The accompanying image of West, snapped by fashion photographer Nick Knight, speaks volumes.

In the lead-up to the deafeningly overhyped debut of Yeezus (2013), his sixth studio album, the New York Times featured him on the cover of its Sunday Arts section (“Behind Kanye’s Mask”) for an interview. Art as Atonementįor all his presumptions of being misunderstood, Kanye West has received more critical adoration over the course of a decade than most artists will find in a lifetime. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon,, and wherever 33 1/3s are sold. least challenging.The following is an excerpt from Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves, out June 19. 'Power' was the least progressive song that I've ever had as a first single. 'So many people rate Dark Fantasy as my best album, but Yeezus and 808s are so much stronger. But he also went on to say that the reflective nature of the album is exactly why he doesn't like the album much today. West himself admitted as much in October of this year: “It was kind of piecing together what people liked about me to make a bouquet of what people loved,” he said in an interview that aired on artist Nick Knight’s ShowStudio website. It’s almost as if West took every sound he had cultivated up until that point-the soul samples of College Dropout, the grand-scale and beautiful orchestration of Late Registration, the gloss of Graduation, and the auto-tuned melodies of 808s, and didn't so much as reduce them but compress them into one vision.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s mouthful of a title perfectly suits the album’s maximalist, grandiose sound.

Kanye west dark fantasy cover art