finally got found to listening to it a few times and i'm completely addicted to all of the lights. it was my favourite part of the runaway video with the kid running with the red flare and rihannas vocals are amazing as ever!

The biggest disappointment with the album is how it has been ignored commercially because of Taylor Swift. Here's hoping All of The Lights gives the album a boost because it really deserves commerical recognition as well as critics' recognition.

it sold hella bank in the US? #1, 500k in the first week...

 

is it not selling the UK?

No, it didn't make the top 10 and is now barely top 75 after just three weeks. 'Runaway' didn't make the top 40, no idea about Power.

power made no39 in september.is the albbum worth a lsiten?

EDIT: Just seen it made #39 not #36...

 

I don't think it really matters though, like Ben says, it has done well in the US and that's surely his main market.

808s didn't make top 10 here either.

 

Steve, the album is definitely worth checking it, by far the best album of the year for me. Seriously incredible.

Edited December 13, 201014 yr by Cremey

yeah plus no promotion whatsoever didn't help :(

 

same with nicki, if only she'd promote she'd be on fire here

 

and i'm suprised she hasn't already with that whole british accent thing going on and all the uk/london references in her songs

Edited December 13, 201014 yr by JakeWild

No, it didn't make the top 10 and is now barely top 75 after just three weeks. 'Runaway' didn't make the top 40, no idea about Power.

Insanity.

 

:(

Album of the Year for Pitchfork, MTV, Rolling Stone, Billboard....

Runaway #2 and Power #6 on the Pitchfork song of the year chart too.

Pity Runaway wasn't one spot higher on that list, but all the critical acclaim is so well deserved :)

it sold hella bank in the US? #1, 500k in the first week...

 

is it not selling the UK?

 

Yeah I meant in the UK, as he has been completely ignored, which is a shame as this album is his best and most consistent. Knew it was doing well in the US, but did not know it was doing as well as that! I guess he hasn't come over and promoted it, but he has been totally ignored really over her. BUT All of The Lights just sounds like something the UK will lap up COMPLETELY, especially with how massive Rihanna is over here at the moment.

pitchfork and cokemachineglow's #1 album of the year. cmg posted an excellent recap:

 

Uh-oh, yup, Kanye did it. He’s won. Sorry, guys, but let’s be honest, that $h!t wasn’t even close. CMG had probably three or four staffers that were like “record’s overrated” and then it won by a bajillion and six points. Yeezy smashed it. In a year where there were so many records to love, to obsess over—in a year where Big Boi finally dropped his and it did right by him, where Frog Eyes shuddered out their most complete of manifestos, where Flying Lotus tripped balls and created his Yorke-step album, where Women were all scuzz everything with a perfect chaser, and Das Racist made us laugh whilst spraining our necks head-nodding, and Emeralds did some of the best $h!t with a couple synthesizers and guitar in f***ing Cleveland, all of that, building and building…and then Kanye drops a record with a stoopid title (what about Ye Actually? Ye’s Tome: A Triumph?) that arcs up and over and beyond, rocketing heavenward on the power of music so pure it gives me pause. Pause.

 

Kanye was dead to me. 808s and Heartbreak (2008) was sterile, a kid goofing in a futuristic toybox instead of getting grimy in the sand he came from. How was he honestly supposed to confront the issues he claimed to when he couldn’t even see them behind his Autotune gimmicks and shutter shades? His art its own barrier, Ye embarked on a quest to up the ante on every last WTF, to destroy his very self and leave only a black sheep Kanye, an “immaletyoufinish” Kanye, a Kanye made not of flesh and blood but of booze and inscrupulous Tweets. The culmination of the ruin was seeing him sink to new inner lows in that Spike Jonze short, like his body turned to oil for his heart to slowly plop down through layers of black ooze, finally hitting a decrepit bathroom floor somewhere in David Lynch’s worst American nightmare. I had to avert my eyes. I swore off writing about him. I swore off caring about him. And, I swear, if oaths weren’t made to be broken under duress of a greater power. Kanye West loved himself and now he loves music more; that’s a love that saves. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy resurrects our expectations for him, for hip-hop, for music in general. A vocal arrangement warbles to life on “Dark Fantasy” and then shoots shafts of light down through the clouds, staccato bursts of a genius melody like calm gusts and cool rain on a heated, scarred face. Beat on the verses, my God, co-produced by the RZA. Kanye conducts his string players to imitate the filthy two-chord whine of classic Wu-Tang, the piano and drums bouncing, and he integrates that seamlessly into a clarion statement that splits the difference between Derulo and Debussy. Kanye West loves music. Only someone who loves music with every fiber of their being could put every fiber of every music they’ve ever loved into the music they make and have it make such ineffable sense. These six-minute bangers are haikus. Kanye West loved music better than any other artist this year and I loved his music better, too.

 

To qualify I point at every track on this record, and if you push me I’ll point to a dozen R&B and pop stars melting into the mortar of a tower, horns clambering over each other to the invisible top—“All of the Lights,” real talk, and the stars are melting because MBDTF gives them place in a celestial choir. It assures them that it is bigger than they are, than even Kanye is, and they believe. “All of the Lights” is five minutes of undulating pop where we hear a mainstream diaspora coming together to help birth Album-mythos and still finding room for constant production shifts and switches and song moments that you can call favorites and never forget, like the glimpse of Kanye headed home with his voice tripping into giddy singing before getting harshed by what he finds. This, then, immediately followed by Kanye’s “Monster” posse cut where Primo-esque boom-bap circa Gangstarr or Jeru the Damaja meets vintage Timbaland (try not to hear the cadences of Missy’s “Work It” in the hook) but with that synergy in the only track without a credited sample, as if after all the reverent lifts Kanye returns the favor with his own raw source contribution to the hallowed canon. In it Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj, and Bon Iver (what) all jam, Minaj going off like Pharoahe Monch. Kanye West loves the music I love and his music possesses its communicants, wholly. Himself, included. Pinch yourself halfway through the orchestral El-P transmission that is “So Appalled” with all its invoked ciphers to make sure you’re awake, because Ye sure isn’t. Dude’s unconscious.

 

And so the record title begins to seem somewhat apt: Kanye’s Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is ported directly from his brain to our ear drums, without the hindrance or halting or insufficiency of speaking. I don’t know why Rawse has to dump on the unfiltered golden haze of Kanye’s spiritual sex-dream “Devil in a New Dress,” but in a way this record’s imperfections add interest and extra crackle to a texture that’s already buzzing at a million watts and imbued with infinite detail. This record’s engine is Unreal. And within the vastness of sprawling compositions linked together in one complete, cohesive work by an oneiric logic that has the absolute swag of straight science, Kanye finds himself.

 

It happens in all kinds of art, of course. Near the end of his life Philip K. Dick started writing novels that mixed autobiography with science fiction with philosophical treatise as a way of showing what happens when a fiercely imaginative but broken and addiction-addled artist encounters what PKD called Hagia Sophia, “Holy Wisdom.” The artists reels and reels and then goes on creating within the language he’s fashioned for himself but using that language to translate for a new tongue. For PKD that meant some of the best and most profound novels of his career, novels like VALIS and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. For Kanye it means MBDTF. Even if some of this record’s wisdom comes by way of collaboration (Dick would probably argue that the external is the basic source of human wisdom, anyways): Rhymefest has writing credits, there’s the aforementioned impact of Gil Scott-Heron’s words in the record’s epilogue, the fact that Pusha T’s surreal “invisibly set, the Rolex is faceless” on “Runaway” is the line of this young decade, cracking asunder its lush surroundings like some bolt of divine inspiration. But every other line here is an inspired blow. “Gorgeous,” for instance, is W.E.B. Du Bois-relentless in dropping knowledge, evidenced as much by Kanye’s torrential rapping as by the mere presence of Raekwon. So MBDTF sets up shop in the unique pink glow of revelation: VALIS talk.

 

And Kanye now sees, for the first time, the true returns of his mirror. On “Runaway” he warns a lover to flee. On “Power” he claims title to “the abomination of Obama’s nation.” On “Blame Game” Chris Rock may be talking horribly funny game in complimenting the way Yeezy taught his girl to re-upholster her p*ssy but the key is that the p*ssy’s no longer with Yeezy, it’s with Chris Rock. And in the sublime climax that is “Lost in the World” Kanye starts first by humbly showing how white-boy Bon Iver used Autotune better than Ye ever could and then goes on to show just how much he feels it when Vernon sings “I’m up in the woods / I’m down on my mind / I’m building a still / to slow down the time.” And then Ye takes that music and glorifies it, raising it higher, “Soul Makossa” interpolation hitting like a crack propellant. This record is Kanye’s “A Day in the Life” moment, his ambition and self-expression catalyzing and crystallizing together in connected unison, but Kanye—cultural siphon that he is—knows enough to ask, “What’s a black Beatle, anyway? A f***ing roach?”

 

The doubters on CMG staff question how much of this album’s strength is dependent on what we know of Kanye versus how much is intrinsic. To which I can only respond: does it matter? Kanye West loves the living $h!t out of music, and if you can’t hear that in every meticulously arranged note and gleefully tossed-in guest appearance (even in a misplaced Rick Ross), then you will never hear it. But that’s all I hear, and when MBDTF pushes me to look at Kanye, it warms my tired heart to see an actual, real Kanye stumbling his way back to wholeness. The album documenting that journey does so with the art of music, and the art of rap, and the art of earnest confession, and never less than art. Kanye knows that we, the audience, we see and we hear. He knows it and he works it in a way that only he—with all his infamy and talent—could do. By the time Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1” runs its course and “Who Will Survive in America?” asks its titular question again and again, we are given that moment that sometimes happens in art where a final, settling realization enters and brings with it numerous truths, in this case amongst them: Yeezy sees us, he sees our recession, he sees just our general struggle to live, he acknowledges that while some may put up a good front and others may “fake-ass party” their breath away, all of us are barely scraping by inside in more ways than one, and Yeezy is no different. So Kanye’s tribulations and innumerable influences have finally achieved that balanced mixture that makes them powerful, combustible, phoenix fuel. Look to the sky, Ye’s on fire. And then just listen to his Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; in the rumbling wake of Ye’s living flame he has left us, at last, a true classic.

Most of the way through this and I think he's gonna get my album of the year again! (808s was my 2008 album of the year)

video will probably be taken down soon but here's the monster video. absolutely love nicki's part! though kanye's teeth.. :unsure:

 

The video isn't as good as that preview made out; I thought it'd be trippier. Still, pretty good though. Monster is the best track on the album, can't get enough of it at the moment.

Incredible. :wub:

Wow :o

Kanye is one of the few rappers, if not the only, who would even try to make a video like this. Nicki is incredible!

Brilliant!

Nicki's part is the best in the song & video. :heart:

AMAZING.

not the official video. there are istock clips in it and obviously tons of editing to do. it could be promising but i have a feeling it'll disappoint. nicki steals it agian obvzzz.

I'd thought the iStock was on purpose actually...