Just before winter break, I made a quick stop at Vintage Vinyl to obtain what was hailed by many as the album of 2010: Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” Since his debut, “The College Dropout,” I’ve found West to be one of the most interesting (and oddly relatable) figures in hip-hop, and the perfect-score reviews that the album received certainly didn’t curb my interest. It became the only thing I listened to for much of break. The elaborate arrangements and the intricately cohesive themes enthralled me—it was a true hip-hop concept album, something that’s been done before but never, I felt, like this.

When my mom asked me what it was that got me so excited about the album, I described Kanye’s masterfulness with a sample, his strong musical ability, his penchant for dense allusion—his explosive ego getting matched in musical form. Yeah…I sounded quite pretentious, but I really thought so.

What I didn’t realize then was that my description was not unlike one of “prog rock”: the orchestral, musically complicated, theatrical and oft-excessive branch of rock that peaked in the ’70s. Heck, a writer for England’s Daily Telegraph compared the album to The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a concept album released in 1967 that, while not prog, certainly set the stage for plenty of the less permissible indulgences that occurred in the following decade.

Jon Pareles of The New York Times recently hypothesized that, for the most part, popular music is experiencing a new return to simplicity, one not unlike the advent of disco in the ’70s. I think the excessiveness of an album like “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” represents a flipside to this idea but at the same time doesn’t contradict it. It’s prog rock for an era of disco, something that seems complicated in this period of simplicity. That feels like part of why this album is standing so far apart from the crowd—that and the fact that its singles are doing poorly (relatively speaking). Yet as Kanye West is nothing if not a trailblazer, I still wouldn’t be surprised if we see a substantial rise in “prog rap” over the next months.

I’m starting to think that we’re on the cusp of an event similar to the one that occurred in the late 1970s when the punk movement rebelled against the extravagance of prog and the simplistic, “let’s dance” attitude of disco. Yeah, punk was eventually co-opted by the mainstream and, yeah, the underground is a lot more accessible today, but it feels like something is just around the corner for pop music. Maybe this shift will be in the wrong direction–like Pitchfork giving Lady Gaga (who somehow fits this thematic overload into a simple pop context) a 10.0 for her concept album about cottage cheese or something–but I think pop may eventually get a jolt for the good.

Last year, I couldn’t stop talking about Robyn, a Swedish singer, whose songs are catchy, immediate and NOT fluffy–she would fit in perfectly with Ke$ha or Taio Cruz on your top 40 radio but offer that same radio some necessary depth. I think if our pop singers, rather than just latching on to Yeezy or Gaga (who certainly have their merits), could take a page from Robyn’s book, we could get out of this simple versus complex binary and bring pop to a new level of greatness.