My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is released

Why it matters

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy came out November 22, 2010, on Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam. It is Kanye West's fifth solo album. He recorded most of it in Honolulu, where he had relocated for roughly a year after the Taylor Swift VMA incident and the resulting public-persona crisis. The album was made in a kind of obsessive workshop environment with a rotating cast of collaborators (Pusha T, Kid Cudi, Rihanna, RZA, Q-Tip, Bon Iver, Nicki Minaj, Raekwon, Common, Elton John). MBDTF sold 496,000 copies in its first week and has, over the next fifteen years, become the consensus pick for the best rap album of the 2010s. "Power." "All of the Lights." "Monster" with the Nicki Minaj verse that is sometimes called the best guest verse of the decade. "Runaway." "Devil in a New Dress." "Lost in the World." The production is denser and more orchestral than anything Kanye had attempted before. The album won the 2012 Best Rap Album Grammy. It is the album where Kanye consolidated the threads (College Dropout's sample-mining, 808s' confessional Auto-Tune, Graduation's electronic ambition) into a single coherent statement. You should hear it in order. It is structured to be heard that way.