While Kanye’s verses throughout this track are undoubtedly some of the best he’s ever laid down in his career, it’s producer Mike Dean who steals the spotlight in ‘Gorgeous’. For this track, Kanye flips an Enoch Light and the Glittering Guitars cover of ‘You Showed Me’ (originally written by ‘60s rockers The Turtles), pitching its fuzzy guitar loop down a semitone to form the bedrock of the instrumental. Samples used: ‘You Showed Me’ – Enoch Light and the Glittering GuitarsĪs illustrious of an opener as ‘Dark Fantasy’ might be, it’s on ‘Gorgeous’ where My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy really starts to show that this isn’t your average rap album. Of course, it’d be criminal to mention ‘Dark Fantasy’ without making note of Nicki Minaj’s spoken word intro, which interpolates a poem from Roald Dahl’s Rotten Rhymes to assist in establishing the long-winding, twisted narrative to come. With a single sample, West sets the tone for the sheer decadence of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, snatching the vocal from Mike Oldfield and Jon Anderson’s 1983 track ‘In High Places’ to use as a precursor for Teyana Taylor’s hook before launching into a classic boom-bap beat cooked up by West, No I.D. It’d be difficult to name an opening refrain more iconic than ‘Can we get much higher?’. Samples used: ‘In High Places’ – Mike Oldfield feat. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of one of the most significant musical releases of the modern era, we’re turning our critical eyes and ears to every single sample used to thread the record together , analysing the record through its production to explore the dark twisted fantasy of the one and only Kanye West. While stylistically coherent, each track on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is drastically different in tone and timbre, due in part to both the instrumental contributions of West’s key collaborators as well as the enigmatic array of samples utilised across the album.įrom obscure prog-rock through to indie-folk and abstract electronica, West and his team dug through crates far and wide to source the samples heard across My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, re-contextualising to paint a grandiose, if not slightly deranged, portrait of Kanye West: not just as an artist, but a man caught within the trappings of fortune and fame, who upon reaching the apex of the American dream, is now desperately questioning whether it was all worth it at all.
Like any Kanye West project, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is densely layered and thematically complex, and this couldn’t be any more apt when approaching the production of the record.
Pieced together alongside a wildly diverse team of creatives over the span of 18 months after West was shunned by the public due to his infamous Taylor Swift stage invasion at the 2009 MTV Awards, is universally regarded as one of the most significant releases of all time, with the record’s highbrow production, intricate narrative, decadent aesthetics and eclectic array of features helping to break down boundaries for the hip-hop and even transcending genre to go down as one of the decade’s most influential releases. Ten years ago, Kanye West’s fifth full-length album, the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was released unto the world. Words by Will Brewster Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the grandiose hip-hop epic.
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