My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West (2010) — what a copy is worth and which pressing to own, in a full Lead-In dossier: Kanye West after the 2009 VMAs, holed up in Honolulu with 13 producers and 29 guest voices.
Kanye West's fifth album, made in Honolulu after the 2009 VMAs. Magnificent and exhausting, and at its best as carefully built as anything he's made, it sums up more than it invents.
West later called it a backhanded apology. It works by overwhelming you, and mostly it does: the production makes a committee sound like one mind. What it doesn't do is invent, and over 68 minutes the excess sometimes turns on the listener.
'Runaway' lasts 9:08, and its words run out at about 5:22. For more than 3 minutes after that, West keeps singing through a vocoder, pushed until his voice is a wail with no words in it. Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal heard something close to a cyborg. Cello and strings carry on underneath. It's the longest song on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and its coda is the album in one gesture. After 4 minutes of putting himself down, West won't stop, and the longer he goes on, the less human he sounds.
West later gave the record a name of his own. In 2013 he told the New York Times it was a 'backhanded apology', a show of skill asking to be accepted back. He said at least 80% of it was genuine, and the rest played to how people saw him. That's the right way in. This is an album built to win an argument by overwhelming you, and mostly it wins. Its triumph is production. In all, 13 credited producers and 29 credited guest voices, over records by King Crimson, Aphex Twin and Bon Iver, end up sounding like one mind. Its flaw comes from the same place. Little here is new. It's the fullest gathering of what West could already do, made bigger and longer.
The background is famous, so it can be brief. On 13 September 2009, at the MTV Video Music Awards, West interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for Best Female Video to champion Beyoncé's 'Single Ladies'. The next day President Obama called him a jackass in an off-the-record remark to CNBC, which leaked. On 1 October his Fame Kills tour with Lady Gaga was cancelled. In mid-October he phoned Noah Callahan-Bever of Complex from Milan. He blamed the outburst on being overworked and fragile, and said he was disgusted by the media and done with music. He also admitted he had beats in his head.
By mid-January 2010 he'd emailed Callahan-Bever to say he'd holed up in Hawaii and was bringing in his favourite producers and artists. The place was Avex Honolulu Studios, where he'd tracked 808s & Heartbreak. Pete Rock said the appeal was that nobody bothers you there. The engineer Anthony Kilhoffer said the isolation kept out the drop-in visitors of Los Angeles and New York. Callahan-Bever spent 5 days in Hawaii in late March. West had block-booked all three of its session rooms, 24 hours a day. Rules were posted on sheets of paper along one wall, among them no tweeting and no pictures. Days began with a 10am breakfast at West's house near Diamond Head, then basketball at the Honolulu YMCA. Studio work started at about 3pm and ran into the night. West napped in 90-minute bursts and, in those 5 days, never slept in a bed.
What came out of those rooms was less a band than a relay. When West got stuck on one song, he moved to another room and another song. One such move took him upstairs to Q-Tip, who was building a new beat on an MPC around a West vocal for a song called 'My Momma's Boyfriend'. Q-Tip's phrase for the whole thing was 'music by committee'. Pusha T said West worked in pieces: a sound from Jeff Bhasker could send him straight to the song it belonged in. West polled the room on what power meant to each of them, and 'Power' sat at one and a half verses for about a month. Pusha wrote his 'Runaway' verse four times. Kilhoffer, looking back in 2020, compared the mood to the TV show Survivor. Pete Rock said the set-up reminded him of his own 1990s days, working on three or four projects at once.
The surprise is how single-minded the result sounds. 'Dark Fantasy' shares the album's most crowded credit with 'Power': RZA, West and No I.D. produce it, and Bhasker and Mike Dean add to it. It opens with Nicki Minaj, speaking in an English accent, reworking Roald Dahl's 'Cinderella'. Underneath, it samples the vocal of Mike Oldfield's 'In High Places', with Dean on piano and Chris Chorney on cello. Sean Fennessey, reviewing it for the Village Voice, heard orchestration West had learned from Jon Brion. He was right, and the debt is worn well. 'Power' is the bluntest case. Symbolyc One and West built it around a piece of King Crimson's '21st Century Schizoid Man'. Alvin Fields and Ken Lewis supply the chant, and the title hook arrives at 0:24 and is heard 9 times.
The heart of the record is the run from 'Devil in a New Dress' into 'Runaway'. 'Devil' is the one track West didn't produce. Bink! built it on Smokey Robinson's recording of 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow', as the credits title it. From about 2:37 the vocal stops for more than a minute, and Mike Dean's guitar solo takes the space. Rick Ross wrote the verse that follows it in New York in about 2 hours, the day before the album was due. West had rejected the verse he'd cut in Hawaii. The second attempt is the best guest verse on the album. 'Runaway' then spends a full minute on its piano figure before West's first line at 1:05. Pete Rock said its drums came from a break he'd used on Mecca and the Soul Brother.
The ending is where the album's ambition starts to work against it. 'Lost in the World' is built from Bon Iver's 'Woods'. West wanted to use it, and after a snowstorm cancelled a trip to Minnesota he rang Justin Vernon and flew him to Hawaii the next morning. Vernon's processed voice opens the track. The credits add pieces of 'Soul Makossa' and Lyn Collins's 'Think (About It)'. Then Gil Scott-Heron's 'Comment No. 1' takes over, and 'Who Will Survive in America' gives it the last 1:38. Dombal read that as West ceding the last word. Fennessey thought it didn't suit a record about private nightmares. Fennessey has the better case. After an hour about one man, handing the ending to somebody else's protest feels like an alibi.
The other flaws are about stamina and tone. At 68 minutes of maximum effort, the album can wear you out. AllMusic's Andy Kellman found it as tiring as it is exhilarating. The Telegraph's headline called it more admirable than enjoyable. Both have a point. 'So Appalled' gives 6:38 to five guests. Ian Cohen, even while writing the #1 entry in Pitchfork's list of the best albums of 2010 to 2014, called CyHi the Prynce's verse the weak link. Cohen also mocked the way 'Hell of a Life' dumbs down the 'Iron Man' riff it borrows. Tone is the harder problem. Kitty Empire, giving it 4 stars in the Guardian, objected to the way its lyrics paint women as money-grabbers. That's the part that has aged worst in the 16 years since.
That leads to the reservation that matters most. For a record this large, little on it is new. The orchestral writing goes back to Late Registration, which Jon Brion co-produced. The treated voice goes back to 808s & Heartbreak, made in the same Honolulu studio two years earlier. Dombal noticed West treating his voice throughout: a tinny filter on 'Gorgeous', the wail at the end of 'Runaway'. That's the 808s method, used now as one colour among many. What's new is the scale and the finish, and that's a real achievement. It's why the production stands above everything else here. But this is a summing-up more than a step forward, and on a long listen you can hear the difference.
None of this hurt it on release. It came out on 22 November 2010 and entered the Billboard 200 at #1 with 496,000 copies, keeping Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday at #2. Pitchfork gave it 10.0 on release day, its first perfect score for a new album since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2002. In the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll, 266 critics gave it 3,250 points, nearly double the runner-up. The Grammys were less sure. It came out too late for the 2011 awards. At the 2012 ceremony it won Best Rap Album but wasn't nominated for Album of the Year, which went to Adele's 21. Touré in Time and Randall Roberts in the Los Angeles Times called that a snub. Rolling Stone ranked it #353 of all time in 2012, and #17 in 2020.
The case for its influence has mostly been made by critics. In 2014 Cohen argued that Bon Iver's second album, Drake's Take Care, Frank Ocean's Channel Orange and Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city all rest on its blueprint. We found no statement from those artists saying so, though Vernon's link is plain: he sings on four of its tracks. The album has also had to outlive its author's reputation. West's antisemitic statements from 2022 onwards cost him his adidas partnership that October. The record's standing hasn't fallen with his. The RIAA certified it 5× Platinum in July 2026.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a great record with a flaw you can feel. As production it's close to faultless: a committee of producers, 29 voices and a stack of borrowed records made to move as one. The best of it, 'Power' and the run from 'Devil in a New Dress' into 'Runaway', still sounds as huge and as carefully built as anything West has made. But it's long, it's sometimes cruel, and it perfects more than it invents. It earns its place near the top of his catalogue and of its decade. It doesn't earn the claim that nothing like it came before.
The original to own is the 2010 US 3×LP, Roc-A-Fella B0014695-01, in a die-cut tri-fold sleeve with five inserts and a 24-inch Condo poster. Ray Janos cut the lacquers at Sterling Sound, and it was pressed at United Record Pressing. The runouts read 'B0014695-01-LP1A Ⓤ RJ STERLING' through '-LP3B Ⓤ RJ STERLING'. Later US pressings reuse the catalogue number, so the 'RJ STERLING' runouts are the test. Its catalogue entry dates the release November 2010.
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