As 2004 came to a close and a young producer forayed into rap superstardom, Kanye West sang, “God show me the way because the Devil’s tryin’ to break me down.” In the next six years, the Devil might have done just that.
At the end of 2007, his mother and muse Donda died of complications from cosmetic surgery. He and his fiancee split. He luxuriated in his solitude and sorrows in the synthetic autotuning of 808s & Heartbreak, which plenty of critics panned at the time. Then came the infamous and intoxicated incident with Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, which incurred widespread outrage from the music industry. Kanye subsequently exiled himself to Hawaii, where he produced the single greatest album of the decade: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
After beckoning his friends to rotate to the island and embark on 24-hour binges of musical creation, Kanye entered the decade gasping for air, finally breaking through the surface of hopeless sadness and creating the best album of the decade.
If 808s & Heartbreak featured Kanye at the bottom of the barrel and that bottle of Hennessy, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy kicks off a drug-fueled Nirvana.
“Can we get much higher? So high,” the first words sung on the album say.
But Kanye is not creepily salivating over Drunk And Hot Girls in his hourlong dream. He’s woken up from the nightmarescape of 808s & Heartbreak, unleashing Kanye’s greatest excesses and ego and embracing the rage that follows sadness. The album’s breakout single, POWER, serves as part redemptive comeback, part metaphorical middle finger to a music establishment keen to cozy up to R. Kelly and Chris Brown but happy to turn on a dime against Kanye for speaking out of line. Sex transforms from the tawdry transactions of his past albums to all-consuming affairs of devotion and destruction in Devil in a New Dress, which samples Smokey Robinson’s cover of Will You Love Me Tomorrow.
Kanye’s passion came to a head with Monster, the horrorcore masterpiece so vicious and vivid in its embrace of villainy that he nearly pulled the track from the album, fearing that it would overshadow his magnum opus. It’s rightly considered the carrier of one of the finest rap verses in the history of hip-hop. But it’s Runaway, the pride-punching pop lamentation, that defines Kanye’s decade, the period that made him the artist of our generation.
From a technical perspective, not one note of Runaway errs. Even the most simple stretches of the song feature some quarter-century-old sample or rhetorical twist. But it’s how Kanye, an artist defined then and now by his ego, confesses his failures so earnestly while opening his heart so wholly to hope that allows him to transcend the confines of “rapper” and “producer” to begin his hero’s journey. It’s the same search for salvation that paved the path, meandering and occasionally mistaken, for him to find love, family, and faith.
Critics universally loved My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Kanye catapulted back into the good graces of the music community. The following decade brought Kanye musical vindication as Drake and a new generation of rappers began to embrace the minimalist beats and synth of 808s and & Heartbreak, and he achieved a random but significant presence in the fashion industry as he launched seasons of his Yeezy clothing and footwear line in tandem with his album releases. Somehow, his success has mostly managed to insulate him from the mob, even when he fist-bumped President Trump in the Oval Office and made entire albums about finding Christ.
It all goes back to My Beautiful Dark Twists Fantasy, the product of exile, when he finally allowed himself to obsess and explode and accept defeat in order to return for redemption. Then, he creates something unlike anything ever before — and a once-in-a-generation career to go with it.
