Kevin Smith and Charlie Murphy's narratives surrounding meetings with the eccentric musician Prince, Ansari relates the kind of details that at once surprise and seem exactly like the media-construction of Kanye West. He tells the audience about being cut off mid-sentence by Kanye West so the rapper can go to his high-powered telescope to check out a female neighbor with large breasts. However, the highlight of the proper set is his account of going to an R. Kelly show (and later meeting him). It's nearly as funny as Dave Chappelle's impression of him in his mock-video "Piss on You." Ansari gets the singer's cadence down spot-on. He also perpetuates the stereotypes made about R. Kelly (especially his hypersexuality) in new and hilarious ways. After visualizing for the crowd a rather explicit element of R. Kelly's stage performance, Ansari says, "Wow. You are not gonna see shit like that at a Modest Mouse concert."

One criticism that can be made of this performance is his transition between the R. Kelly material and his encore as Raaaaaaaandy (that's right, with eight As), Ansari's comedic alter ego who embodies some of the lowest common denominator tendencies of comedians/performers like Dane Cook, Andrew Dice Clay, Funkmaster Flex, or the more sexually-oriented Def Comedy Jam comedians. The material is funny, but his performance is so similar to his concluding musical impression of R. Kelly that it's really hard to distinguish Ansari's regular stand-up from his alter-ego Raaaaaaaandy.

Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening in no way represents a revolutionary breakthrough in stand-up comedy. Ansari's material is slight, and when he does slip into political topics outside of the domain of race, like gay rights, he is more interested in social aspects of political integrity than in making statements. But there is nothing wrong with this. Ansari's debut CD is highly entertaining and almost always generate laughs for the duration of its fifty-four minutes. Ideally, this is what a comedy performance should do.