At the heart and at the soul of Kanye West’s new album is the 9 minute extravaganza “Runaway”. Forget the video, who cares, right? Just as a piece of music and just as a self-portrait it carries the album on its back and changes it from a let down after the superb 808s And Heartbreaks, to an album that can be mentioned in the same breadth.
All the reviews you’ve read about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy have been incomplete. It isn’t a masterpiece, or if it is, it is as much a masterpiece as his first three albums and not as good 808s. Good Ass Music would’ve been a better title. It is Born In The USA without the depth. It sounds phenomenal but it is shallow. It is self-involved but it isn’t self realized and it is certainly among the top albums of the year, near the top albums of the year, it misteps and falters. A masterpiece must be, well, perfect, so let’s say it is a flawed masterpiece.
Except for “Runaway”.
“Runaway” is a devastated self-portrait wrapped in one of the great melodies. It is so good I could swear I had heard it before and I absolutely checked out the samples but the samples aren’t melodic they’re rhythmic and though Kanye says he can’t sing and he can’t play an instrument, he is sing rapping the way he did on “Hey Mama”. The rapping is first rate, the chorus is first rate and while it is as entirely subjective as you could, in the chorus it is an invitation to the dance for the bad boys: for a succession of bad boys who fuck everything up just like the great Kanye.
So it does do the Lennon trick, maybe I mean it almost does the Lennon trick: it switches something very personal inside/out; as Kanye reams himself against a lovely piano note by note melody, it is always lonely. West keeps on inviting people in and shutting them out at the same. He doesn’t build up, he builds sideways and into the song. Around the six minute mark an orchestra joins in only to disappear entirely and the last two minutes are an extended instrumental which despite the fuzzbox and noise is all mooted loneliness. The beauty finds it way out to the world and fights its way back in till it is surrendered in sorrow.
Better than the TGIF version, this is a great personal art form.
But Patrick Stickle’s “A More Perfect Union”, its rock and roll twin, is better. I’ve written about “A More Perfect Union” many times this year and here is where it it connects to us.
1. The antecedent to both is “Born In The USA”.
2. Both sound great and I mean GREAT.
3. Both are intensely personal visions that seem to expand outwards to the world. They are both the opposite of gnomic: there is an internal struggle to work its way from personal depression to inclusive vision. Kanye joins his peers, Patrick joins North America.
4. Both find salvation through sound: Kanye in the chorus, a relation to “Salt Of The Earth”, Patrick on the break to “Born to Run”.
5. Both are joyous odes to misery.
6. Both are long songs not jams.
Patrick’s is better.
Everything Kanye does, and Kanye does everything on “Runaway” and on Dark Fantasy, Patrick does just a little better on “Perfect Union” and The Monitor.
They are brother albums, stupendous artistic statements in any year, in any decade.