My introduction to this album’s material was watching Kanye West perform “Runaway” on the MTV Music Awards. After a year of embarrassing outbursts, interviews, tweets and an involuntary cameo on South Park, calling himself a “douchebag” felt like too little and too late. It also felt appropriately tasteless. Hearing the word “douchebags” sung, no matter how deserving its target, no matter how pretty the accompanying melody, for any reason other than comedy just felt…silly. Watching that on TV, I really thought I was witnessing Kanye nuke the fridge. But then: a pair of revelations. The first was this album, which, for all its bombast, is nearly a masterpiece. The second was my realization that his personal life – even his frighteningly narcissistic insistence on living the majority of it in public – is kind of irrelevant to the art he’s creating. I don’t want to make a virtue out of vice, but he seems capable of an alchemy that turns shit into gold. After all, reasonable people can agree on all the available facts and still disagree on the conclusions one could reach from them. Is Kanye obnoxious? Garish? Self-involved? Arrogant? Yes. Is he also charismatic? Ambitious? Self-critical? Talented? Yes. As he rightly dares us on “Gorgeous,” “act like [he] ain’t had a belt in two classes.” In 1994, major league baseball went on strike. I was 15. Turned off by what seemed to me then to be the greed of players and owners alike, I stopped watching. I even stopped playing, so great was my disgust. But, after reaching adulthood, I came back to the sport, acknowledging that the game itself was better than the men who played it. So it is with Kanye. Grade: A-
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