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"Who Will Survive in America" | |
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Song by Kanye West | |
from the album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | |
Recorded | 2010 |
Genre | Spoken word |
Length | 1:38 |
Label | |
Songwriter(s) | |
Producer(s) |
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"Who Will Survive in America" is the final track of the standard edition of American rapper Kanye West's album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy . [1] It is built on a sample of "Comment No. 1" by Gil Scott-Heron.
The piece, featuring no vocals from West himself, serves as the album's coda and its composition is built on a sample of Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 recording "Comment No. 1", which is also sampled in fellow album track "Lost in the World" as a transition into "Who Will Survive In America". [2] [3] "Comment No. 1" is a blunt, surrealist piece delivered by Scott-Heron in spoken word about the African-American experience and the faded idealism of the American dream. Scott-Heron's poem, which criticized the 1960s Revolutionary Youth Movement for failing to recognize the more basic needs of the African-American community, is edited to a reduced version on the track that, according to music writer Greg Kot, "retains its essence, that of an African-American male who feels cut off from his country and culture". [4] By contrast, Sean Fennessey interprets it as "a too-serious denouement for an album that is more about the self’s little nightmares than some aching societal rejection". [5] West had previously sampled Scott-Heron on "My Way Home", a track from his 2005 album Late Registration . [6]
Gilbert Scott-Heron was an American soul and jazz poet, musician, and author, known primarily for his work as a spoken-word performer in the 1970s and 1980s. His collaborative efforts with musician Brian Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues, and soul, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. His own term for himself was "bluesologist", which he defined as "a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues".
Roc-A-Fella Records was an American record label founded by Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter, Damon "Dame" Dash and Kareem "Biggs" Burke in 1995. It was operated as a division of Def Jam Recordings.
"Lost in the World" is a song by American hip hop recording artist Kanye West from his fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010). The song features vocals by Justin Vernon of indie folk band Bon Iver, as well as sampling his 2009 song "Woods". It also contains portions of "Soul Makossa" written by Manu Dibango, and samples of "Comment No. 1", performed by Gil Scott-Heron. It was produced by West and Jeff Bhasker, who wrote the track with Vernon and Malik Jones. "Lost in the World" was initially leaked on September 29, 2010 and was 6 minutes and 4 seconds long. The version on the album was split up into two parts, with the outro becoming a new track entitled "Who Will Survive in America".
Malik Yusef El Shabazz Jones is an American spoken word poet, rapper, writer, actor and producer based in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
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