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Keep in mind that I’m no expert on intox­i­ca­tion (hello, fam­ily mem­bers and/or poten­tial employ­ers!), but bear with me, any­way, because this is the best angle I have to express how I feel about Kanye West’s crit­i­cally acclaimed My Beau­ti­ful Dark Twisted Fan­tasy. With regard to intox­i­ca­tion, I believe there is usu­ally some time between the high and the hang­over, where one’s under­stand­ing between the for­mer and the lat­ter is both grad­ual — over the period of a night’s sleep — and sud­den. Which is to say that the hang­over is usu­ally real­ized apart from the party. I believe it to be pos­si­ble, though, to go at it in such a way that the high becomes the hang­over before one has the oppor­tu­nity to set down one’s drink, let alone lay down one’s body. In those cases, the prior hours might have been the most fun one ever had, and the fol­low­ing 48 might be the most unpleas­ant, but, for some unde­fin­able period of time, there’s an ambiva­lence of these extremes, two rag­ing waves toss­ing a ship back and forth. It’s in this state of exis­tence that I com­pre­hend MBDTF.

Whether MBDTF is well exe­cuted isn’t much of an argu­ment, or at least I haven’t seen any sug­ges­tion that it’s not well exe­cuted, and I won’t be mak­ing that case, either. Maybe it’s the best exe­cuted hip-hop album of all time (although I’d go to bat for either Ill­matic or 36 Cham­bers any day). But, pop­u­lar music is not about exe­cu­tion, and it never has been. This is not to say that MBDTF lacks style, energy, emo­tion, or any­thing like that. Instead, reflect­ing on MBDTF is like reflect­ing on last night from within the hang­over. The only thing miss­ing was restraint.

I think there’s an iden­ti­fi­able moment that marks the onset of hang­over, that one-drink-too-many. That would be the outro to track 11, “Blame Game,” fea­tur­ing Chris Rock and some robotic, vapid sound­ing female voice. Mr. Rock engages the female in post-coital flat­tery, punc­tu­at­ing his awe with corny, weird ques­tions, the answer to each being, “Yeezy taught me.” All of it makes me feel a lit­tle dizzy until Mr. Rock asks, “Who the f*** got your p**** all reuphol­stered?” The female voice responds, “Yeezy reuphol­stered my p****.” That’s when I taste vomit in the back of my throat. In drink­ing terms, that’s the shot that goes beyond unnec­es­sary to self-destructive. In music terms, that two and a half min­utes crosses the line from overly-indulgent to bloated. That’s to say noth­ing of the offen­sive­ness involved.

I will say some­thing of the offen­sive­ness involved, though. I’m a fairly avid hip-hop fan, and I have been for most of my life. I’m also a man with fem­i­nist val­ues, and I do my best to reject misog­yny. As such, I’ve had to deal with the real­ity of misog­yny in hip-hop. For that mat­ter, I have to deal with the real­ity of misog­yny in the Bible, in the Church, in the United States, in my cir­cles, and so on. Nev­er­the­less, “Yeezy taught me” (and, espe­cially, “reuphol­stered”) both­ers me more than any misog­y­nis­tic state­ment I’ve ever heard in rap. It both­ers me even more than much more explic­itly woman-hating lines, such as fea­tured on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. I’m not sure I can really say why, and maybe it’s just an unfair dou­ble stan­dard. If it is a dou­ble stan­dard, though, it’s not arbi­trary. Snoop Dogg was 20 when The Chronic was recorded, and Dr. Dre 27, and the album attempted to por­tray life in the ghet­toes of Comp­ton and Long Beach. On the other hand, Kanye West and Chris Rock are 33 and 45, respec­tively, and the prob­lems of “Blame Game” are not sub­ject to socio-economic class, nor is the bulk of the con­tent in either participant’s career. Frankly, there is no liberal-academic-style maneu­ver­ing to be done with regard to “Yeezy taught me.” That por­trayal — and the whole song, for that mat­ter — is misog­yny, woman-hating, vio­lence, pure objec­ti­fi­ca­tion with no unjust con­text as a point of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. Bad enough that it’s there at all, but Mr. West wal­lows in it to the point of excess.

With that said, it’s the excess, more than the misog­yny or any other theme, that turns me off of the album. I remem­ber when Mr. West tweeted about the video for “Power” not being a video but a “mov­ing Paint­ing.” I chuck­led at the pre­ten­tious­ness of the dis­tinc­tion, but the video was beau­ti­ful, and, what’s more, I loved the song. At the time, the song was only about a minute long. The album ver­sion is nearly five min­utes, and while it’s not bad, there was some­thing really strik­ing about the brevity of that early ver­sion (in fair­ness, it may have been called a “trailer” or some­thing to indi­cate that it wasn’t fin­ished, but my point remains). That’s my com­plaint about this album, it’s too much. It’s far too much.