It is, undoubtedly, a “Where were you when you first heard it?” record. It’s also epically satisfying, the culmination of a hard-earned artistic evolution. Like Mulholland Drive, the album is a dreamlike story that speaks in symbols, with no clear beginning or end. Instead, it surveys his subconscious, distilling his waking chaos into an otherworldly narrative, one inhabited by characters representing the hideous, the insane, and the magnificent. It explores his reality’s truth not by assessing, explaining, or spinning the events of his day-to-day life like he felt compelled to do on his first four albums-you’ll find no talk of Taylor Swift or W. The triumph of his new album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is that it peels off most of West’s false layers. You could practically hear the groan from music bloggers across the country when he released his “Runaway” video its half-hour-plus running time felt like more than most were willing to devote to digesting it and writing it up. But in an ADD pop environment built to facilitate dance-floor hookups, Kanye deploys pauses, empty space, and other forms of musical foreplay. His genius as a producer is making radio-friendly songs at will, updating the sounds of Chaka Khan and Bobby “Blue” Bland for modern audiences, doing T-Pain better than T-Pain.
In fact, he’s spent much of his career bemoaning modern failures, the ultimately unsatisfying nature of luxury cars and diamond chains, the media cloud always raining on him, and the inherent soullessness of the information age. With his globe-spanning interruptions, pronouncements, and Twitter dispatches, he can seem like a walking publicity statement, but he actually isn’t well-suited for a world of iPhone apps, hybrid engines, metrosexuality, and cyberlove.
Within 48 hours of uploading, the video received over 480,000 views, 31,000 likes, and 12,000 dislikes.Kanye West is a man outside his time. Describing it as overrated, in a word, the album was rated a strong 5 to a light 6 out of 10, deviating little from the original score he gave when he uploaded his original review a decade ago. In the redux review, Fantano concluded that the album started strong but ended weakly, though it was made up partially by the features and production. It was also a decade after his original review, and the album had generally cemented its place in music as one of the more ambitious releases of the 2010s. On January 9th, 2020, Fantano uploaded a redux review of the album, in celebration of reaching 2 million subscribers and due to re-reviewing Kanye West's album The Life of Pablo after it had received a number of updates and revisions since its initial release. It has also become a well-known joke within Fantano's fanbase as well as Kanye's fanbase. Since the publishing of the initial review, there has been a large number of requests to re-review the album due to perceived unfairness in regards to the way Fantano discussed the album. Since publishing, the video has received over 770,000 views in the past 9 years but was also the subject of negative backlash with over 20,000 dislikes in comparison to its 7,000 likes. He concluded the review by rating the album a light to decent 6 out of 10. While he praised the production and lyricism from Kanye, he felt that the album relied too much on Kanye's persona, which he felt ambivalent towards. On November 16th, 2010, music critic Anthony Fantano uploaded his review of the album to YouTube.
The album also holds a Metacritic score of 94/100. The album received a perfect 10 score from Pitchfork, three Grammy Awards for Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song, and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration the latter two won with the song "All of the Lights", and a RateYourMusic score of 4.03/5 from over 27,000 user ratings, making it the highest-rated Kanye West album on the site. On November 22nd, 2010, rapper and artist Kanye West released his fifth studio album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to widespread critical and fan acclaim.