Many balked and laughed when Kanye West said, “I’m a creative genius and there’s no other way to word it,” on Jimmy Kimmel in 2013, but on 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy he walks with a swagger that backs up the talk. Released alongside the short film Runaway, featuring music from the album, it’s clear that West set out to showcase the full breadth of his talent with this record, excelling across the board with lavish production and lyrics musing on the manic highs and sobering lows of fame and excess. No two tracks sound the same, but they’re all tied together by a distinctly darker sound that emerges through their production, from the echoing chants on “Power” to the furious drums on “All Of The Lights”. Enlisting the industry’s finest for features – Jay-Z, RZA, Raekwon, Rick Ross, Rihanna and Nicki Minaj, to name a few – West crafted a modern masterpiece that rewrote the hip-hop rule book and confirmed that, actually, he probably is a creative genius after all.
Good Kid, m.A.A.d City by Kendrick Lamar (2012)
The snubbing of Kendrick Lamar’s sophomore studio album, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, at the Grammys in 2013 is one of the ceremony’s greatest injustices: to make matters worse, it lost out to Macklemore’s maudlin The Heist, which no one has listened to since. M.A.A.D City, on the other hand, is still considered one of the greatest records — nay, artistic achievements — of the current century. Billed on its cover as a “short film,” the richly constructed concept album recalls the story of Lamar’s adolescent coming-of-age in Compton, California. Punctuated by narrative-weaving voicemails from his friends and parents, Lamar navigates love, lust, gang violence, and peer pressure on the streets. “Swimming Pools” became something of an ironic house party hit; the features from Drake (“Poetic Justice”), Jay Rock (“Money Trees”) and MC Eiht (“M.A.A.D. City”) rank among their greatest. At the tail-end of “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” Maya Angelou baptises Kendrick and his friends anew in a frisson-inducing moment of inspiration: the rest of the artist’s life, demarcated.
Yeezus by Ye (2013)
