Song 85: Runaway

I've thought about Kanye West too much.

I know I have. Rather like Steven Gerrard, Joni Mitchell and, bizarrely, Professor David Starkey, he's one of the people who has taken up residence rent-free in my brain for me to have long, involved imaginary rants about, and if anyone makes the mistake of mentioning them in real life, that dull, uncalled-for rant will be made flesh.

The even more stoopid thing is that the starting point for this obsession was indifference. I was, initially, obsessively indifferent to Kanye West. I didn't love him, didn't hate him, just thought he was kind of decent. But, of course, obsessively indifferent can't be a thing for long. And he became so real-life objectionable that perhaps that stopped being a valid position.

What really bothered me was the way he went from being a fairly acclaimed and successful rapper to, in the eyes of music critics, the reincarnation of the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Kraftwerk and Godspeed! You Black Emperor all at once.

Whatever happened to rock'n'roll, I must have thought?

Recently I realised there was one specific incident that must have gnarled at me more than I thought.

Shortly after I laboured for months over a list of 1000 Greatest Songs of All Time, the exercise in futility of which I remain unduly proud, I happened to have some drinks with people who worked in that old new media in America, and it was a perfectly enjoyable and interesting evening, and my list came up (for they were all experts in lists) but, before I had much of a chance to explain what the thinking was behind it (broadly, both an attempt to apply judgement on an accumulation of data from lots and lots of other lists, and, above all, an attempt to listen to lots of great songs and reach a greater understanding of what made a song great), I was being harangued, good-naturedly, on personal choices - which is a perfectly natural instinctive response, and all fine, but the one that bothered me was one of these gentlemen saying "What about 'School Days' by Kanye West? Is that in it?" ... erm, I hadn't heard of this song, do I bluff and pretend I have, this is embarrassing, I thought I'd covered the most acclaimed songs by Kanye West ... erm, no "What, you can't not have 'School Days' by Kanye West, that's just nonsense" and I rather lost the will to defend myself in the face of my ignorance.

Well, maybe you already know but ... there is no song by Kanye West called 'School Days'. I'm still not 100% certain what song he was referring to. There's a (fairly unexceptional) track on 'The College Dropout' called 'School Spirit', maybe it was that, he must have been thinking of something.

I guess the point is, that loud and forceful attitude came to present for me how the American press wrote about Kanye West, the relentless, pseudo-intellectual proclamation of his genius built on flimsy ground, The very essence of Emperor's New Clothes.

And his 2015 botched Glastonbury headline slot confirmed that for me. Sure, I liked 'Yeezus' a lot and a few other tracks from other albums, but the increasing grandiloquence and unpleasantness of his public pronouncements allied to what I thought were pretty mediocre releases post-Yeezus strengthened my position.

I was right about Kanye all along. Those fools, those phony cultists.

Yet his stuff was still right up near the top of end of 2010s lists from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and the rest . The cult lived on. When will they learn?

So I listened to 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy', an album I'd generally found a bit much and not paid a great deal of attention to, one more time, just to confirm my position and put the argument aside.

And, of course, what's happened?

I'm hooked. Finally, wholly. Finally I'm hearing what everyone else was hearing. It's a phenomenal album, a throw-everything-in-and-everything-sticks masterpiece without a dull moment, full of memorable hooks and glorious cameos.

This is annoying for me. It's annoying too that the most acclaimed song from it, probably the most acclaimed Kanye song of all, 'Runaway', is my favourite track on it, a song of power, pathos, sadness and brilliance, everything he and his acolytes claimed it to be.

Lots of people have known this for 10 years ... Those Kanye-cultists who didn't know anything. Ah, well.