My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: An unconventional cry for help

This blog has helped me to realize how oblivious I was (still am) to deeper meanings of songs. I don't consider myself a two-dimensional person in the slightest. If anything, I'm an overthinker that reads too far into things but divulging into this album certainly changed my point of view. I'm not a member of any Kanye West fan clubs but I've consistently enjoyed his music for as long as I can remember. Despite being the unfortunate age of 13, 2010 was a great year and so was Kanye's 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I want to dissect this album for you guys and I think the coolest way to do it would be by trying to figure out what goes on in Kanye's head. 

Back in the day (the dark times of middle school), I used to sit at my computer and listen to the album on YouTube while online shopping for Abercrombie graphic tees (that I later came to regret). Anyways, my point is that I never thought of the songs as having deeper meaning or I guess I just didn't care if they did or not. I don't even know if I took any notice to the lyrics at all. In fact, I don't even think I thought twice about why the album was called My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I may be seven (almost eight) years late on truly engaging with the music on this album but better late than never, right? 

Before writing this blog post, I sat there and blasted each individual track trying to figure out what every song actually meant. Of course, there were several issues discussed on the album, things like consumer culture and race but what stuck out to me the most was fame. Weird, right? Now, I'm no philosopher, but I love to overthink. This album has a ton of philosophical ideologies present like materialism, racism, isolation (closely tied to the plight of fame), and power, just to name a few. Some songs were super direct about it (POWER) while others were much more indirect (Runaway), but I just kept coming back to the realization that every track has something to do with fame. Considering it is, THE Kanye West, (I mean, seriously, the guy thinks of himself as a god), it shouldn't have taken me that long to come to that epiphany but it was a cool way to dissect it and arrive at these conclusions.  

First of all, what even is philosophy? Google says, "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline." Which is still a super broad and vague definition. Philosophy is such a wide thing to grasp my head around so I just took to google. Shockingly, I typed in “fame philosophy.” What can I say? I'm a just a genius when it comes to research. I clicked through several irrelevant articles that weren't helping me out at all, so I decided to switch up my search approach. I feel like fame is just one of those words that you’ve always known the definition of and although I was one hundred percent certain that I knew what fame was, I googled the definition anyways. About seven minutes after that, I found myself sucked into the web reading a super interesting article about celebrity culture, the need to be envied, and how the egotistical desire for fame is genuinely a natural one. I got pretty deep into the article because I loved hearing that my obsession with getting likes on Instagram wasn’t just me, but rather a natural desire that everyone has. The article ended up being really useful because it brought up some extremely interesting points made by a man named Alfred North Whitehead. After the mentioning of his name, I took to google once more and I genuinely felt like I found a massive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Alfred North Whitefield was actually a mathematician and philosopher. I used the quote I found in the article and “The desire for admiring attention becomes futile except in the presence of an audience fit to render it. The pathology of feeling consists in the destruction of the audience for the sake of fame,” (Whitefield). I couldn’t find the source in the article, other than the name, so I copied and pasted the quote into my trusty search engine once more and voila, there was the title of the work. Published in 1933, by two different publishers, Adventures of Ideas, is a dense publication of basically philosophy and ideologies in general. Alright so please bear with me, this excerpt is pretty long but SO worth reading through all of it:  

“The converse tendency is at least equally noticeable; The egotistic desire for fame- ‘that last infirmity’- is an inversion of the social impulse, and yet presupposes it. The tendency shows itself in the trivialities of child-life, as well as in the career of some conqueror before whom mankind trembled. In the widest sense, it is the craving for sympathy. It involves the feeling that each act of experience is a central reality, claiming all things as its own. The world then has no justification except as a satisfaction of such claims. But the point is that the desire for admiring attention becomes futile except in the presence of an audience fit to render it. The pathology of feeling, so often exemplified, consists in the destruction of the audience for the sake of the fame. There is also, of course, the sheer love of command, finally devoid of high purpose. The complexity of human motive, the environment of its threads, is infinite.  

The point, which is here relevant, is that the zest of human adventure presupposes for its material a scheme of things with a worth beyond any single occasion. However perverted, there is required for zest that craving to stand conspicuous in this scheme of things as well as the purely personal pleasure in the exercise of faculties. It is the final contentment aimed at by the soul in its retreat to egoism, as distinct from anesthesia. In this, it is beyond human analysis to detect exactly where the perversion begins to taint the intuition of peace. Milton’s phrase states the whole conclusion - “That last infirmity of noble mind.” Fame is a cold, hard notion.” 

This excerpt on fame appeared in the chapter on peace. At first, I thought that it was a weird place to put it. I was pretty worried that I had just spent hours of my time on a book of little relevance to this assignment, but it actually makes perfect sense when you think about it and I don’t think I could find a better publication if I tried. The whole premise of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is this battle with inner peace rooted in the good and evil that comes with fame.  

It is so obvious that Mr. West has this inner conflict with how he feels about fame (and ultimately himself). In a really weird way, I can totally relate on a personal level. Obviously not so much on the fame part, but just being uncertain on how to feel about my particular situation. I think that everyone has their own personal internal conflicts and struggles that they face. I broke it down into the most basic way I could possibly think of: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The beauty and riches that come along with fame, the darker side of fame, and everyone's least favorite option (both). Seriously, life needs to be a little more black and white every once in a while. Anyways, that's how I went about figuring out this album out in relation to the ideology and philosophy of fame.  

Let's start with the break-down of the dark side. I was probably still rocking my 'come to the dark side we have cookies' t-shirt in 2010... yikes. Anyways, why does Kanye even rap about the darker side of fame? Being 'rich as fuck' and a household name doesn't sound that bad. Even my grandma knows who Kanye West is. She's not a huge fan but all publicity is good publicity, you know? Okay, so this philosopher guy Whitehead says that, "In the widest sense, it is a craving of sympathy." This logic made virtually zero sense to me at first. I have a pretty hard time sympathizing with celebrities and extremely wealthy people and I can't be the only one who has a little contempt for those who have more money than they know what to do with. I mean seriously, "Good night cruel world," (lyrics from the third track, POWER). Is a millionaire (maybe billionaire at this point) really one to talk about a cruel world? Then again, I kind of get it. A lot of people crave attention and a lot of the times this need for attention leads people to highlight the negative aspects of their life. I must say, even I'm not immune to craving sympathy every now and then. However, Kanye seemingly has it all. His wife is an American icon, his two kids are so cute, and he's found success in several areas. I know they say money can't buy happiness but I'd still like to try being a sad millionaire. Having said that, I do love my personal space and privacy, so I might just give it to him this time. I guess I can feel some empathy for Kanye, but not too much.  

The music on a lot of these tracks has some seemingly paranoid and sinister sounding riffs. This makes perfect sense when you listen to Monster, where Kanye seriously personifies himself as a fame obsessed monster (song title is a little obvious). Both Jay-Z and Kanye say "everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster." I can't really bring myself to relate to feeling that way but it isn't something uncommon among celebs. Alfred Whitehead explains that the egotistic desire for fame is a substitute or rather a road block for finding peace. Monsters definitely disturb the peace, obviously. Whitehead also stated in his book that, "It is beyond human analysis to detect exactly where the perversion begins to taint the invitation of peace." But if you ask me, it looks like Kanye is pretty sure that his obsession with fame has begun to take over a bit. The other obvious dark-side tracks are All of the Lights and Runaway. All of the Lights sounds glamorous at first but I guess there are things like hookers and drugs. By 'turning on the lights', Kanye wants to show us what life is really like for him. Runaway, the other track that demonstrates the darker side of fame. Runaway is such a depressing song to me, "Run away from me baby, run away as fast as you can." Now that line, just screams self-image issues. I think Emile Haynie (American music producer) said it best, "Combine that with Pusha T's verse and it becomes Greek tragedy rap: it takes the cliched ideas of power, sex, money, and removes all the glamour from them." It's honestly starting to sound like being famous is a trap. However, in case one of you guys were going to nominate me to be the next crazy rich celebrity (or crazy AND rich), I'm still down to give it a try.  
2010 was sort of a hard time for us all. Coming back from the Great Recession that ended the previous year, (2009) left all of us in a weird mood, I think. Kanye published this album after his "self-imposed exile" to Hawaii. A lot of the work on the album was done during his exile and I think that makes a lot of sense. 

If you're anything like me, cracking codes and solving mysteries are fun. I feel like I just performed the greatest psychological evaluation of Kanye West ever. Back to point (the entire point of all of these blog posts), I really miss the old Kanye. In fact, even Kanye misses the old Kanye. Please, don't get me wrong, I still love Kanye but new Kanye doesn't make stuff like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy anymore. I guess no one really knows where or when old Kanye went missing but he's still around when My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy came out back in 2010. Sorry not sorry for getting super nostalgic here. Don't get too sad, we can still enjoy old Kanye. Who knows, he may even decide to make a comeback one of these days... Stranger things have happened before.