Master Maestro Showdown: Kanye West vs. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West’s fifth solo album, is an achievement as grand as his ego. Featuring a bevy of performers and a kaleidoscope of sound, West’s record, out on Tuesday, sounds more like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles or The Legend by Johnny Cash than anything currently on the pop charts. Curious about how West’s album might stack up against history’s highest-regarded musician — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — we invited Jeffrey Beecher, the double-bass player for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, to help us compare West to someone he’d probably consider his musical peer. This is the tale of the tape.

Power vs. Eine kleine Nachtmusik: Eine kleine Nachtmusik was written in 1787 and features viola, cello, violin and strings. “Each instrument comes on with a new personality, like the song’s a dinner party and each instrument changes the conversation,” Beecher says. Power, the first single from West’s new record, is the most traditional hip-hop track on the album and features a sample of 21st Century Schizoid Man by King Crimson. “A lot of ego’s involved in that,” Beecher says, and he’s not wrong as one wry scatological lyric takes braggadocio along an unusually visual path. West elevates this song in his live show, but it pales in comparison to “a little night music.”

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