In a week that has seen Ye banned from the UK by denying his Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), which subsequently saw Wireless Festival cancel this year's festival, where Kanye was headlining all nights. I thought it was time to reveal my top ten Kanye West songs.
Disclaimer: I don't condone everything Kanye has done or said. His antisemitic remarks, erratic public behaviour, and associations in recent years have been deeply troubling, and it would be wrong to brush over that. When it comes to separating the art from the artist, I try to recognise the complexities involved. For me, appreciating Kanye's music does not mean ignoring or excusing his actions. Instead, I focus on the emotional and creative impact his songs have made, while still critically acknowledging his behaviour outside of music. This is an approach I also take with artists like Morrissey and Kasabian, whose personal controversies haven't erased the way their music speaks to me or others. I think it's possible to hold both thoughts at once, and ultimately, this list is purely about the songs and what they represent musically and culturally.
Before we dive in, I want to briefly share what makes a Kanye West song stand out to me. For this list, I looked for tracks that showcase his innovative production, powerful or thought-provoking lyrics, cultural influence, and, sometimes, the personal memories or emotions they spark. These are the qualities that define his best work, in my opinion.
With that in mind, here goes.
‘Blood on the Leaves’ is one of the most sonically jarring and emotionally complex tracks Kanye has ever made, and also one of the most morally provocative. The centrepiece of the production is a sample of Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of 'Strange Fruit', a song written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and made famous by Billie Holiday, historically associated with the lynching of Black Americans in the Deep South.
It is one of the most charged pieces of music in American history. Kanye takes that weight and layers it beneath a booming TNGHT drop, specifically the duo’s track 'R U Ready', creating a collision between civil rights-era tragedy and the shallow excesses of modern celebrity. The result is deeply uncomfortable, and that discomfort is entirely the point.
The lyrics deal with a toxic relationship, and the fallout of fame, and the juxtaposition between the gravity of the sample and the relative triviality of the subject matter is either a stroke of genius or an act of profound bad taste, depending on your perspective. Perhaps both. One of the most talked-about moments in the song comes in the second verse, where Kanye references Jay-Z and Beyonce by name: he addresses a woman who is using the relationship as social currency, essentially telling her that even dropping Jay-Z’s name means nothing when he is committed to someone else. It is a remarkably candid thing to put in a song, especially given how close Kanye and Jay-Z were at the time, and it sparked considerable speculation about the nature of that friendship.
Notably, when Kanye performed the song live at the X Games Austin festival in 2014, he dropped Jay-Z’s name from the lyrics entirely, which only added fuel to rumours that the two had fallen out. The song had been in a difficult place between them for some time.
The track features uncredited vocals from Tony Williams and was produced by Kanye alongside Hudson Mohawne and Lil Soda Boi. It charted in the US, UK, France, and Australia, earning a Platinum certification in the US, and Rolling Stone ranked it #75 on their list of the best songs of the 2010s.
Few songs in his catalogue divide opinion quite like this one, and few demand your attention quite as forcefully.
‘Jesus Walks’ is the song that proved Kanye West was something entirely different. At a time when industry executives genuinely believed a song openly declaring faith in Jesus would never get radio play, Kanye made it his fourth single from his debut album and dared them to ignore it. He even addressed the sceptics directly in the lyrics, rapping about how you could rap about guns, sex, and drugs and get played on every station, but the moment you mentioned God, radio stations would look the other way. It was a provocation dressed as a prayer, and it worked.
The track is built around a sample of the ARC Choir’s 'Walk With Me', a recording by a choir of reformed drug addicts in New York, with drums lifted from Lou Donaldson’s 'Ode to Billie Joe'. It was co-written with rapper Rhymefest, who originally found the gospel sample and brought it to Kanye. The song had been in development since a 2001 demo and was originally intended for Rhymefest’s own debut album before Kanye claimed it for 'The College Dropout'. Rhymefest had originally recorded a verse for the song, but it was eventually cut from the final version.
The lyrics themselves are structured around a tension between sin and faith, with the verses written from the perspective of the sinner rather than the preacher. Rhymefest later explained that this was a deliberate choice: if the verses were about Jesus, they would drain the power from the chorus. Instead, Kanye inhabits the voice of someone falling short, someone reaching for something they cannot quite hold onto. It gives the song a raw, searching quality that sets it apart from anything else in the genre.
It peaked at #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Song at the 47th Grammy Awards in 2005, where Kanye performed it live alongside his mother Donda West, Mavis Staples, and John Legend in one of the most memorable Grammy performances in recent memory. The College Dropout was also nominated for several Stellar Awards, which honour gospel music, before the committee withdrew the nomination after complaints that a secular rap album had no place on the ballot. Kanye’s response was characteristically direct: he said the song was never meant for the evangelical audience, but for the people he believed God was really trying to reach.
The song has never really left him. He performed it at the 2004 BET Awards, at Live 8, at Glastonbury, and at Abbey Road Studios with a seventeen-piece all-female string orchestra. It became a centrepiece of his Sunday Service project years later, reimagined in a gospel setting that brought the song full circle. Whatever else you think of Kanye West, ‘Jesus Walks’ is the sound of an artist who genuinely believed he had something to say, and was willing to bet everything on the world being ready to hear it.
‘Flashing Lights’ is one of Kanye’s most elegant productions, and in many ways one of his most underrated. Unusually for him, the track contains no credited samples; instead, it’s built entirely around an original arrangement co-produced with Eric Hudson, complete with a live string section that gives it a cinematic, almost orchestral sweep. It is proof that Kanye’s gift was never just in flipping records: when he wanted to build something from scratch, he could do that too, and make it feel just as rich.
The production process itself has a good story behind it. Eric Hudson had already completed the beat when he played it to Kanye, beginning with the strings, sequencing the drums on his MPC, and building the bassline from there. Kanye heard it and wrote the lyrics the same night. The live string section was then added by the two of them, layered over the synth strings already in the arrangement. Hudson later admitted he had no idea the song would be as big as it became.
Dwele and Australian singer Connie Mitchell provide the vocals, and the result sits somewhere between soul, electronic, and late-night pop, the kind of track that feels different depending on what time you listen to it. There is a melancholy running through it that Kanye rarely lets surface so openly, a sense of glamour curdling at the edges. Connie Mitchell, who was the lead singer of Australian dance act Sneaky Sound System, came to the song in an unlikely way: Kanye met her bandmates at a diner in Sydney while on tour, struggling for inspiration, and they suggested he meet her. She ended up contributing to six tracks on ‘Graduation’ in total.
The music video is one of the most discussed in his catalogue. Co-directed by Spike Jonze and Kanye, it is a slow-burning, noir-ish short film shot entirely in slow motion in the Nevada desert at dusk. A woman in a fur coat drives a Ford Mustang to a remote location, retrieves Kanye from the boot, and the film ends with her attacking him with a shovel. It is oblique, cinematic, and completely at odds with what you might expect from a rap video. Kanye later named it his favourite video of his entire career, and it won Best Narrative Video at the 2008 Antville Music Video Awards. Two further videos were made for the song but never officially released, though both eventually leaked online.
Pitchfork ranked ‘Flashing Lights’ the 52nd best song of the 2000s, and Complex named it the sixth best song of the decade. The ‘Graduation’ album, which comes from, featured iconic cover artwork by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, and the whole project had an ambition and visual coherence that few rap albums have matched. ‘Flashing Lights’ is currently Kanye’s seventh most-streamed song of all time, which speaks to how extraordinarily well it has aged. It is a track that rewards patience: subtle, layered, and quietly devastating.
‘Power’ is one of the great comeback statements in modern music. It arrived in the summer of 2010, Kanye’s first release after the Taylor Swift VMA incident had made him, briefly, the most hated man in pop music. He could have come back quietly. Instead, he came back with this: a track that opens with a sample of King Crimson’s ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, layers in Continent Number 6’s #Afromerica’ and the drums from Cold Grits ‘It’s Your Thing”, and builds into something that feels genuinely colossal. The sample clearances alone were a feat of determination. West reportedly spent 5,000 man-hours developing the track, which, when you hear the finished result, feels entirely believable. This is less a song and more a stone skimmed across the surface of over forty years of popular culture: the sixties, the eighties, the noughties, and now.
Dwele provides uncredited vocals, and a Jay-Z remix was later released, though the original remains definitive. The track debuted at #22 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has since crossed 1 billion streams on Spotify, as of January 2025. NME ranked it the #6 song of the 2010s. The accompanying short film, directed by Marco Brambilla, is a Renaissance painting brought to life: a tableau of mythological figures, goddesses, and warriors frozen in a gilded frame, with Kanye at the centre. It is one of the most visually striking pieces of music film of the decade.
What makes ‘Power’ so enduring is not just its scale, but its self-awareness. In its lyrics, Kanye addresses the United States, his mental health, and his critics with a directness that few artists would attempt at the height of their fame. The chorus features an abrasive, almost confrontational vocal riff that lodges itself in your head and won't let go. And then there are lines like: “Lost in translation with a whole fuckin’ nation / They say I was the abomination of Obama’s nation / Well, that’s a pretty bad way to start the conversation.” It is the kind of lyric that could only come from someone who genuinely does not care whether you are comfortable or not. Kanye is not just asserting his greatness; he is interrogating it, examining the loneliness and paranoia that come with it. ‘Power’ doesn’t just sound enormous; it feels enormous, the kind of track that makes you stand up straighter when it comes on.
The song’s reach extends well beyond hip-hop. Noel Gallagher cited ‘Power’ and ‘Fade’ as direct influences on his 2017 track ‘Fort Knox’, from his album ‘Who Built the Moon?’. Gallagher praised Kanye’s boundary-pushing approach and his ability to challenge industry norms, and even expressed interest in a collaboration. Coming from one of the most self-assured figures in British rock, that is not a compliment given lightly. It is a reminder that ‘Power’ transcends genre entirely: it is simply a great piece of music, and great music has no borders.
‘Stronger’ is the song that proved Kanye could cross every genre boundary and come out the other side with a number one record. Built on a sample of Daft Punk’s ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’, which itself sampled Edwin Birdsong’s ‘Cola Bottle Baby’, the track fused hip-hop and electronic music at a time when that combination still felt genuinely bold. The story of how the sample came about is almost as good as the song itself.
Kanye had never heard of Daft Punk until 2006, when he was on tour in Europe with his DJ A-Trak. He heard Busta Rhymes’ track ‘Touch It’, which sampled Daft Punk’s ‘Technologic’, and asked A-Trak who made the beat. A-Trak, barely able to believe it, played him ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’, and Kanye immediately decided he was going to sample it. A-Trak thought it was a terrible idea: too obvious, too on-the-nose. Kanye didn’t care. He made the beat and spent months rewriting his verses around it. The sample was cleared through Daft Punk’s manager, and the duo voiced their approval, finding that Kanye had made it entirely his own. Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter later described it as “symptomatic of this circle of sampling and being sampled”, a chain that ran from Edwin Birdsong to Daft Punk to Kanye and beyond.
The impact went both ways. ‘Stronger’ helped bring Daft Punk to mainstream prominence in the US: Rolling Stone credited it with “the beginning of the group’s path to mainstream success”, and sales of ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’ jumped from around 1,000 copies a week to between 5,000 and 7,000 after ‘Stronger’ was released. Kanye and Daft Punk even performed the song together at the 2008 Grammy Awards. Later, Daft Punk would go on to co-produce three tracks on ‘Yeezus’, including ‘Black Skinhead’, cementing one of the most fruitful creative partnerships in modern music.
The track reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the UK Singles Chart, making it his only solo UK number one to date. ‘Graduation’, the album it led, sold 957,000 copies in its first week, famously outselling 50 Cent’s ‘Curtis’ in a chart battle that had been hyped as a generational showdown between two very different visions of what rap could be. Kanye’s victory felt significant beyond the numbers: it suggested that hip-hop’s centre of gravity was shifting, that introspection and ambition could sell just as well as bravado.
The Hype Williams-directed video, filmed in Tokyo with heavy references to the anime film ‘Akira’, is a visual landmark in its own right: all neon, rain-slicked streets, and cyberpunk imagery that felt completely at home alongside the track’s electronic pulse. ‘Stronger’ sounds as fresh now as it did in 2007, which is the clearest possible sign that Kanye was not just ahead of the curve but operating in a different place entirely.
‘Homecoming’ is Kanye at his most tender and nostalgic, and it is easy to overlook precisely because of how gentle it is. On an album full of grand gestures and genre-crossing ambition, this is the track where he simply goes home. It was always intended to be the lead single from ‘Graduation’, though it ended up being released as the fifth and final single in February 2008, perhaps because the label knew it was a different kind of track from what was driving the album commercially. They were not wrong, but they were also not entirely right: ‘Homecoming’ has outlasted almost everything around it.
The song features Chris Martin of Coldplay on piano and backing vocals, and the story of how that collaboration came about is one of the better ones in Kanye’s career. He had booked a one-day session at Abbey Road Studios in London in February 2006 to record strings. By coincidence, Coldplay were performing a live show in another studio the same week. Kanye, mid-session, simply decided he was going to ask Chris Martin to sing on the track, walked out of the studio, and came back three hours later with Martin in tow. Martin went into the live room, sat at the piano, and came up with the chorus melody on the spot.
It was produced alongside Warryn Campbell and reworked from a 2001 demo called ‘Home (Windy)’, meaning the song had been living inside Kanye for years before it finally found its finished form. The original version of the demo featured John Legend on the chorus and had a different beat entirely. Kanye later said he believed the original would not suit stadiums, but the lyrics were too good not to use.
Lyrically, ‘Homecoming’ interpolates Common’s ‘I Used to Love H.E.R.’, a song that personified hip-hop as a woman Kanye loved and left behind. Here, Kanye extends that metaphor to Chicago itself, addressing the city as though it were a person he owes something to. He calls her Windy, after the city’s nickname, and the song opens with him meeting her as a three-year-old boy. It is a genuinely moving conceit, and he carries it without a trace of irony.
The video features a cameo from Common himself, which gives the interpolation a satisfying circularity. The track reached #9 on the UK Singles Chart, was nominated for Best Hip-Hop Video at the 2008 MTV VMAs, and was certified triple platinum in the US. Billboard cited it as one of rap’s most loving hometown tributes. The Hype Williams-directed black-and-white video, shot on the streets of Chicago, perfectly captures the song’s mood: unhurried, honest, and quietly proud. Among all the maximalism of ‘Graduation’, ‘Homecoming’ is the quiet heartbeat at the centre of it.
Can't Tell Me Nothing' is Kanye at his most defiant and self-aware, and it is one of the tracks that best captures the particular tension running through 'Graduation' as a whole: the feeling of someone who has achieved everything they wanted and is not entirely sure what to do with it.
Produced with DJ Toomp, the track samples Young Jeezy's 'I Got Money' and Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth's 'T.R.O.Y.', one of hip-hop's most revered records, and builds them into something that feels both triumphant and deeply conflicted. Young Jeezy and Connie Mitchell feature on the track, which charted at #41 on the US Hot 100 and was certified triple platinum in the US. It also received a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Song.
The song is perhaps best known culturally for its unofficial alternate video, in which Zach Galifianakis lip-syncs the entire track while doing farm chores on a sun-drenched ranch. It is one of the funniest things on the internet, and it went viral before “going viral” was even a common phrase. Kanye reportedly loved it. The contrast between Galifianakis's deadpan delivery and the song's genuine emotional weight is part of what makes both the video and the song so memorable.
The song itself is deadly serious: a meditation on ego, excess, and the cost of success. Kanye raps about the gap between what he has achieved and what he feels, about the weight of expectation and the impossibility of living up to it. It is the sound of someone at the top of the world who cannot quite enjoy the view.
‘Black Skinhead’ is Kanye at his most confrontational and visceral, and it remains one of the most physically intense pieces of music he has ever made. Co-produced with Daft Punk, using drums recorded during the ‘Random Access Memories’ sessions, the track also features uncredited backing vocals from Lupe Fiasco and samples Black Lodge Singers’ ‘War Paint/Soldier Boy’. It is a track that does not so much begin as detonate.
It premiered live on Saturday Night Live in May 2013, a performance that felt genuinely dangerous and thrilling. Kanye stood alone on a darkened stage, the track thundering around him, and it was one of those rare television moments where you could feel something shifting in real time. The track was certified Platinum in both the US and UK. Rolling Stone ranked it the #3 song of 2013, Billboard named it the sixth best of the year, describing it as “raw, unadulterated and unstoppable”, and NME placed it tenth, writing that there was not a more fascinating pop star in the world than Kanye West at that moment.
It also featured in the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s film ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, and producer Mike Dean later revealed it nearly did not make ‘Yeezus’ at all, because it was felt to sound too much like a football anthem. Travis Scott, who was in the studio during its creation, described watching the song come to life within the space of a single week as “a turning point” in his understanding of how to make an album.
‘Yeezus’ as an album was a deliberate act of confrontation: stripped back, abrasive, and almost aggressively uncommercial for an artist of Kanye’s stature. ‘Black Skinhead’ is the most extreme expression of that impulse. It is a track about Blackness, power, and the way the music industry attempts to contain and commodify both. The title deliberately juxtaposes Black identity with a term historically associated with white supremacist subculture, and that collision is the whole point: it is an act of reclamation and defiance in the same breath. The song is also sometimes stylised as ‘BLKKK SKKKN HEAD’, which makes the racial provocation even more explicit.
Its industrial, relentless energy has had a lasting influence well beyond hip-hop. Billie Eilish has cited it as a direct inspiration for ‘Bury a Friend’. Bono included it on a list of sixty songs that saved his life. Jack White performed a cover of it as the opener to a live concert in Dublin in June 2014. Catfish and the Bottlemen performed a mashup of it with Kasabian’s ‘Shoot the Runner’ on the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge. And closer to home, Stockport band Blossoms adopted it as their walk-on song, a choice that says everything about the track’s ability to cross genre lines and speak to people far outside its original context.
‘Black Skinhead’ is the sound of someone tearing down every expectation of what a rap song should be, and revelling in the wreckage.
‘All The Lights’ is Kanye’s most ambitious pop moment, and one of the greatest ensemble performances in modern music. The track features no samples; instead, it’s built around an entirely original production, which in itself is a statement for an artist whose genius had always been so bound up in the art of the sample. What he created in its place is extraordinary.
The song had an unlikely origin. Kanye later described it as having started out as a Young Jeezy record with horns. The working title was ‘Ghetto University’. Then came a bridge, then The-Dream wrote the hook, then Rihanna sang it, and Kanye compared the layering process to the Nike Flyknit: many coloured threads woven together until they become something entirely new. The hook itself was written by The-Dream during a studio session he had to abandon, having been working on Beyoncé’s album ‘4’ when Kanye stopped by and said he could not find the right chorus. The-Dream wrote it on the spot. Rihanna, who had heard the album three months earlier, came to the studio at 2 am when Kanye called.
She later said she had no choice: she already knew it was going to be one of her favourite songs. Elly Jackson of La Roux, who also contributed vocals, later admitted she could not even hear herself in the finished track, explaining that Kanye had simply wanted to use his favourite vocalists from around the world to build a unique vocal texture, one you could feel rather than identify.
Rihanna takes the hook, but the supporting cast is almost absurdly star-studded: Alicia Keys, John Legend, Drake, Elton John, Fergie, Kid Cudi, The-Dream, La Roux, and seven others are all credited on the track. Fourteen additional artists in total, each contributing something to a song that somehow never feels overcrowded. The production holds everything together with a sweep and grandeur that few tracks in any genre can match. It is also worth noting that the song on the album is preceded by an interlude, ‘All Of The Lights (Interlude)’, on which Elton John plays piano and there are no vocals; it functions as an overture, building anticipation for what follows.
The song’s lyrics tell a specific story: a man returns from prison having served time for domestic violence, only to find his partner has moved on. He wants to see his daughter. The narrator is not sympathetic, but the song refuses to judge him either, and that ambiguity is part of what makes it so interesting. The Village Voice noted that West had written about “a disoriented parolee trying to beat a restraining order and see his daughter”, and that the star-stuffed production made the song’s bleak domestic narrative feel almost operatic in scale.
The music video, directed by Hype Williams, is a strobe-lit assault of neon typography and flashing lights, with visual references to Gaspar Noé’s 2009 film ‘Enter the Void’. The similarities to that film’s title sequence were so pronounced that Noé later publicly accused Hype Williams of copying his work, noting that Williams had even put his own name in the credit sequence repeatedly, as Noé had done in the film. Epilepsy Action issued a warning about the video, stating it could trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy, and a revised version with fewer flashing lights was later released.
It charted at #18 on the US Hot 100 and also reached #2 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. It won two Grammy Awards: Best Rap Song and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, and was also nominated for Song of the Year. Slant Magazine named it the best single of 2011 and later placed it second on their list of the best singles of the 2010s.
Time Out named it the 13th best song of all time in 2016. Rihanna performed it during her headline set at the 2023 Super Bowl halftime show, more than a decade after its release, and it sounded as vital as ever. That is the clearest possible measure of how well it has lasted. Big, bright, and emotionally overwhelming, ‘All The Lights’ is Kanye operating at the absolute peak of his creative confidence.
‘Heartless’ almost made the top ten, and depending on the day, it probably would. Co-produced by Kanye and No I.D., and co-written with Kid Cudi, who contributed the chorus, the track samples Alan Parsons Project’s ‘Ammonia Avenue’ and was reportedly built from a beat originally intended for Jay-Z’s ‘Blueprint 3’. It debuted at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has since been certified 6x Platinum in the US.
'808s & Heartbreak’ was the album that changed everything. Released in 2008 in the wake of the death of Kanye’s mother, Donda, and the breakdown of his engagement, it was a record made in grief and recorded with unusual speed. Kanye abandoned rapping almost entirely in favour of Auto-Tuned singing, and the industry response was initially baffled. Critics were uncertain. Fans were divided. And then, slowly, the rest of the music caught up.
The fingerprints of ‘808s & Heartbreak’ are all over the last fifteen years of pop and hip-hop. Drake has cited it as a foundational influence on his entire approach (you can hear it, his whole career since has been trying to do what Kanye did on this album). The Weeknd built a career on its emotional architecture. A generation of artists absorbed its willingness to be vulnerable, melodic, and sonically sparse. ‘Heartless’ is the most immediate and accessible entry point into that world: a clean, aching track about the end of a relationship that somehow manages to feel both deeply personal and completely universal. It just missed the list, but the case for it being one of the most consequential songs of the last twenty years is not a difficult one to make.
‘Runaway’ is as close to a perfect song as Kanye has ever made, and arguably as close as anyone has made in the last twenty years. It is the kind of track that stops you wherever you are when it comes on.
Not because it is loud, or because it demands your attention in the way that ‘Power’ or ‘Black Skinhead’ do. It stops you because it is honest in a way that almost nothing else in his catalogue is. It is a song about being a bad person and knowing it, and not being entirely sure you can change.
The song opens with one of the most recognisable piano figures in modern music: a simple, slightly off-kilter sequence played by Jeff Bhasker, eight notes that somehow carry the weight of everything that follows. It was built on a sample of Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth’s ‘The Basement’ and interpolates both Rick James’ live performance of ‘Mary Jane’ from 1981 and James Brown’s ‘Introduction to Star Time!’. The track was produced by Kanye alongside Emile Haynie and Mike Dean, and features Pusha T on the only verse that is not Kanye’s, a contribution that fits the song’s mood of unflinching self-examination perfectly.
That piano figure is worth dwelling on. It plays alone for nearly a minute before anything else enters: no drums, no bass, no vocals. Just those eight notes, repeating, slightly out of tune, slightly fragile. It is one of the most audacious openings in modern music, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. When the drums eventually arrive, they hit like a door slamming shut. The song locks into a groove that is simultaneously triumphant and desolate, and it never really resolves: it just keeps moving forward, carrying its contradictions with it.
Lyrically, ‘Runaway’ is a sustained act of self-laceration. Kanye addresses himself directly, cataloguing his own flaws with a specificity that goes well beyond the generic humility of a rap apology. He calls himself a douchebag, a scumbag, a jerk. He toasts to the douchebags, the scumbags, the jerkoffs. It is funny and devastating at the same time, and the line between the two is never entirely clear. Pusha T’s verse arrives midway through and acts as a kind of counterpoint: colder, harder, more forensic. Then Kanye comes back and the song begins its long, slow dissolution into the outro.
The outro is where ‘Runaway’ becomes something else entirely. Kanye’s voice is fed through a vocoder and transformed into something that sounds less like a human voice and more like a musical instrument, a sound that is somewhere between a saxophone and a synthesiser. He is not rapping. He is not singing. He is making a sound that sits between language and music, and gradually the distinction stops mattering. It goes on for nearly three minutes. It is the most emotionally raw thing he has ever recorded, and it is almost impossible to describe to someone who has not heard it. You simply have to listen to it.
The song was written, recorded, and mixed in Hawaii during the sessions for ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’, a period Kanye later described as one of the most creatively intense of his life. He had assembled a rotating cast of collaborators, including Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Nicki Minaj, Jay-Z, Rick Ross, and Pusha T, and the sessions were reportedly relentless. ‘Runaway’ emerged from that environment as something that felt both perfectly constructed and completely raw, a combination that is almost impossible to achieve and that Kanye has never quite managed to replicate.
It premiered at the 2010 MTV VMAs; Kanye’s very public return after the Taylor Swift incident had made him a pariah. In the months before, he had retreated to Hawaii to record, working in an open studio where he and his collaborators reportedly wore suits at all times.
He could have come back with something safe and radio-friendly. Instead, he performed a nine-minute song that was essentially a confession: an admission of arrogance, self-destruction, and the damage he causes to the people around him. The audience did not quite know what to make of it. That was the point. Even President Obama had called him a “jackass” after the Taylor Swift incident. ‘Runaway’ was his answer to all of it.
The song was accompanied by a 35-minute short film, written and directed by Kanye, filmed in Prague. He plays a character named Griffin who finds a phoenix, played by model Selita Ebanks, and tries to bring her into his world, only to watch that world destroy her. Kanye described the film as “the story of a phoenix fallen to Earth, and I make her my girlfriend, and people discriminate against her, and eventually she has to burn herself alive and go back to her world.”
He cited ‘Purple Rain’, ‘The Wall’, and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ as the kinds of works he wanted to remake in a modern version. The film features an extended ballet sequence, a procession involving a giant illuminated bust of Michael Jackson, and a dinner scene in which the phoenix is horrified to be served a cooked bird, at which point the song itself is performed in full. It is an extraordinarily ambitious piece of work, and it gives ‘Runaway’ a visual and narrative context that deepens an already extraordinary song. The art director was Virgil Abloh, then at the beginning of what would become one of fashion’s most remarkable careers.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest hip-hop songs ever recorded, ‘Runaway’ is a nine-minute meditation on ego, self-destruction, and the impossibility of redemption. The closing section, in which Kanye’s voice is processed through a vocoder until it becomes almost indistinguishable from the instrumentation, is one of the most haunting finales in modern music. Entertainment Weekly called the film “a carefully modulated art-film made by a man on a mission.” The Wall Street Journal described it as “a cross between an epic music video and a charming indie-house flick.”
The song was later performed in the film’s centrepiece scene, with Kanye seated at a grand piano surrounded by ballerinas in black tutus, and it is one of the most striking performance sequences in any music film ever made. It is, in every sense, the definitive Kanye West song.
So there it is. Ten songs, one honourable mention, and probably a hundred arguments waiting to happen.
The hardest part of writing this list was not choosing what to include, but deciding what to leave out. ‘Gold Digger’ is one of the biggest songs of the 2000s, and it is not here. ‘Through the Wire’, recorded with his jaw wired shut after a near-fatal car accident and released as his debut single, is one of the most extraordinary origin stories in music, and it did not make the cut. ‘Ultralight Beam’, the opening track on ‘The Life of Pablo’, is the kind of song that makes you feel like you are standing in a cathedral, and it sits outside the top ten. ‘All Falls Down’, ‘Monster’, ‘New Slaves’, ‘Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1’, ‘Good Life’, ‘Touch the Sky’: any of them could have been here on a different day, and none of them would have looked out of place.
That is, ultimately, the point. Whatever you think of Kanye West the person, and there is plenty to think about, the scale of his catalogue is genuinely staggering. From the soul-sampling warmth of ‘The College Dropout’ to the industrial confrontation of ‘Yeezus’, from the maximalist grandeur of ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ to the grief-soaked minimalism of ‘808s & Heartbreak’, he has made records that have changed the shape of popular music not once but several times over. Very few artists can say that. Almost no one can say it across as many different genres and moods.
And then there is where we started: a UK ban, a cancelled festival headline slot, and the question of whether the music is still worth your time. I think it is. I also think it is entirely reasonable to feel conflicted about that. The art and the artist are not always separable, however much we might want them to be, and Kanye has made that separation harder than most. But the songs on this list are not going anywhere. ‘Runaway’ will still stop you in your tracks in twenty years. ‘Jesus Walks’ will still feel like a provocation and a prayer at the same time. ‘Power’ will still make you stand up straighter.
He was, at his best, a genuinely once-in-a-generation artist. The tragedy is that with his recent actions, he seems determined to make us forget it.