You're my devil, you're my angel

Kanye West - 'Lost In The World'/'Who Will Survive In America' (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - 2010)

It is hard to envisage a more 2010s scene than the one Rolling Stone writer Daniel Kreps outlines in a 2010 article in which he describes Kanye West at the Palo Alto offices of Facebook performing a cappella on top of a desk. This song was based on a poem he used to woo Kim Kardashian. This was the year that The Social Network was released, and I find it hard not to imagine Lex Luthor and a Spider-Man watching the gig. Not that the Facebook employees knew it at the time, but It was also reasonably surprising to have Kanye West not just interpreting Bon Iver’s adventures in auto-tune, ‘Woods’, from his 2009 Blood Bank EP but having him guest on the finished song.

Throughout the last few months of 2010, Kanye West was releasing free music on what he called GOOD Fridays, four of these social media debuted tracks¹ would eventually feature on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in November, but despite this generosity from Ye, a version of ‘Lost In The World’ leaked in late September. At this point, the song was around the six-minute mark and included what we now know as ‘Who Will Survive In America’ as the outro; for the purposes of this entry, we will consider both sections.

West was clear that he wanted this song last on the album, and he told MTV that;

…emotionally, it just fit the crescendo of everything that I was saying and what I wanted to say to this girl. And it's also my favorite eight bars that I've ever written in my life. I think it's one of the greatest pieces of writing.

Moving forward from 2010, we know that the girl in question is Kim Kardashian, eventually West’s wife from 2014 to 2021 and that the section he is referring to started as lyrics, then poetry he added to her 30th birthday card.²

Kim Kardashian @KimKardashian

Kanye couldn’t come up with some of the lyrics but then realized he had then in a poem he had written me that was my birthday card he gave me for my 30th birthday. He took the poem he wrote me and made it the song. I keep everything! 🎶

Let’s step back a little into what it must have been like to be Kanye West while recording the song. In September 2009, Kanye interrupted Taylor Swift’s VMA acceptance speech for Best Female Video. He ended up having former US President Jimmy Carter call it “completely uncalled for,” and the sitting president, Barack Obama, call him a “jacka55”. He’d also lost his mother and broken up with his fiancee the previous year, as detailed in his previous album, 808s and Heartbreaks. So I can imagine becoming public enemy number one for a few days wasn’t what he needed.

West chose to record in Oahu, Hawaii, away from the controversy. After enquiring about using Bon Iver’s ‘Woods,’ the telephone discussions between Justin Vernon and West evolved to the point that the pair were in the studio in Hawaii recording together. Vernon would produce a total of ten tracks there with West which included ‘Dark Fantasy’ and ‘Monster’ on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. This partnership would continue through the decade, with Vernon featuring on Yeezus, Watch The Throne (with Jay-Z) and collaborating on tracks for Francis and The Lights.

Vernon told Pitchfork Media about the composition of ‘Lost In The World’, stating:

"So I head out there, and he plays me the track, and it sounds exactly like how you want it to sound: forward moving, interesting, light-hearted, heavy-hearted, f*cking incredible sounding jam. It was kind of bare, so I added some choir-sounding stuff and then thicked out the samples with my voice. That whole first week I was there we worked on the 'Woods' song, which is called 'Lost in the World'. We were just eating breakfast and listening to the song on the speakers and he's like, 'F*ck, this is going to be the festival closer.' I was like, 'Yeah, cool.' It kind of freaked me out."

Vernon and West’s conversation about it being a festival was largely accurate. West performed the song at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2010 and was joined by Vernon for the penultimate song at his 2011 Coachella performance and his 2015 headline set at Glastonbury. At Worthy Farm, West confirmed that the original poem was to Kardashian.

Bon Iver’s debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, was about a man struggling with his own identity after his relationship and band folded. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that Kanye West felt a kinship with Vernon due to the amount of shared detailing in their music of how lost they both felt and striving to be fulfilled in life. They don’t know how, but they know they are missing out. That’s the turn West takes after his poem; he laments that so much of the world is plastic, fake and consumerist and strives for something that feels real - in this case, getting laid before they get laid (buried) in the afterlife - there are touches of PJ Harvey’s magnificent closer, ‘We Float’ from Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea in this idea of being locked together in death.³

The music builds on Bon Iver’s ‘Woods, which was purely Vernon’s vocal and auto-tune effects, but adds thumping tribal drums and brings in a gospel choir and tropes from the house end of dance music as the choir and percussion hold back until being unleashed on the “run from the lights” line.

The ghost of Micheal Jackson looms large over the recording of the album, Jackson’s death is referenced directly in ‘All of The Lights’, and at the end of his eight-bar poem to Kardashian, West breaks into the "Mama-say mama-sah ma-ma-coo-sah" from Manu Dibang’s ‘Soul Makosa’ which many will recognise from Jackson’s ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ and Rihanna’s ‘Don’t Stop The Music’. Few people from the last 100 years experienced levels of fame that Jackson did though Kanye West comes closer than most, and I’m sure West felt a kinship with Jackson amongst all the MJ references in his career⁴.

On release, the song was heralded by some of the best reviews of West’s career to date, all the more impactful when the album itself was lionised as likely to be one of the best of the decade before we even reached 2011. The album received a rare 10.0 from Pitchfork; they wouldn’t give out another for almost a decade to Fiona Apple; the previous one was nearly a decade prior for Wilco. Elsewhere, the record held a 94 rating on Metacritic and topped many polls for the best album of 2010 and the whole of the 2010s. It is ranked 3rd for the 21st Century on Acclaimed Music.

‘Lost In The World’ was praised for the poetic nature of West’s verse and measured use of auto-tune, where many were not so diligent as it exploded at the end of the previous decade. The production, Vernon’s contribution and the atmospheric build from isolation in the woods to layering on the experience of African Americans through the lens of Gill-Scott Heron’s ‘Comment #1’ in the outro ‘Who Will Survive In America’ section was also heavily applauded by critics. I think it is also worth acknowledging that he takes an introverted, fragile, indie-folk song and turns it into an arms in the air, jumping up and down banger of the highest order.

If ‘Lost In The World’ brings together everything West wanted to say about himself on the record, ‘Who Will Survive In America⁵’ brings his outlook on the price of fame in America. "Comment No. 1" was a 1970 commentary on the late 1960s revolution and how it didn’t attend to the wants and desires of African-Americans and how isolating it felt to see the Sixties’ dream disintegrate into race riots and political assassinations of leading black figures.

West’s use of it re-contextualised it for the 2010s and how his celebrity and treatment are allegorical for tensions that were there at the time and brought bubbling back to the surface by the time the 2020s arrived. It was clear that while things had improved over the previous sixty years, some of the issues had not gone away.

This brings us back to the start of the album and the impassioned ask '“Can we get much higher?” Scott-Heron highlighted the moral decay of the land of freedom, where the milk and honey had spoilt in the sunlight. Kanye is contrasting that fame might promise freedom, riches and happiness, but it too can be oppressive and make him feel like a slave to American culture, which simultaneously propels him up and holds him back.

The bleak conclusion is he can’t break free from this, so he should settle for happy family life and not dream of bigger things because the American (and Western) cultural obsession with fame will ultimately turn sour.

---

Welcome to new subscribers who’ve discovered this newsletter this week; today’s entry was slightly longer than usual, so apologies for any eyeball strain. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is #26 in Acclaimed Music’s top 100 albums of all time. I am about to break off working up the list over the summer to mix things up but expect to resume with Patti Smith’s ‘Elegie’ from Horses in early September.

You can scroll back through (nearly) every track covered to date on this Spotify playlist.

1. ‘Power (remix)’, ‘Monster’, ‘Devil In A New Dress’ and ‘So Appalled’

2. 21st October 2010

3. More on this track soon.

4. He produced Jay-Z’s ‘Izzo (H.O.V.A.)’ which samples The Jackson Five, and he mentions his light and dark-skinned friends who look like Micheal Jackson on early hit ‘Slow Jamz’

5. It wasn’t the first time West sampled Scott-Heron; we can hear him on ‘My Way Home’ from 2005 and West-produced tracks for Common.