Kanye West is usually his own biggest fan, and he rarely has anything but superlatives to say about any project he’s been involved in. However, at his core, Ye is a contrarian who goes against the popular consensus on almost everything.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is regularly regarded as West at the peak of his powers, and he reached a height that he’s never been able to touch again. It was released off the back of a series of controversies, most notably the fiasco with Taylor Swift at the MTV Awards.
The preceding album, 808s & Heartbreak, was also met with a mixed reception, and Ye responded to his critics in the most stylish way imaginable to man. Anybody who had decided to write him off were forced to eat their words, and West used their criticism as the ammunition which fired him to the moon.
“All these people say Dark Fantasy was this album that was so good, and then people didn’t like 808s, they didn’t like Yeezus,” West explained to GQ in 2020. “[My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy], I just made it to that level because people were saying my career was going to be over.”
Despite West admitting that the album is arguably his magnum opus, he unexpectedly expressed regrets about his choice of lead single. Ye opted to release ‘Power’, which is now viewed as one of the rapper’s definitive tracks and a perfect way to introduce this new chapter of his career, but he believes it’s “weak”.
West continued, “I always felt like ‘Power’ was my weakest first single that I ever had, because I felt like it was bowing to the expectations. You had actually heard ‘Power’ before,” he continued. “You heard ‘Amazing.’ You heard that song before! It’s just a mix of things.”
After all the talk that surrounded him, West burst out of the traps with answers to the questions that everybody had on their lips, and going down the obvious route is why he is disappointed in the track.
Ye has made a career out of doing the unexpected, but back in 2010, releasing a defiant anthem like ‘Power’ was the only foreseeable path out of the abyss, and putting himself back on the right track.
