17. Kanye West, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"

 

Ah fuck, here were are again at the Kanye West Problem, which is how to talk about a work of art when the artist has recently revealed himself to be a loathsome antisemite and is also probably seriously mentally ill and whether mental illness should offer mitigation for genuinely awful behavior and on what terms.  It's complicated!

Lots and lots of artists on this list have done and said vile and inexcusable things.  It was an open secret that Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, liked underage girls, and in fact had a relationship with Lori Mattix when he was 29 and she was 14.  Aerosmith's Steven Tyler is accused of an ongoing relationship with a 16-year-old girl in the 70's.  Eric Clapton is more or less openly racist.  Chris Brown, of course, has a long history of abusing women, and beat Rihana so bad she had to go to the hospital.  And on and on.  So why is Kanye such a hard case?

Two things, I think, and please excuse me if I keep talking about this every time a Kanye album comes up.  The first is recency - Kanye made his openly antisemitic comments very recently (to this writing, anyway).  On December 1, 2022, he appeared on the Alex Jones Show, ugh, it's gross just typing that, and said "The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world. . . .  We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all of the time.”  Just a couple of weeks earlier, he brought well-known white nationalist Nick Fuentes to a dinner with Donald Trump.  The fact that all this - and more! - happened so recently makes it hard to forgive.  Also, Kanye has yet to make any sort of apology for his inexcusable statements.

Second, I think, is that Jimmy Page never went on the Dick Cavett show or whatever to brag about having sex with a young teen, but Kanye keeps doing things in the most loud and obvious kind of way, almost as if he intends to infuriate the largest number of people.  It really seems like it's on purpose, and either he's faking it to get attention or he wants to broadcast his hateful message as far and as loudly as he can.  Neither option is palatable.

So for now, he's in some kind of cancel limbo.  He appears to be laying low now, having lost all of his big-dollar contracts and his wife and much of his reputation.  And I'm not sure what to do now.  I don't want to act like nothing's happened and just go on but also....

I think this is a brilliant, amazing album.  Ughhh.  It's obviously the product of a mind obsessed with music, who took inspiration from all over the place and worked feverishly to synthesize it all into something otherworldy and revelatory.  Kanye booked all of Avex Studios in Honolulu to work on multiple songs simultaneously, working through the night and importing various artists (like RZA, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, and MIA, who has lately run aground on her own rocky shoals of controversy) to guest on the record.  It's possible it's one of the most expensive albums ever made, although it's very hard to pin down things like that.

I would love to go into detail about what I like so much about this album, about the moments on it that I found truly moving and inspiring and captivating, but I'm going to demur at this time.  Maybe someday Kanye will find redemption and we'll be able to separate the art from the artist once more, but right now I'm stuck on that image of Kanye on the Alex Jones Show wearing a black mask over his entire face as if he even knows he should be ashamed of what he's saying and casually praising pure unvarnished evil.  That day is not today.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? I'm not gonna lie, it is.