Credit: Alamy

Following his infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West decided to disappear from the limelight for a spell. He started work on a new album, but this was not to be an ordinary production process. These sessions would impose some strict rules upon all involved.

This album became My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Ye’s fifth and widely considered to be his best. Most of the recording sessions took place in Hawaii, with additional work taking place in California and New York, and, by all accounts, the process of putting it together was an extremely intense one.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is believed to have been one of the most expensive albums ever made, with Def Jam pumping roughly $3million into its production. That’s a wild amount of money, especially for back then, but it clearly didn’t go to waste. Kanye used it to assemble a dream team of collaborators that included producers and musicians such as Q-Tip, RZA, Pete Rock, Madlib, DJ Premier, Kid Cudi, Elton John, Rick Ross and Pusha T, among many others. 

Everyone who joined Ye in Hawaii for these sessions was subject to a unique work environment. Kanye himself operated on a 24-hour schedule, not sleeping through the night and instead taking a sequence of power naps throughout the day. The engineers, who needed to facilitate Ye’s own schedule, did the same. To fuel this intense process, breakfast was a significant affair, with multiple courses being served in the morning.

It wasn’t all work and no play, and those involved in the album did get some space to unwind as they needed to. Games of 21 were apparently a big thing for the crew, while Kid Cudi, for one, smoked weed and worked out and RZA used the weight room. But, when people were working, they had to play by a very specific set of rules.

These rules, 12 of them, were literally printed out and stuck to the wall of the studio. Pusha T has spoken about this, offering Vulture with some insight as to what it was like. “Once we hit the studio,” he said, “it was just all focus on the music. All focus was 100% on the music.”

Push elaborated on these pieces of paper bearing Kanye’s 12 commandments. “There were rules: no twittering, no emailing, no blog-watching—no stupid questions,” he recalled. “All of this stuff is posted all over the walls. A wall of questions, for inspiration. ‘What would Mobb Deep do?’ All types of stuff.”

Pusha T isn’t the only one to have spoken publicly about the set of rules everybody involved in the album was expected to adhere to. In his memoir, Hurricanes, Rick Ross wrote about the process, too, recalling the moment when he realised that this wasn’t going to be like any other recording experience he’d ever had.

“I started to gather that this wasn’t going to be my typical guest verse,” he recalled. “The first thing I noticed were all these signs Kanye had put up on the walls… I wasn’t sure what ‘tweeting’ was, but I did know that something different was taking place here.”

The rules may have been a lot, and they contributed to a certain sort of intense atmosphere during the recording session, but it’s fair to say, they worked. The album was a huge success, both critically and commercially, and it marked one of Ye’s greatest ever musical achievements.  

Kanye’s 12 rules during the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sessions

1. No tweeting
2. No hipster hats
3. All laptops on mute
4. Just shut the fuck up sometimes
5. No blogging
6. No tweeting please thank you (again)
7. No negative blog viewing
8. Don’t tell anyone anything about anything we are doing!
9. No racking focus when music is being played or music is being made
10. Total focus on this project in all studios
11. No acoustic guitar in the studio
12. No pictures