Put Your Hands To The Constellations

Kanye West with Rick Ross “Devil in a New Dress”

Have you heard about this new Kanye West album? It’s pretty good!

The majority of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is just outside of Kanye West’s comfort zone as a producer. He’s pushing for something grand, something that we all immediately understand to be ambitious and exciting. Despite all that, I think the most musically interesting and emotionally stirring track on the record is “Devil in a New Dress,” a song that’s something of a throwback to the style the “chipmunk soul”/recombinant funk style that put him on the cultural map at the start of the last decade. “Devil” expands a brief moment of gorgeous raw emotion from Smokey Robinson’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” into a sustained meditation on conflicted affection, speeding up the sample but stretching its feeling out over nearly six minutes. It stays in the same space for all that time, but the construction of the track is very subtle and sophisticated, with gentle shifts in dynamics and additional instrumentation that lends the piece a bit of glitter in the piano and a touch of grime in the guitar. The bass is what really gets to me. The melody line is a flourish lifted directly from the Robinson tune, but in this context, it’s the sweet, creamy core of the composition. West and Rick Ross come off as cold and vain in their verses, but that bass line counters their words, indicating all the warmth and humanity that they’re holding back in their rhymes.

Buy it from Amazon.