The Debate Begins: Is Kanye's 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' The Best Album Of The Decade?

Kanye West's transgressive 2010 opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy augured the decade's hip hop, R&B and pop canon. It even influenced West's foil – not a rival MC, but pop star Taylor Swift.

A producer-cum-rapper, the Chicagoan had long manoeuvred around hip hop's perceived boundaries. He was preoccupied with creativity and individuality as much as skill or storytelling. After 2004's soulful premiere, The College Dropout (home to Jesus Walks), West recruited film composer Jon Brion to collaborate on Late Registration. For Graduation, he embraced electro-house, sampling Daft Punk. Next, West utilised Auto-Tune to render emotional, existentialist illwave balladry on 808s & Heartbreak, which inspired his protege KiD CuDi, Canadian singer/rapper Drake, and the cloud-rap and avant'n'B genres. West's fifth album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, would be the most ambitious yet, incorporating elements from across his previous work, albeit surrealistically. It was maximalist, meta and magnificent. 

By the 2010s, West was already controversial for venting. During a live Hurricane Katrina benefit concert broadcast, he (justifiably) chided President George W Bush for failing to aid Black New Orleans. Then, at 2009's MTV Video Music Awards, West rushed the stage to protest Swift's receiving the Best Female Video statuette over Beyonce grabbing the mic and emitting the now immortal line, "I'mma let you finish…" He caused furore. President Obama called him "a jackass". West retreated to a Hawaiian studio to record. 

"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy introduced West as today's chaotic, eccentric and extravagant GOAT."

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy wasn't an apologia, nor was it penitent. Instead, West chronicled the precariousness of celebrity, while astutely critiquing the racialised subtext to his public chastisement and media representation. He was brutally honest – and comic – in examining the paradoxes of his own psyche, aspirations, image, mythology and drama, problematic discourse or no. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy's summit was the prog-hop symphony Runaway, with West mockingly proposing, "Let's have a toast for the douchebags!"

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy introduced West as today's chaotic, eccentric and extravagant GOAT, notorious for his protracted album rollouts. But it also showed him to be a committed serial musical reinventor, like David Bowie, Prince or Madonna. This album signified an era. West commissioned the cover art from George Condo, a painter who describes his style as "psychological Cubism".

West acted as conductor for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. He brought in an epic assembly of cohorts. On the hip-hopera All Of The Lights, West and Rihanna were backed by a choir including Elly "La Roux" Jackson, with Elton John playing piano. An ascendant Nicki Minaj theatrically flexed an English accent for the prologue, Dark Fantasy, riffing on Roald Dahl's unsentimental Cinderella (with RZA as co-producer). Nevertheless, Minaj really blazed on the OTT posse-cut Monster, combusting West, JAY-Z and Rick Ross. Extraordinarily, the rapper's debut, Pink Friday, dropped the same week as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (West featured). 

Curiously, West solicited contributions from Justin Vernon, frontman of the then niche indie-folk outfit Bon Iver. Vernon had experimented with Auto-Tune on his cult track Woods. West reworked it musically, and figuratively, as Lost In The World, with a beat switch lurching into the LP's percussive finale, Who Will Survive In America, his rumination on capitalism. Here, West atomised Gil Scott-Heron's formative spoken word Comment No 1. Coincidentally, earlier that year, Scott-Heron had unveiled his post-dubstep comeback, I'm New Here (he died in 2011).

Universally acclaimed, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was an incubator of trends for contemporary hip hop, R&B and pop. Indeed, West instituted art-rap, with MCs recasting themselves as auteurs, itself a political statement, given hip hop's marginalisation at the Grammys (notably, it won Best Rap Album, but contentiously wasn't even nominated for Album Of The Year). 

"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was an incubator of trends for contemporary hip hop, R&B and pop." 

The new wave of (post-)rappers competed, not in traditional battles, but with innovative concepts, curation and visuals. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy made way for Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky and Travis Scott (whose Astroworld was the decade's art-rap bookend). Frank Ocean established an avant'n'B parallel with Channel Orange. West's beloved Beyonce pivoted from singles to zeitgeist album artiste, peaking with Lemonade, and Rihanna presented the anarchic Anti. In the interim, West unwittingly fell into a symbiotic creative relationship with Swift, the two looming as pop's last postmodernists. In 2017, Swift released her own meta-commentary on fame in Reputation. The trap-leaning bop This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things alluded to her ever-serpentine feud with West (and wife Kim Kardashian) following Famous-Gate. But perhaps My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy's greatest legacy is that its riveting sonics and proto-viral narratives assured the album format's continued relevance in the cyber age.