Chief Keef mumbles something about a girl’s ‘rents not being home while Vernon echoes him without a hint of irony, the effect being similar to a golden-voiced ghost doing backup on a sex tape playing at half speed. While Kanye’s verse is great and all in its Spartan (wait, you mean Roman?) simplicity – the best line is “soul mates become soulless” – he really flexes as a producer and song director here, running a liquid smooth guitar solo straight into that glorious bridge. It’s like some Walter White type chemistry shit when Justin Vernon and Chief Keef come together on this song (cue Jesse Pinkman: magnets bitch! etc). Taken to epic extremes, you get “Runaway” on one end and “Wolves” on the other taken to its most middling, the most appropriate way to capture the ennui of love lost and consumerism gone disappointing, you get this. It’s not the, er, flashiest beat Kanye’s produced, but it’s nonetheless the best of his career: though he captures this gray, isolated mood on other tracks, nowhere else does he do it so understatedly. That’s “Flashing Lights” in a nutshell, where chintzy cinematic strings meet aughts-era “futuristic” synth sounds in a morose anticlimax of disenchanted introspection. Essentially, superflat pieces both reflect and push back against imagery prevalent in the mainstream, imbuing that imagery with more complexity and ambiguity than it receives in its original form. Superflat, the art style founded by Graduation cover artist Takeshi Murakami, is, in reductive terms, generally motivated by the shallowness, or “flatness,” of consumer culture and popular media. Say, how Kanye somehow drew blood like the “jaw shattered”/”Lord’s ladder” rhyme from the stone that is Rick Ross, or the tragicomic second verse that traces a relationship breakdown with a wry smile on its face, or how Kanye follows a trifling line like “your crib’s Scarface, could it be more Tony?” with a soul-wrencher that’s more brutally honest than maybe the entire rest of the album – “you love me for me, could you be more phony?” –Rowan “Devil in a New Dress” does have those, but this was Kanye at his most self-conscious and deliberately complex, and what constantly astounds me about this song is the depths it just casually reveals.
I’ve always assumed Bink! cooked up the beat as a modern update on “Slow Jamz”, ready to receive some filthy sex bars and not much more. The molasses-slow soul vamp is credited to Bink!, by all accounts one of the main inspirations to the man rapping over that gorgeous sample and noodly prog guitar. “Devil in a New Dress” is the greatest Kanye West beat that wasn’t actually made by Kanye West. –Rowanįrom the album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy In the album proper that becomes obvious and grating, but for four pulse-pounding minutes it’s a thing to be glad of, even if I’m just pretending to like the Desiigner bit because “Real Friends” somehow didn’t make our list. There’s no cohesion or unifying purpose to any of this. I mean they’re like a quickfire montage of unfinished songs dating anywhere from 808s through to Yeezus, featuring not one but two of West’s greatest choruses that could easily grace chart-topping stadium hits, but in very Life of Pablo fashion instead wrap around the famous bleached asshole, a West rap that lasts about 20 seconds in total but manages to cut deep all the same (“market crash/hurt him bad/people get divorced for that”) and a diversion into just straight up being “Panda” by Desiigner for like a fourth of the overall runtime. Check out our carefully curated list, and be sure to comment with your own!īoth parts of “Father Stretch My Hands” are a ridiculous fucking mess. There are sure to be predictable entries as well as some surprises. Our staff grew up listening to his music, so we’ve decided to take his his entire body of work into consideration for the construction of a Top 10 Songs list. Kanye’s rise to stardom coincided with the growth of internet culture, and as such, his footprint is all over Sputnik. Is there an artist from the 2000’s who is bigger than Kanye West? If not, he’s at least somewhere in the top 5…and regardless of whether or not you love him or hate him – whether you find his antics annoying or endearing – the man can sure as hell write music. Top 10 National // Top 10 Say Anything // Top 10 Thrice // Top 10 Kanye Sputnikmusic Staff Rankings: Top 10 Kanye Songs