(Judging by the 2020 existence of QAnon, I’d say worse.) If the monoculture lost its real-world circulation around this time, Fantasy was proof it was still thriving in the virtual realm: thing’s flawless beginning to end. So while The Internet wasn’t yet synonymous with The World in 2010, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy helped that process along for better or worse. Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Def Jam 2010 To calculate its influence on 2010s hip-hop is to try and contact trace Nirvana’s Nevermind. His lavish new pretensions toward six-minute tracks and 35-minute videos and Elton John cameos paid off until the visual-album benchmark Beyoncé at the tail end of 2013 and Kendrick Lamar’s jazz-shocked, To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, Fantasy was the uncontested, critically acclaimed masterpiece in all of music for the initial 2010s: Kid A and Stankonia rolled into one and a lot less humble about it.

Considering West was a premier album artist since his debut six years ago, this was hardly a cause for alarm.īut it’s an important data point: This superstar was making capital-A art in a hit-dependent medium (this isn’t Elvis Costello, folks) and being a hitmaker now came second for the auteur if at all. It reached number one and while Kanye’s proper album did too, it only held the spot for a week and none of its own singles even made the top ten. It didn’t have any hits on the order of “Gold Digger” or “Stronger” in fact, Kanye’s role in Katy Perry’s negligible “E.T.” at the time helped recoup some of his album costs and keep up chart appearances. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy created a rip in the monoculture timeline (this is also known as a generation gap) where if you’re not Extremely Online, you expected and/or got more or less another great Kanye West album.

The first thing to understand about Kanye West’s mythologized-to-death fifth album and fifth work to redefine contemporary music wholesale is that it didn’t change the world: It broke the internet.

Kanye west dark fantasy rap genius