These are the last two songs on Kanye West's universally-loved My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I include myself in this universal love: it's as close as I could imagine to a perfect rap album. A few comparisons: it's a hip-hop OK Computer; it's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (nowhere more than here), where Jeff Mangum's strange obsession with Anne Frank is replaced by Kanye West's strange obsession with Kanye West. The album succeeds because it is a narrative of decline that is not imposed by any outside forces. One of the first lines is "I dreamt about this back in Chicago," and one of the last is "I'm lost in the world." In between, it's a lot of self-reflection, increasingly dark in tone. It's Kanye realizing how terrible of a person he can be. Consider it "Suicidal Thoughts" minus the suicide (and most of the swearing).
Finally, a justified use of auto-tune--as a thematic device rather than 'hey, this sounds weird, doesn't it?' The concluding song draws from Gil Scott-Heron's "Comment No. 1," stealing most of the good lines and editing out Scott-Heron's shots at the White Panther Party. In a way, in reminds me a lot of Belle and Sebastian's Write About Love. The commentary on that album pointed out how Stuart Murdoch of B&S had developed an approach to song-writing that incorporated multiple perspectives, and had finally solved the problem of how to communicate these multiple perspectives by giving them to different members of the band to sing. MBDTF feels similar: the guest verses and samples are remarkably on-point, and mostly cover subjects it would feel odd for Kanye to address directly. The whole thing makes a surprising amount of narrative sense, and narrative is the key word. Rap groups, even those with well-developed personalities (I'm looking at you, Wu-Tang), can often feel like all those personalities talking at cross-purposes; here they sound like one unified (but polyvocal) narrative.
The other strange thing about the album is how long all the songs are: "Power" 5:57, "Monster" 6:18, "So Appalled" 6:37, "Runaway" 9(!):07, "Blame Game" 7:49. These are inconceivably long, especially since three of the first four are the singles. I'd like to suggest, however, that there's a particular reason for this phenomenon, which links up to my current semi-serious project of reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Two observations:
1. I wrote in a letter a few years ago, after reading Joseph O'Neill's well-reviewed Netherland, that I had arrived at a general theory of the contemporary novel's sentence structure. No one of my generation or that directly preceding mine knows exactly how to express a sentiment or thought, especially one that is complex and contains something ineffable. So instead of writing a sentence to express a feeling exactly, we write to express the feeling approximately. Since one sentence will fail in its task, it often comes coupled with others which are also attempting to approximate the same idea, on the theory that one will eventually cross a point at which the collection of approximating sentences feels or seems to have captured the underlying idea well enough.
2. When Alan Jacobs read Infinite Jest last year, he criticized it as indulging to readily in gigantism, often to little effect:
It’s impossible to tell how much of this is strictly intentional and how much is the effect of writerly indiscipline, but either way, I think it's a problem. Most episodes (the sections of IJ, like those of Ulysses, are best described as episodes rather than chapters, I think) are approximately three times longer than they need to be: there are just too many words, phrases, and whole paragraphs that do nearly nothing to advance the narrative or deepen the characterizations or fill in the fictional world's weave.
As far as I've gotten in Infinite Jest (given the size of the book and the number of other things I have going on, it's not a high priority), this seems like a reasonable criticism, except that IJ also has these 15-to-20 page sections that are riveting, which tend to emerge from the excess which Jacobs criticizes.
Let me suggest a thesis that combines these two observations, IJ, MBDTF, and, for good measure, 2666 a book some (like myself) find brilliant and others find to be inconsistent and overlarge. The thesis relies on an argument DFW made in an essay on Dostoevsky (I gather this is one of the better-known things he wrote):
Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can’t is the reason he wouldn’t: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile…. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this…who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that?
My thesis: the increase in gigantism is an attempt to revive a form of art that can be morally serious. The excess is needed in part because of the first numbered observation--we do not have the language needed to talk in any honest or realistic way on these topics; and in part because the people who attempt it are aware that they will seem 'pretentious and overwrought and silly'--the space functions as a means to isolate oneself.
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