Five years ago today, Kanye West unveiled My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Upon its release, it received near-unanimous critical acclaim (it remains one of the few albums ever to receive a perfect 10.0 from Pitchfork), and it completed West’s comeback after the “Taylor Swift Incident” at the 2009 VMAs—which some felt was career suicide.

In the time since, though, West has grown more as a creative and as a person than any other five-year stretch in his career. He’s released another solo album, 2013’s explosive Yeezus, and today he seems more hell-bent on becoming the next Ralph Lauren than the next Jay Z. So knowing what we know now, should Dark Fantasy still be considered his masterpiece?

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My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s mouthful of a title perfectly suits the album’s maximalist, grandiose sound. It’s almost as if West took every sound he had cultivated up until that point—the soul samples of College Dropout, the grand-scale and beautiful orchestration of Late Registration, the gloss of Graduation, and the auto-tuned melodies of 808s, and didn't so much as reduce them but compress them into one vision. West himself admitted as much in October of this year: “It was kind of piecing together what people liked about me to make a bouquet of what people loved,” he said in an interview that aired on artist Nick Knight’s ShowStudio website. But he also went on to say that the reflective nature of the album is exactly why he doesn't like the album much today. "So many people rate Dark Fantasy as my best album, but Yeezus and 808s are so much stronger. Dark Fantasy to me is... almost like, an apology record. 'Power' was the least progressive song that I've ever had as a first single.... least challenging."

The "banned" My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album cover.

An apology record. Let’s revisit, for a moment, where Kanye West was in 2010. After the 2009 VMAs, West tried his best to take back his Hennessy-inducedwords by appearing on the premiere episode of the short-lived The Jay Leno Show. He apologized to Taylor Swift, even broke down in tears, but his words did little to lessen the public backlash. Weeks later, President Obama was recorded calling West a “jackass,” which crystallized the public’s perception of West at the time. The day in-day out scrutiny ultimately led him to flee the country, to Japan and Rome. At the time, many people genuinely didn't know what was going to happen to Kanye West. Would he retire from music? From the spotlight?

Well, as we now know, of course not. Slowly but surely, West began to build his public persona back up from the ground level. PR-wise, even without an album, 2010 became a banner year for West: He joined Twitter (where he would tweet hilarious non-sequiturs like "French fries are the devil"), he performed at the Twitter and Facebook headquarters, he dropped songs weekly via “G.O.O.D. Fridays,” and he wore suits every day as a part of his lavish “Rosewood” movement. Ultimately, when it came time to premiere a 36-minute super-music video for MBDTF, he did so on the same network where the Taylor Swift debacle took place. By the time the 2010 VMAs came around and Kanye debuted his song “Runway," he was on the verge of winning the public back, one soulful, lovable move at a time. But these lovable moves would mean nothing if the album wasn’t a payoff that was worth it.