The leak of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is essentially a non-event, since all but two of the album's tracks have already circulated widely in some form (you may be shocked to learn which two tracks are the album's worst!). The main things that are new about the finalized retail product are the tweaks Kanye saw fit to bestow upon his work before unleashing it to the world - and what tweaks they are!
As it turns out, Kanye didn't just pull a "Power" sample from King Crimson - he also jacked their prog-rock spirit of endless overblown ornamentation/wankery. The comically-overadjectivized title is just the start - there are 11 guests on "All of the Lights" (of which the contributions of half are discernible), the otherwise somber confessional rap "Blame Game" includes a capital-W wacky two-minute Chris Rock monologue, and the album version of "Runaway" now includes an outro where Kanye moans unintelligibly into a vocoder for three minutes.
Kanye is hardly a stranger to self-indulgence, as his still-confusing fling with AutoTune illustrated. But the reason that 808's and Heartbreak was, quite improbably, kind of a good album had to do with the exacting rigor he brought to his fundamentally wackadoo idea of becoming a singer - limiting his sonic pallette to an 808, a synth keyboard, and some tribal drums went a long way towards undercutting the album's general insanity. Artistic constraints led, as they often do, to better art (see also: Kanye's brilliant SNL performance last month, which fit music video vision into minimal square footage).
The line going around right now, the germ of which came from the typically bland and lazy Rolling Stone review, is that the Looney Tunes excess and ambition solely for ambition's sake that dominates this album was inevitable from Kanye - that he couldn't have made the album any other way. Which is true in a sense, except that, by pre-releasing these songs, he kind of already did. At the risk of over-analyzing the psychology of someone I do not know, I'd say that Kanye, tentative after a year of public shaming, humbly sought approval with his leaks. Getting it then emboldened him enough to smother said songs with an excess of ridiculous trappings.
Don't get me wrong - grandiose absurdities aside, these are mostly great songs! "Lost in the World" in particular is one of the best things West has ever been involved with, from the inspired flip of Bon Iver to those oh-so-hard snares and the oh-so-harder tribal drum breakdown; "All of the Lights" is as well done as stadium rap gets; Nicki Minaj's verse on "Monster" is still inexplicably jaw-dropping. It's just interesting to see how these songs compare (unfavorably) to their previous incarnations* or to Kanye's "G.O.O.D. Friday" series, all of which were of course conceived and recorded in the space of a week.
Massively talented beat-maker that he is, Kanye managed to create songs in a week (specifically the "Power" remix, "Monster", "Good Friday", "The Joy", "Looking for Trouble", and the "Runaway Love" remix**) that are as good as anything he's done, songs that benefited greatly by being taken out of his hands immediately. There's even a pretty strong argument to be made that the collected series is stronger than the proper album. If I had to guess (and here I go again), I'd say that the constant tinkering seems like a function of low self-confidence more than any kind of perfectionism. How many times do you have to go platinum before you have enough confidence in your beats to leave them alone?
Kanye West - The Joy (feat. Jay-Z, Kid Cudi, prod. by Pete Rock)
*The most egregious example may be when Kanye adds a lounged-up cheesy-guitar-driven section to the rest of the hallucinatory "Devil in a New Dress", just so Rick Ross can spit a characteristically tone-deaf verse completely out of line with Kanye's own heart-on-sleeve sentiments. Furthermore, when has the addition of Rick Ross ever improved anything?
**Yeah, I know, Justin Bieber. But listen to it! It's Kanye fanboy-ing hard on Wu-Tang lore with the Bieber sample as a completely inexplicable hook - an odd attempt to troll preteen girls?
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