Hey, remember when your favorite publication gave My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a perfect rating? Sure you do. Barely a handful of weeks removed from a ceremonious release that drew blood (and power) from a free music campaign—that trumped all other competitor’s efforts—UStream carnivals, supposed mental breakdowns, mini-movies, bloated inclusion of guest appearances (on one track)…all did their part to seemingly have the music world in a tizzy. Admittedly, our Crew discussion over the album’s status spiraled over days and days of heated and intellectual debates. A tiring process for some, but necessary to ensure us to continue to rise as a leading credible source for presenting you with these testy Hip-Hop opinions that everybody cares about, even if you do openly denounce them. However, one thing we proudly take pride in this situation is overcoming the hype. That particular 4-letter word can be both a gift and a dangerous entrapment in one’s judgement. It is needed to bring anticipation to a project to garner excitement for it to even be enthused to critique in the first place. Yet, it has also known to stall the forward-thinking process all the same. Foresight. Predictions. Those kind of things.

Generally this type of memoir is reserved for several months—years maybe—after the fact, but seeing that the music industry moves in lightning speed and cares not for your nostalgia or absorption of music mechanisms, it’s being forced upon you today. Kanye even put this to practice when he recently announced the release of Watch The Throne, his collaborative album with Jay-Z, much sooner than you’d expect. While you can probably take a concrete release date with a grain of salt and margarita, he is obviously not dwelling on letting any music marinate.

This post was prompted for a number of reasons. A recent article in the New York Times by Jon Caramanica openly lambastes the thought of perceiving the album as all-time top shelf, let alone placing it on his top album’s list. A recent leak of an outtake that didn’t reach the finish line (more on that in a minute) placed things in perspective a bit, and quite honestly, I just wanted to post the remaining artwork. Ain’t it fancy? Highbrow, avant-garde garnishing can sure skew a person’s perception onto outside factors that have nothing to do with the music, and believe it or not, there are plenty of guilty parties on that front.

Back to Mr. Caramanica’s analysis of Kanye’s Fifth Symphony:

“My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” may or may not have been the best album of 2010. Believe what you will. Either way it’s not even the best Kanye West album. So now what — turn it up to 11.0? Plead for extra credit? Develop a new ranking system? Mr. West’s next album can only be a disappointment, a step down from the perfect ratings and universal acclaim he’s been openly craving since the beginning of his career and has finally wrested from the last constituency most people look to for approbation: critics.

Bits of pretension aside (it is kind to hard to argue against Kanye’s melodic approach to song scultpting, which undoubtedly trumps the accessibility of that of his peers, was at the crest of 2010′s offerings), there are bits of truth in there. As our review meticulously stated, MBDTF has its lapses with overkill and eventually, even if slightly, chipped away at its possible perfect rating. Sure, it was the cool thing to do. “Hey! Kanye’s dominating the spotlight! Give him a perfect rating!” Yet, you read all the reviews that are sly to pacify such flaws and sweep the delirious outros under the rug and it teeters on becoming a case of partisanship.