Rihanna’s hook on “All of the Lights” is every bit as indelible as “Umbrella” or “Love the Way You Lie.” I’ve been decidedly on the fence about the whole Nicki Minaj thing, but she annihilates some pretty esteemed competition on “Monster.” Kid Cudi comes into his own as a hook man on “Gorgeous,” which also features a blistering verse from Raekwon. Jay-Z hasn’t been as dialed-in as he is on “Monster” and “So Appalled” since at least The Black Album. Yeezy’s maniacal perfectionism often brings out the best in his collaborators. Adding a four-minute vocoder solo to the end of “Runaway”? Sure, why not? How about working the guitar riff from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” into “Hell of a Life”? Is that even a question? My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is mainstream hip-hop reimagined as prog rock, and not just because “Power” samples “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Any time Kanye has to make a choice between under- and overdoing something, he always opts for the latter. This cockiness is something you love or hate about the guy, but only a fool would deny that he takes this self-given title seriously on a creative level. As far as he’s concerned, he’s been the best in the game since the release of 2004’s The College Dropout. The fact that he bounced back from all of that with any public goodwill intact, let alone remained the biggest pop star on the planet, tells us all we need to know.Ībout a decade ago, Bono famously said that U2 were applying for the job of greatest rock band in the world Ye would never be so modest. He released an insular, autotune-soaked breakup album that nobody liked except me, upstaged the one person at the VMAs that was guaranteed to make him the most enemies, cancelled a planned tour with Lady Gaga just as she was on the cusp of becoming Madonna 2.0, created the most schizophrenic, self-absorbed Twitter feed in existence, and released a short film to accompany this album’s second single, “Runaway,” that made Axl Rose’s “November Rain” trilogy look restrained. And there’s no doubting that those are his cultural peers now: since 2007’s Graduation made him as big as it’s humanly possible to be in the rap world, Kanye has had the kind of three-year stretch that would kill the career of a lesser artist. It’s not enough that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a masterful synthesis of the best bits of Yeezy’s earlier albums, or that every song packs in twice its length in ideas-Kanye’s pushing creative boundaries like this while operating decidedly on the LeBron/Obama/Michael Jackson level of fame. The problem with this sentiment, though, is that you occasionally have to account for things like Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a frequently astonishing, no-holds-barred tour de force that not only eclipses his previous four albums in scope and creativity (no small feat), but also makes everything else on the radio sound positively amateurish by comparison. However, it’s perfectly reasonable for my generation to feel cheated by the thought that Carole King was the Dr. It’s still a somewhat valid point-it’s not that there isn’t a ton of great music being made today, because that is a ridiculous claim. When I was in high school, my music-nerd friends and I would often gripe to one another that the pop music of today wasn’t anywhere near as innovative as it was three or four decades ago.