I certainly risk overestimating my own prescience when I look back at this album's release with everything we know about West today (he recently tweeted that he has dominion over his wife and has repeatedly posted Nazi imagery). What I remember is really enjoying the sound and production of this album but really not being able to listen to it a lot because it all felt like it chafed and I was starting to lose belief in the idea that this was all critical genius, to do things like sample "Strange Fruit" and rap over it about consumption and cheating. (To borrow from wikipedia: Jody Rosen of Vulture stated that: "[West is] well aware how audacious to interpolate that sacred song into a monstrously self-pitying ... a melodrama about what a drag it is when your side-piece won't abort your love child.") We'd already had MBDTF and it had some similar production tricks and similar lyrics, and 2013 for me personally had a lot of scales falling from my eyes about dudes who were like "no one can understand my dark and twisted psyche >:)) anyone who could see in my mind....ehhehe...well....they would go crazy >:]" and the idea that the reddit/4chan style of using slurs because free speech is important. The beat for Black Skinhead was incredible but listening to it at the gym I'd just think about how Genius annotations on it would be like "actually! West here says 'keep it 300, like the Romans' but 300 is a Spartan army reference as seen in the comic and movie!! however, this is lyrical genius to twist the reference to rhyme with '300 bitches, where's the Trojans' !!" and I just was getting sick of it. A bunch of the "zingers" in here, whether critics loved them or not, feel to me like Hot Topic t-shirt slogans or Facebook statuses from the worst guy you know in your hometown. ("I'd rather be a dick than a swallower" .... "in a world of dicks and assholes I'd rather be a dick" you see where I'm going here?) Daft Punk did incredible work on this and it's unfortunate that Kanye West is who he is. Jesus certainly wept.