kanye west my beautiful dark twisted fantasy square

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The clerk, who never so much as greeted me despite being a customer for years, couldn’t contain himself: “This album… this album is so dope, man.” On the walk home, two different cars passed me blaring Kanye verses I’d never heard. I stepped up to the Rhino Records counter with a red square in my hand. For a Playstation-raised suburbanite like me, a Kanye album was the only traceable source of confidence. Around that time, I was a high school sophomore, unable to so much as introduce myself to a girl I was attracted to. Just to imagine how it would open, who the guest vocalists would be, how it would close, was a joy of its own. If you ever wondered where the rappers’ tradition of commissioning world-renown artists for album art began, now you know.Īfter months working under the alias A Good-Ass Job, he announced the final title: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. He introduced the album’s five different covers, all by modern Picasso disciple George Condo, most notably the portrait of Kanye making love to a voluptuous half-phoenix woman, complete with Pegasus wings and Dalmatian tail. But he could only fully recover if this upcoming album was his best ever. As he finished and walked off, the audience gave the sort of roaring applause that resounds overwhelmingly even from a TV.

He was somehow both apologizing and not apologizing, singing directly to her while not acknowledging her at all. “ Let’s have a toast for the douchebags / Let’s have a toast for the assholes / Let’s have a toast for the scumbags / Every one of them that I know” Calmly, he delivered the melancholic chorus: He walked in, wearing his red suit and chains, up to an MPC2000 sitting on a white Greco-Roman pillar, on which he tapped out the piano motif to ‘Runaway.’ Mauve ballerinas glided along the circular white stage. Whatever it was, it would have to address the elephant in the room. Consider, for a second, the colossal pressure riding on this performance. No one had any idea what song he'd even play. The rest of the lyrics ask West rhetorical questions about his childhood, which at the time came off eerily like a dig at his mother’s recent death.īut still, it was September 12, and Aziz Ansari introduced Kanye West at the close of the show. Somehow no one registered this as shameless self-pity, but if that wasn’t enough, she hung her head and sang a song called ‘Innocent,’ which contained such lyrics as “ It’s okay, life is a tough crowd / 32 and still growing up now” (West’s age at the time, because you know, she didn’t want to just spell it out for us).

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Swift opened her performance with a full replay clip of West walking up to take the microphone from her.

The following year, it was announced that both West and Swift were on the performance schedule of the 2010 VMAs. “ I’m living in that 21st Century, doing something mean to it / Do it better than anybody you ever seen do it / Screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it / I guess every superhero needs his theme music” With the wallop of a rock’n’roll anthem, it sampled King Crimson’s prog rock relic ‘21st Century Schizoid Man,’ and over a tribal chant, his opening lines went like this: Atop a custom-built mountain stage, backlit by panoramic travelogues of snowcaps and clouds, he performed a new single called ‘Power,’ and each time he said the word, a geyser of red smoke would erupt behind him.

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This was the world premiere of his iconic bright red suit, sans shirt, plus life-size gold Pharaoh head necklace.

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In June 2010, still enduring peak backlash, West would put on one of his littlest-known TV performances ever at the BET Awards. No matter your opinion of the action, being told that one ten-second impulse has stripped you of the ability to tour is a heavy blow to a global superstar-heavy enough to make one think their career is over, and kill the morale to achieve greatness ever again. In the fallout, Lady Gaga dropped off his planned co-headline tour, and he was then held back from touring on his own due to plummeting sales predictions. Even in 2018, after brandishing support for Donald Trump and positing that American slavery was “a choice”, there still may not have been a more dangerous time for this artist’s career than after the VMA 2009 Taylor Swift incident. It doesn’t take a social scientist to predict the result of a black rapper in a leather dress shirt walking onstage at a global award show to tell a teenage white girl why she doesn’t deserve her award.