Portrait of an artist as a broken man.

Epithets—quotes that introduce a creative work or piece of writing—are pretty lazy most of the time. It’s the ultimate sign an artist isn’t confident enough in their own words to kick things off themselves, or that a writer wasn’t able to encapsulate their mission well enough to communicate it effectively, so they chose to lean on someone else they thought embodied it better. One of the few exceptions to the rule is Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but then again, this album is the pure definition of exceptional.

Most of the time, when rappers talk about themselves, it’s boring. This album is the exception.

Most of the time, when rappers organize multiple posse tracks, it’s unfocused and insubstantial. This album is the exception.

Most of the time, when rappers pair up with elements of rock, it’s a sonic disaster. This album is the exception.

Most of the time, when rappers try to use their work to shape their public persona and reform their image, they’re hopeless in the face of the internet’s dominant, overpowering ability to assign labels and make them stick. This album is the exception. Kanye West is the exception.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the greatest album of the 2010s. Birthed from a disgraced, scattered, imploding star, it’s a microcosm of all the temptations, pressures, pleasures, and conflicts that come with fame in this decade. It’s also a genre-expanding tentpole of rap music, boundless in soundscape and audacious in ambition. Finally, it’s the definitive word from and about one of the decade’s most troubling and complicated public figures, an encapsulation of everything he was in the past, a timestamp of who he was when the album was made, and a cruel foreshadowing of his disturbing, perhaps inevitable unraveling.

And it all starts with a twisted rendition of a Roald Dahl poem.

Appearing for the first time on the record that would launch her into the upper echelons of the music industry and global fame, rapper Nicki Minaj[1] recites at the top: 

“You might think you've peeped the scene / You haven't; the real one's far too mean
The watered down one, the one you know / Was made up centuries ago
They made it sound all wack and corny / Yes, it's awful—blasted-boring
Twisted fictions, sick addiction / Well, gather 'round, children; zip it; listen”

After the poem, one piano chord. Justin Vernon[2] cries: “Can we get much higher?” It doesn’t seem possible. You’re already off the ground.

A complete dissection of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy would take dozens of chapters[3], but its epithet deserves special attention for its function. This isn’t a summation; it’s a thematic mirror. It’s a hint more than an explainer.

The original Dahl poem comes from Dahl’s book Revolting Rhymes. It’s the introduction for what Dahl calls the real story of Cinderella, deriding “the phony one, the one you know” as a “cooked up” tale made “soft and sappy, just to keep the children happy.” What ensues in Rhymes is a blood-soaked retelling of Cinderella in which the prince is a monster who beheads Cinderella’s entire family[4]. The signal Kanye sends by using a ghetto-ized version of the poem is somewhat straightforward: This album is a fairy tale gone corrupt. Is Kanye the prince, or Cinderella?

The rapper’s Fantasy story begins at its emotional peak: “Can we get much higher?” It’s a cruel bit of self-flagellation. When Kanye West began crafting My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010 (the album came out November 22 of that year), he was as low as any modern celebrity has ever been.

In 2008, Kanye released his most critically polarizing album yet, the moody, fretful, maybe infantile 808s & Heartbreak, an autotune-heavy synthfest centering on the loss of Kanye’s mother. The sentiment and emotion was there; the musical cornucopia West usually delivered wasn’t. The album’s aged well—like most of West’s music, it spawned a legion of stylistic disciples[5]—but it remains a qualitative outlier. 

808s’ tepid reception put West on a self-perceived emotional island (if your album about missing your mom because your most divisive work, how would you feel?). Most likely lonely, bitter, and hurt, West became erratic on social media and outright mean in public, culminating in a where-were-you-when moment at the 2009 Video Music Awards when he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Video of the Year to declare Beyoncé (say it with me!) “had the best video of all time!”[6]

A metaphoric public stoning ensued, fans and media and the industry lashing back against West so universally and mercilessly he began dropping hints he might never make another song. He threw himself instead into the world of fashion[7], with results as popular and trendsetting as they were perplexing, but other than a few slick sneaker drops, West retreated from the public eye. As the decade turned over and the world entered the 2010s, popular culture was beginning to acclimate to a climate without Kanye West. Rick Ross became the Teflon Don. Eminem entered Recovery. Drake said Thank Me Later. Lots of people started liking Arcade Fire. It was a weird moment.

But Kanye hadn’t disappeared without a plan. As the world coped to the sounds of The Black Keys and Vampire Weekend, Kanye was booking every session room at Avex Honolulu Studios in Hawaii for 24 hours straight, seven days a week. He’d have the whole facility to himself, on lockdown, until he was done. He sent invites to the music industry’s greatest performers, artists, producers, and songwriters to join him for his redemption album. The comeback was on.

The stakes were high for Kanye’s fifth studio album; this was his make-or-break moment, either his tragic swan song out of public favor or the thing that would legitimize his former glory. It was serious business. Accordingly, Kanye put a host of rules in place for how his guests were to conduct themselves during the Honolulu recording sessions. In fact, he posted those rules on the wall of the studio, and we know what they are. Here:

1. No tweeting.

2. No pictures.

3. All laptops on mute.

4. No blogging.

5. No negative blog viewing.

6. Don’t tell anyone anything about anything we are doing[8].

7. Total focus on this project in all studios[9].

8. No racking focus while music is being played or music is being made.

9. No hipster hats.

10. No acoustic guitar in the studio[10].

11. Just shut the fuck up sometimes.

Despite the strict trappings, it was still Hawaii. Kanye had his personal chefs make everyone a multi-course breakfast every day (apparently the French toast with banana flambé was a highlight), and after the meal, everyone would go play basketball against the Hawaiian locals. Recording sessions didn’t start until 3:00 in the afternoon, but engineers were apparently kept behind the boards 24/7 (that means someone missed out on the banana French toast every day, which is a bummer to think about).

Reports from Honolulu (limited as they were) indicated Kanye stayed at the studio late into the night, too, hardly ever sleeping at home and often falling asleep in front of his computer. The whole Hawaiian endeavor was bent to his will. All the collaborators were put on his timeline, made to answer to his beck and call, and forced to adhere to his rules of secrecy[11].

At the same time, Kanye wasn’t a dictator. The impression from those on the scene is that Kanye was nothing if not too collaborative, crowdsourcing opinions from everyone who happened to cross his path at Avex Studios, be it earth-shaking producers like RZA and No I.D. or the delivery guy dropping something off at the door. Seriously. Look at what rapper Q-Tip (the late A Tribe Called Quest emcee) said about his experience in Honolulu:

“Every person has a voice and an idea. If the delivery guy comes in the studio and Kanye likes him, he’ll go, ‘Check this out. Tell me what you think.’ By the end of the sessions, you see how he integrates and transforms everyone’s contributions so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What he does is alchemy, really.”

It’s a surprising evaluation from Q-Tip, someone known for his ability to exist within a collective, about Kanye, someone known for his self-sabotaging renegade singularity. Kanye brought so many voices into My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy it’s remarkable the album is as coherent and unmistakably Kanye as it is, even when its tracks look like dogpiles of disparate talent on paper.

On the contrary, Fantasy actually seems to feature everyone at their peak, from Clipse rapper Pusha T (a longtime collaborator with Kanye) to Minaj to Rick Ross to, of course, Kanye himself[12]. During production, stories say Kanye pushed everyone to their creative and technical limit, often in a blunt or shameless way only Kanye could do. A great example: When Pusha T was writing and rapping his guest verse on the album’s centerpiece track “Runaway” (we’ll dive into this one more in a second), Kanye would yell at him from behind the boards, ‘More douchebag! We need more douchebag!’ Push was meant to embody the narrow, selfish man at the heart of the song, but a recent breakup had him feeling too sensitive. Kanye West, the least sensitive artist perhaps in the world, forced him into a darker place. It’s what the song needed.

After four futile tries at the verse, Push went back to his room to regroup. Finally, after some time alone, he wrote the sick, honest, uncomfortable words that lead his guest spot on the track: “24/7/365, pussy stays on my mind.”

The vignettes about Kanye’s time at Avex Honolulu Studios will probably keep surfacing for decades to come[13], in no small part due to the album’s incredible roster of contributors. A partial list: Pusha T, Kid Cudi, RZA, Jay Z, Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Q-Tip, Raekwon, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Fergie, Bon Iver, Elton John, Consequence, No I.D., Swizz Beatz, Charlie Wilson, Chris Rock, and Dwele.

The songwriting credits on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy are even more sprawling and eclectic. Sonically, Fantasy draws from a few classic R&B and hip-hop sources, but more often it pulls from the world of progressive rock, sometimes even further afield than that. There are samples on the album from Yes, the Byrds, Foreigner, and Black Sabbath.

It’s further evidence Kanye—if we set his pure emcee skills aside for the moment—is one of the best producers of all time, drawing from such an encyclopedic and encompassing spectrum of genres and styles he can simultaneously create something both familiar and unexpected, over and over, album after album. His earlier records expanded the sound of hip-hop, but Fantasy cast its aural palette in an entirely new mold. Hip-hop has never had an artist as nerdy about music as Kanye, and this album indulges his most counter-cultural tastes.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was perhaps the most indulgent album, musically speaking, rap had ever seen, but its uncompromising soundscape underscored its themes. The opening corruption of Roald Dahl’s poetry made way for one of hip-hop’s most self-focused albums ever. West had long been one of rap’s scrappiest personalities, but his egotistic persona was always positioned to punch up, be it at the Bush administration or the haters in the industry or those who questioned his legitimacy as a street-savvy emcee. On Fantasy, however, Kanye positions himself above the petty beefs and cheap shots of his 00s run. He’s entered the ruling class. He’s a world eater. He’s the greatest.

But rather than stomp on his inferiors and grind his (designer) shoes into their faces, Kanye’s swagger on Fantasy is tainted by a surprising degree of self-awareness, reflection, and inward condemnation. Ego anthems like “Power” and “Hell of a Life” are checked by honest admissions of corruption, temptation, greed, or depression. On “Power,” the same record where he raps “screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it / I guess every superhero need his theme music,” Kanye spins the outro into a contemplation of suicide. “This will be a beautiful death,” he declares, as background vocalists sing about jumping out a window. Kanye’s final words on what’s now become a hype track: “Do you have the power to let power go?”

Meanwhile, “Hell of a Life” seems on its face to be an erotic, lewd sex brag about a relationship between Kanye and a porn star. On the opening verse, Kanye raps: "We headed to hell for heaven’s sakes, huh / Well I’mma levitate, make the devil wait, yeah!” But as the song goes on, Kanye begins to draw parallels between the woman’s exhibitionism and his life as a celebrity. In the final verse, when Kanye and the porn star appear together in public, he compares the shaming of her work to the shame levied against him as an imperfect musical influencer: “What party is we goin’ to on Oscar day / 'specially if she can’t get that dress from Oscar de La Renta, they wouldn’t rent her, they couldn’t take the shame / Snatched the dress off her back and told her, ‘Get away’”

When Kanye went off the deep end in 2009, was it because his chosen line of work and way of living made that fall a guarantee, or because his public perception forced the outcome? “Hell of a Life” never comes down one way or the other, but Kanye’s singing of the title phrase always sounds more like “lie” than “life.” On an album like Fantasy, that sort of thing is deliberate.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s centerpiece, finally, is the straightforward and unadulterated “Runaway,” an eight-minute submersion into moral resignation and hopelessness that somehow stands as one of the decade’s most poignant personal records and one of its moodiest, most brooding club anthems. If it weren’t for the four-minute autotune-laden instrumental that makes up its back half, the song would almost be radio friendly. As it stands, Kanye shapes it into the perfect backing track for a montage of ironic pain. Lack amid excess. Loneliness in a full arena. Misery as the club blows the roof off.

Kanye was never a perceptive lyricist—his early work had some strong Chappelle Show-quality punchlines but little you’d call emotionally true—but on “Runaway,” his blunt writing is bruising and effective. He makes contact with the listener. It’s like sitting next to him in a confessional.

“I always find something wrong / You’ve been putting up with my shit just way too long
I’m so gifted at finding what I don’t like the most / But I think it’s time for us to have a toast
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
Let’s have a toast for the jerkoffs / That’ll never take work off
Baby I got a plan / Run away as fast as you can”

He’s never been better, because he’s never been more Kanye. Before and since this song, listeners have only had one side of the emcee: the aggressive, claws-out Kanye, the spiteful and vindictive Kanye, the zero-fucks Kanye, the Kanye who couldn’t see through his own delusions of grandeur. Here, maybe the delusion is still intact, but Kanye sees how it damages himself and those around him. “Runaway” isn’t an apology record, but it is an admission of guilt, and the irony of not apologizing for greatness and knowing that greatness hurts people rests on the tightrope that defines this album, and really, Kanye West’s entire career.

Because after Fantasy, Kanye attained the redemption he sought. Critics speculated his path to public grace would involve putting out a masterpiece, and he did. No one forgot about the VMAs or the Twitter rants or the general Kanye bullshit, but Fantasy’s brilliance overshadowed it all, and as a result, the wearisome parts of Kanye were woven in to the tapestry of his celebrity, his personal never-ending battle with the fame machine he loves and resents. Before this album, Kanye’s music was always more fascinating than Kanye the musician, but on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, those things reached the unlikeliest and most precarious of equilibriums.

Considering the parties involved, perhaps we should have anticipated everything that followed Fantasy. Kanye teetered on the summit of his acclaim for a minute, but his reputation began to crack again with his 2012 Fantasy follow-up, Yeezus, an anti-radio, difficult-on-purpose album that frustratingly undercuts every moment of glory with a lyrical or production decision seemingly designed to troll the listener. Yeezus has a focused mission, but it’s torn between being good and being anarchist. The idea that its abrasiveness might be intentional is neither an excuse nor an encouragement about Kanye’s stability.

The Yeezus tour was more telling than the album. Typical of a Kanye show, the Yeezus tour did things with production and stage design that arena tours hadn’t seen before[14]. The whole show was oriented around an enormous, LED-loaded monolith a la 2001: A Space Odyssey. The monolith could open and close and Kanye would enter it and reappear in various costumes, and the LEDs would change and flow and respond to the music[15].

The parts of the Yeezus tour that became the biggest sticking points in Kanye’s legacy were the intermittent rants the rapper would deliver mid-show. Between songs, Kanye would take the microphone and start raving about whatever was bothering him at the time, be it his personal life or the music industry or—heaven forbid—something he deemed wrong with “society.” These speeches gained virality not for their wisdom and poignancy but their sheer lunacy and strangeness. The topics were random, the ties to the show itself almost nonexistent. It was like hearing an unfiltered Twitter thread for 15 to 20 minutes straight.

And behind all these rants, remarkably, was an instrumental that sounded a lot like “Runaway.” Kanye was co-opting his most genuine moment of self-reflection to legitimize his opinions.

The cruel irony of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s thematic triumphs is that for Kanye himself, it seems the album was more an indulgence than a catharsis. For all the album’s honesty and candor, the artist who emerged on its other side was no less volatile and erratic than the man who grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift in 2009. In fact, the massive acclaim heaped upon Fantasy—critical praise across the board, a rare perfect 10 review from Pitchfork[16], multiple #1 finishes on Best of 2010 lists (and Best of the Decade lists)—seemed to give West permission to go off like he had always done. If his music was so forward-thinking and innovative (and it was), it didn’t matter if he kept tweeting in all-caps and scrapping with his haters. If My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a one-of-a-kind marriage between art and artist, Kanye ensured we would never be able to divorce the two. His music was too great to ignore. He was too awful to set apart from it.

The Life of Pablo followed Yeezus in 2016, and though it recaptured some of Fantasy’s sonic highs, it tested how much of Kanye’s id people could tolerate. Sometimes, the rapper’s brags were validated by ecstatic production (try not to feel like a superstar when you hear the Fantastic Freaks shout “Turn me up!” at the top of “Waves”) or gleeful pop-culture targeting (is there a more cackle-worthy claim than Kanye’s opening verse on “Famous:” “For all my southside niggas that know me best / I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous”). Other times, eye-rolling lyrics submarined the tracks. How can you ascend with “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” after Kanye says, “Now if I fuck this model / And she just bleached her asshole / And I get bleach on my t-shirt / I’ma feel like an asshole”? Pablo soars at times, but it clangs with dissonance. It’s a frustrating experience, and unlike Yeezus, that’s not on purpose.

Pablo’s presentation is even more indicative of Kanye’s lack of restraint. After its initial release, Kanye kept updating Pablo with new music, at the same time taking songs away and changing existing tracks. Retroactively, he called the album a “living breathing changing creative expression,” but despite the interesting implications for digital music at work, it was annoying to have your preferred version of “Wolves” changed overnight or only have access to “Saint Pablo” for a few days before West snatched it back. From a consumer standpoint, The Life of Pablo was confusing and destabilizing. It seemed clear Kanye had no clue what he wanted it to say or do or be, and while some music critics called its evolving nature “genius,” at a basic level it was burdensome. You’d almost call it an unconfident work, but then again, this is Kanye.

As we left Fantasy further and further behind, we began to give Kanye less and less benefit of the doubt. His unflinching support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election saw him fall out of favor in the eyes of left-leaning culture critics, and works like Yeezus and Pablo—previously described with dubious phrases like “intentionally messy” and “controversy-courting”—began to seem more and more indicative of a fraying creative mind. Some said Kanye needed therapy. Others said he needed rehab. Others said he needed a slap. The pre-Fantasy spiral repeated itself, perhaps in a more toxic form, and the greatest irony is that Fantasy predicted this exact spiral would happen. The fame machine ground Kanye down again. Kanye had killed Kanye again.

The rapper’s 2018 album Ye sounded like a spiteful whimper. It was confirmation of Kanye’s desperation and aloofness toward the culture around him. For a man who has insisted over and over that Bill Cosby is “innocent” of rape, it’s not a good look to make #MeToo jokes. For a man who exhausts everyone across the political spectrum, it’s not the time to issue taunts about your MAGA hat. Ye was as half-assed as its title and as provocative as any Kanye album before it, except its specific provocations were nothing we hadn’t heard before, nothing insightful into Kanye himself, and because of that, totally boring. Ye is the first Kanye album to vanish into the cultural ether. Can you even name a song on it?

We could talk about the recent Jesus Is King and how it refracts Kanye’s narcissism through the corrupt twistings of the prosperity gospel, but honestly, it’s too lame of an album to justify such an exhausting exercise. It feels like a footnote. We won’t even give it that.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy ends with a second poem. It’s an abridged version of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1,” a thematic bow to tie Roald Dahl’s ribbon from the top.

“Us living as we do upside-down / And the new word to have is revolution
People don't even want to hear the preacher spill or spiel / Because God's whole card has been thoroughly piqued
And America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey”

As Kanye is wont to do, he applies his personal experience to broad societal trends. If a man with his story could achieve massive acclaim and success by any worldly standard, but still feel this broken and fragmented and discontent and wanting, how can anyone believe in America? Where can we turn—the church, our families, our ancestors—that hasn’t been touched by the corrupt systems that brought Kanye down? The poem doesn’t have an answer; the album might not, either.

Fantasy is inconclusive, yet all-encompassing. Kanye West is no one on it except Kanye West, yet that raises a mountain of paradoxes. Kanye can speak only for himself and yet tries to speak for everyone. Fantasy can draw from genres as diverse as soul, progressive rock, and gospel, yet sound like nothing in the history of music. We can love this album but hate Kanye. We can love this album because we hate Kanye. Fantasy can cement Kanye’s legacy as one of the greatest artists in the history of hip-hop, and yet it can be the same work that dooms him to an ever-controversial existence.

“Who will survive in America?” asks the final line of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Staring at the colossal wreck of Kanye West in the 2010s, we still don’t know. He is terrible. He is great. He changed music. He destroyed himself. This album presented the illusion of America’s biggest celebrity taking control of himself and taking control of his story, but at some point after the fact, America took control back. Maybe it always does.

[1]  Minaj’s debut album Pink Print released the same day as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Pink Print was well-received, but nothing on it rivaled Minaj’s incinerating guest verse on Fantasy’s “Monster.” That verse earned Minaj enough street cred to make her a rap staple and a pop superstar, but it also seemed to curse her career. Minaj flexed so many talents in that handful of bars—character work, tonal shifts, intricate rhyme schemes, vicious punchlines—she raised the expectations for all her solo stuff. She hasn’t met them. “Monster” is her albatross.

[2] Vernon’s the Bon Iver frontman. The guest roster on Fantasy is absolutely insane. More on this later.

[3] A great one’s been done already, too. Check out the podcast Dissect from Cole Cuchna. He devotes a 40-minute episode to each of Fantasy’s tracks, with additional episodes offering thesis statements, concluding statements, and bonus content on the album as a whole. Cuchna maybe gives Kanye too much credit as a rapper (Kanye’s ability as an emcee is probably his weakest skill as a musician), but he gives Fantasy the thorough coverage it deserves, certainly more than we can offer in this single chapter.

[4] Roald Dahl was the best.

[5] Most critically, 808s was the coming-out party for Kanye understudy Kid Cudi, who brought the album’s feelings-forward subject matter and hazy-afterparty vibe into the mainstream. 808s also granted Drake his first big-time guest verse. Drake was in his feelings as much as anyone on 808s, but he’d go on to a more fusion-centric, pop-driven sound. Today, he’s at the center of rap’s popular appeal.

[6] She didn’t. But in fairness to West, the race was close. T-Swift’s “You Belong With Me” video was Peak Swift. It featured her in a hilarious (and oddly revealing) dual role as a geeky girl and her cheerleader nemesis, and the song itself was the perfect blend of Swift’s songwriting talents and country-pop sound. Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video had an iconic style and dance, but c’mon, it has maybe three lyrics.

[7] Though Kanye’s Yeezy sneaker line has huge legitimacy, his most ubiquitous moment in fashion is probably when he released a plain white t-shirt for $120. Naturally, it sold out.

[8] Geez alright already.

[9] It’s not the case, but I like to imagine this one came about because some scrub producer was like, “Yo I know Kanye’s rented this space out, but like, lemme do a little side hustle while I’m here.” And then Kanye caught him screwing around with, like, a J. Cole track or something.

[10] This one appears to be redundant with “no hipster hats.”

[11] Except, as the stories go, Kid Cudi, who apparently would smoke so much at night he’d always miss breakfast and basketball because he was sleeping so late.

[12] The one exception to this “everybody at their peak” rule, infamously but also bafflingly, is Jay Z, whose “Monster” verse is probably the silliest, dumbest, corniest thing Hov has ever done. While that same record features Peak Rick Ross—never more braggadocious, never more powerful, never more massive despite having just four lines (“As you run through my jungles all you hear is rumbles”)—and Peak Minaj, Jay Z comes off wheezy and old. Fantasy bursts with youthful wisdom and authority, but Jay’s gaspy recitation of “Sasquatch, Godzilla, King Kong, Loch Ness / Goblin, ghoul, a zombie with no conscience / Question: What do these things all have in common? / Everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster” is downright octogenarian.

[13] One last quick one: When Minaj arrived in Hawaii, she found Kanye on his laptop in the studio. Kanye was calling out instructions, corrections, tweaks, and concerns about the music from his chair, but he was never taking his eyes off the computer. After about an hour, Minaj went over and peeked at Kanye’s screen. He was watching porn. Just sitting there watching porn, flicking back and forth between pictures of naked women, giving notes on one of the best hip hop albums ever made. Kanye sucks so much.

[14] Another area of innovation for Kanye is live performance. Yeezus was a huge leap forward for live music in terms of how an artist could blend production design and music to create something much greater than “play the album live,” but the tour for his 2016 album The Life of Pablo actively reinvented the concept of a stage. On that tour, Kanye stood on a platform above the audience, with lights shining down on the crowd. The setup reversed the whole conception of who’s there for whom. It’s neat, and no one else has replicated it.

[15] Hard to say if the symbolism here—a crowd of intoxicated fans going wild before a futuristic structure erected and controlled by a man comparing himself to God—ever landed with concertgoers.

[16] This is uncommon enough to mention, but all the same, Pitchfork is so pretentious you almost regret the inclusion anyway.