In the spring of 2004, a girl on my high school lacrosse team wearing her uniform of a kilt and polo shirt dropped into a seat next to me on the bus on our way to a game and said, “Here, you have to listen to this song, it’s so funny.” It was “The New Workout Plan.” There, I had the whitest possible introduction to Kanye West.

The College Dropout, Kanye’s first album, was released 11 years ago, and I never could have guessed how he would evolve over the next decade, how integral he’d become to how I live. Kanye is not just content or an artist, he’s a mindset and a way of being.

It’s funny: Kanye is known for his bombastic overconfidence, but so much of his music is about laying bare his insecurities. He has a lot of modes: He’s arrogant, emotional, clever, regal, desperate, dazed, dismissive, self-assured, self-aware. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to find a systematic way to process him, his body of work, and what he means to me.

There are album reviews, which is how Kanye is usually processed, but they don’t show him fully in context. Ranking also doesn’t work , for reasons mentioned above: He’s changed too much and his work is too varied. So I made a bracket, and through this bracket, I’ll find my favorite song. Theoretically.

Methodology

I chose the initial set of 32 ad hoc, and then refined it by re-listening to all of the albums and swapping out this or that song while keeping a list of alternates. My loose goal was to represent all albums, with some effort toward representing them all somewhat evenly. This didn’t pan out, as The College Dropout has six songs in the set while Graduation has two. I decided to have Watch the Throne and Kanye West Presents GOOD Music Cruel Summer in the mix, because, while they are not his solo releases, collaboration is essential to Kanye’s work. It feels disingenuous to say I can include, for instance, “Monster,” but can’t include “No Church in the Wild.” His most recent releases (“Only One,” “FourFiveSeconds,” “Wolves,” “All Day,” all off his forthcoming album “So Help Me God,” as well as a leaked mixtape) are not included, because we don’t know anything yet about what complete thought they are a part of. Which is not to say I don’t love them; “Only One” is the only Kanye song that makes me cry.

I might have landed on a different 32 if I were not trying to incorporate fair representation from all the albums, probably, and pay tribute to all of Kanye’s evolutions. They would have looked different a year ago. They would look different if I didn’t live in New York. They’d look different if I were single, if I had a different relationship history, if I had a different job.

The bracket is set up such that the Past Kanye tracks are pre-2008/pre-808s and Heartbreak Kanye, which is often where musical “purists” draw the line over “which” Kanye they like. The Present Kanye tracks are 808s & Heartbreak and everything after. The exceptions are Watch the Throne and GOOD Music Cruel Summer, which are demi-credits to Kanye’s name in comparison to major releases. The tracks I chose each fit neatly on one side, so I slotted them there. This won’t winnow down a completely pure pre-2008 and post-2008 song choice, but it will be close. I’m fine messing it up this way because to say you only like “pre-2008” Kanye is an entitled treatment of Kanye anyway.

How songs move through brackets isn’t supposed to indicate anything about the album they come from either way—his albums are extremely cohesive, best consumed and judged whole. I’m just doing this because I wanted an excuse to think about and listen to a lot of Kanye. And to make people angry. But mostly for my personal relationship with Kanye as a force in my life.

Log in to Medium and “recommend” this story.

“No Church in the Wild”►

vs.

“Never Let Me Down”►

Kanye is at his self-destructive best in “No Church in the Wild” from Watch The Throne, alongside Frank Ocean. Then there is “Never Let Me Down,” the The College Dropout track that also happens to feature Jay Z (and J.Ivy) that is representative of everything everyone wanted from pre-2008 Kanye West.

Winner: “No Church in the Wild”

“The New Workout Plan” ►

vs.

“Jesus Walks”►

I have a real soft spot for “The New Workout Plan,” because it is, at its core, a song about women; an actual clever, insightful, satirical rap song about women and the rat race of looking good to land a man. Every time I hear a reference to bitches as commodified goods in his other songs, I remember this song exists, and that it’s on Kanye’s first album, and I feel a little better. The lead-in skit, “Workout Plan,” passes the Bechdel test. It makes Kanye’s first album pass the Bechdel test. I was 17 when I first heard this song, and it changed everything I thought I knew about rap. It’s up against “Jesus Walks,” the anthemic radio single from the same album that has an unfortunate association with a mediocre war film. My love for “New Workout Plan” is deep and thorough, but in terms of greatness, making the 32 seems like enough of an honor.

Winner: “Jesus Walks”

“Everything I Am”►

vs.

“Good Life”►

“Everything I Am” is mellow for an early Kanye song, but we are getting into Graduation, when no one knew it yet, but Kanye was about to curve. “Good Life” is, likewise, a confident song, but bolder and with T-Pain. While “Good Life” is catchy, “Everything I Am” is cleverer.

Winner: “Everything I Am”

“Diamonds from Sierra Leone (remix)”►

vs.

“Ni**as in Paris”►

I love “Ni**as in Paris” because it’s the epitome of what Watch the Throne is: Jay Z and Kanye as two friends sitting on top of a world that is indebted to them and their genius. Plus, man, the cynical brilliance of sampling Will Ferrell. But I have to give it to “Diamonds of Sierra Leone”’s orchestral strains and self-awareness, even if it’s cursory.

Winner: “Diamonds from Sierra Leone (remix)”

“Stronger”►

vs.

“Gone”►

I love the Otis Redding sample in “Gone,” so deeply, and Kanye’s final verse is classic resentment of a music industry (“I’ma open up a store for aspiring MCs / Won’t sell ’em no dream, but the inspiration is free / But if they ever flip sides like Anakin / You will sell everything including the mannequin”). But “Stronger”: On the surface it’s excess, underneath it’s self-destruction.

Winner: “Stronger”

“I Wonder”►

vs.

“Through the Wire”►

“I Wonder” has some of the exploration of relationship issues starting to creep out before it became full blown on 808s and Heartbreak. Like 808s’ songs, it has a lamenting sample and Kanye intoning frustration about a woman (or women) who say they want one thing but do another—a dude gets on your nerves but you keep going back to him, you want your independence and professional success but maybe secretly want a family but in chasing the two you might lose both. Kanye knows the Can’t Have It All struggle. While it hints at better Kanye themes to come, it’s not quite there yet with expressing them. “Through the Wire,” with its killer Chaka Khan sample, made when he was still basically unknown, is an autobiographical song about Kanye’s car accident in 2002 when he had to have his jaw wired shut, and he recorded the first version of the song with his jaw wired shut. That is commitment.

Winner: “Through the Wire”

“Spaceship” ►

vs.

“Good Morning”►

“Spaceship” has some astute points about the working man’s ennui (“So I’m on break next to the ‘No Smoking’ sign with a blunt in the mall/takin’ my hits, writing my hits”). “Good Morning” is the understated setup to Graduation (“Haters saying you changed / Now you doin’ your thang”) which is the setup to the rest of Kanye’s career, saying goodbye to what he had to be to get to where he was so he could become what he was meant to be. (Related from “I Am A God” on Yeezus: “Soon as they like you, make ’em unlike you / ’Cause kissing people ass is so unlike you”).

Winner: “Good Morning,” on an existential plane.

“H.A.M.”►

vs.

“We Don’t Care”►

“H.A.M.” is a song I feel a little bit bad about having in here because it’s a pump-up song, though it did give bros the world over a way to state their intent to do something, but not just do it, like really do it (“I’m about to go HAM on this sandwich/report/dirty apartment/bottle of Honest Tea”). It’s one of the most obvious losses in this round.

Winner: “We Don’t Care,” one of my favorite tracks from The College Dropout.

“Mercy”►

vs.

“RoboCop”►

I know there will be people who are not pro-including GOOD Music in the mix because it was heavily collaborative. They are free to not put this song in their own bracket and ignore what Kanye’s vision can bring to a collab. “Mercy” has so many good musical elements, with the obscure wailing Fuzzy Jones sample, the otherwise restrained beat and arrangement, and so many lines that pop: “Make the ground move, that’s an ass quake,” Pusha T’s whirring “whoo” followed by a syncopated “Lambo, Murcie, Lago.” But the reason I’m writing so much about the merits of this song is I have to knock it out in favor of “RoboCop,” which I will get into in the next round.

Winner: “RoboCop”

“Hold My Liquor”►

vs

“Blood on the Leaves”►

It pains me to put two Yeezus songs up against each other but the universe is cruel in its randomness. “Hold My Liquor,” God, this is a dark song, violently revisiting a doomed and destructive relationship, with a broken Kanye reflecting on his issues as an “aunt” in his girlfriend’s life dismisses him as selfish and uncaring. But she’s right, maybe, as the poetic interlude points out he’s using women as a palliative. Now, “Blood on the Leaves.” I could give it to this song just on the Nina Simone sample. But then the horns blow out the song into a huge, emotionally delivered narrative.

Winner: “Blood on the Leaves”

“Power”►

vs

“Monster”►

“Power” is Kanye putting himself in the context that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released in—last everyone had heard from him, he had interrupted Taylor Swift, and everyone had been making fun of him since. But he won’t be the caricature and the “abomination” everyone’s made him into in his absence. “Monster” is one of the best tracks on MBDTF, without question. I know every word and I rap it quietly, whitely, in the silence and privacy of my own home. It’s an achievement, but it’s not Kanye’s achievement—recognition goes to the other artists, not least to Nicki Minaj and the way she managed to define her entire existence on someone else’s remix.

Winner: “Power”

“Love Lockdown”►

vs.

“Heartless”►

This is tough because these songs are from the same album (808s and Heartbreak) and about essentially the same thing. Well, 808s’ songs are all kind of essentially about the same thing. “Heartless” is a little more resentful, and the arrangement and production on “Love Lockdown” have a little bit more range.

Winner: It’s close, but, “Love Lockdown.”

“I Am a God”►

vs.

“New God Flow”►

“New God Flow” is the only other GOOD Music track I have in contention, because it was peak Kanye hyping himself (“living three dreams: Biggie Smalls’, Dr. King’s, Rodney King’s”) and has a lot of layers in the samples used. However, “I Am a God” is too excellent a track to knock out this early.

Winner: “I Am a God”

“All of the Lights”►

vs.

“Paranoid”►

I love Rihanna and she and Kanye don’t work together enough (prayer hands emoji for “FourFiveSeconds”). But she’s an accessory to the emotionally complicated narrative of “All of the Lights,” a song packed with one painful vignette after another, and its unrelenting chorus. Musically, I really like “Paranoid,” but it’s about a boring kind of fight pretty much every couple has.

Winner: “All of the Lights”

“New Slaves”►

vs.

“Runaway”►

“New Slaves” skewers some really big ideas perfectly from the very first verse—racism transcends class, money, and time, and how externalizing people’s value through their consumer goods keeps them immobile on the societal ladder. And then Kanye gets amazingly angry, he yells, it’s great. But while “New Slaves” is smart and meaningful, “Runaway” is insightful, meaningful, introspective, and beautifully constructed.

Winner: “Runaway”

“Devil in a New Dress”►

vs.

“Black Skinhead”►

“Devil in a New Dress” wanders lazily in a way that Kanye songs usually don’t, about a girl who he speculates he’s rubbed off on to the point that now she’s the asshole. The irony of him crediting himself for her learning to treat him in a way he knows he deserves is probably not lost on him. “Black Skinhead” touches on similar themes to “New Slaves,” but elevates Kanye to out-of-body experiences: wolf, king, army.

Winner: “Black Skinhead”

Read Rachel Syme’s essay, “Notes on ‘Kim.’”

“No Church in the Wild”►

vs.

“Jesus Walks”►

“No Church in the Wild”’s steady, galloping beat and Frank Ocean as a guest are an incredible combo. Frank Ocean is, actually, the best part of this song, with the best delivery and best lines. Kanye’s verse is excellent and contributes to the canon (Kanye-on) of him as a picture of self-conscious excess. I’ve flattered myself so many times thinking I was living the lines “Sunglasses and Advil, last night was mad real/sun coming up 5 a.m., I wonder if they got cabs still.”

“Jesus Walks,” though, is too on-point about what Kanye was about, became about, is about. Maybe in a really broad way. And in a Jesus-y way that I respect but still kind of makes me uncomfortable about how I can relate.

Winner: “Jesus Walks”

“Everything I Am”►

vs.

“Diamonds From Sierra Leone (remix)”►

“Everything I Am,” if you consider where it landed in his career, is Kanye’s turning point. It’s goodbye to “ya boy Kanye.” (“Ya boy” is Drake. Kanye is our lord and savior.) It also gives beautiful context to Kanye, outspoken critic of music awards shows (“So say goodbye to the NAACP award / Goodbye to the In-di-a Arie award / They’d rather give me the ni-nigga-please award / But I’ll just take the I-got-alotta-cheese award”).

Still, “Diamonds From Sierra Leone”’s arrangement is one of my favorite Kanye styles: aggressive orchestra. The rising action of the strings grounded by the horns gets me… very worked up.

Winner: I love “Diamonds” in an abstract way, but “Everything I Am” is the superior song.

“Stronger”►

vs.

“Through the Wire”►

This is a secret early battle between early Kanye and latter-day Kanye. “Stronger” has the self-destruction I mentioned, but it samples Daft Punk, his collaborators for Yeezus, and was an early instance of his affinity for and skill with electronic music. “Through the Wire,” meanwhile, is Kanye rapping about life and death and a traumatic event that happened to him.

Winner: This is a hard one, but I’ll give it to “Through the Wire.”

“Good Morning”►

vs.

“We Don’t Care”►

I am a sucker for wordplay, and “We Don’t Care” delivers over and over. Both it and “Good Morning” cover the early-album themes of growing up in the frameworks you’re born with: For “Good Morning,” it’s mobility, but for “We Don’t Care” it’s predetermined fate. I can personally relate to none of this. Now I feel bad for saying “I like the clever jokes about the rat race actual humans are trapped in every day.” Maybe I am taking this too seriously.

Winner: This one is easy and “We Don’t Care” is obviously the better song.

“RoboCop”►

vs.

“Blood on the Leaves”►

As far as references go, it doesn’t get better than “RoboCop,” which is a perfect movie. Like “Paranoid,” it’s a typical couple-argument song, but a better one. It’s about a woman who is attractive but turns out to be a control freak, which sounds a lot like Reggie Bush–era Kim, who once freaked out on her show about a girl texting Reggie. I love this song.

But if “RoboCop” is about Kanye’s overly chill cool-dude emotional unavailability, “Blood on the Leaves” is him laying himself bare, zero chill, having real feelings and regrets.

Winner: “Blood on the Leaves”

“Power”►

vs.

“Love Lockdown”►

“Love Lockdown” has a pretty simple melody, like most of the 808s songs, and I’m now realizing it’s probably made it this far because, like “Jesus Walks” and “No Church in the Wild,” it has that galloping beat interchanged with a steady one under piano chords. I have a thing for steady galloping beats.

“Power” really works, though, as a statement of purpose, and more or less every line in the verse is a characteristic way he’s described himself before or since (“And I embody every characteristic of the egotistic / He knows, he’s so fucking gifted / I just needed time alone with my own thoughts / Got treasures in my mind but couldn’t open up my own vault / My childlike creativity, purity and honesty / Is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts”). Also, “I don’t need your pussy, bitch, I’m on my own dick” is truly a perfect Kanye line.

Winner: Okay, I have to give this to “Power.”

“I Am a God”►

vs.

“All of the Lights”►

The best thing about recent Kanye albums is that, as every album comes out and critics ask who Kanye thinks he is, he comes back in the next album with an even firmer assertion that he’s the greatest. “I Am a God”’s “hurry up” verse throws that in everyone’s face. He did a pitch-perfect rehash of this tired exchange on his most recent leaked mixtape (“When someone comes up and says something like ‘I am a god’ / Everybody says ‘Who does he think he is?’ / I just told you who I thought I was / A god!”) But then the song is intercut with screaming, heaving, gasping, and spare falling electronic notes (Kanye did all his own screaming and heaving). It turns the song from Kanye being the epitome of himself to Kanye frankly not caring if you were enjoying the song because he has something to say and he’s going to say it with screaming. As someone trying to dissect his songs, I have to respect this.

“All of the Lights” feels old in comparison to “I Am a God.” It’s a sad song about an irredeemable dude. It’s also a busy, maximalist song, with background vocals, an orchestra, a propulsive beat, Rihanna, Kanye, Kid Cudi, Alicia Keys, Elton John, and… an awkward Fergie doing her best Nicki Minaj impersonation. But he becomes better as an artist to me when he strips everything away.

Winner: “I Am a God”

“Runaway”►

vs.

“Black Skinhead”►

Close your eyes and pick a song at random from Kanye’s catalog. There’s a sizable chance it will be a lament about how he’s a dick, a dick with women especially, him feeling bad about being a dick, wondering at the roots of his dickishness. When he offers a toast to the douchebags and assholes, and tells a woman to run away as fast as she can, it doesn’t feel like a kiss-off; it feels like Kanye bottoming out and giving in to the idea that everything is his fault—unable to escape himself.

“Black Skinhead” has rough bass tones that cut throughout and sharp rebukes for everyone: Those who care more about deaths in Iraq than young black people murdered in Chicago, the Middle America demographic that treats him like an exotic, other artists who can’t keep up with him. Even the title is a send-up of “reverse racism,” reflective of all the flak Kanye gets for pointing out the way he is treated in the media just for being black, and for pointing things out about the black experience that white people inflict (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people” being the earliest example).

Winner: “Black Skinhead” is representative of many great things about Kanye, but for its sheer enjoyment factor, as opposed to its political intent, “Runaway” edges it out slightly.

“Jesus Walks”►

vs.

“Everything I Am”►

It’s funny to look at “Everything I Am,” a song about things he’s not, for things that Kanye eventually became. He rapped “I’ll never be picture-perfect Beyoncé” a few years before his Vogue spread with Kim; “I never rock a mink coat in the winter like Killa Cam” years before “Tell PETA my mink is dragging on the floor” in “Cold”; “I never be as laid back as this beat was” years before releasing the gentle organ-backed “Only One” for his daughter. “Everything I Am,” as an expression of his true self, at the time, has become over the years a reflection of his capacity for personal growth, which is one of the things that I love most about him as an artist. Kanye, like everyone, always wants to be better, and he refuses to be trapped by what other people think of him, or by his own limitations. He loves Michael Jackson and often compares himself to him, though he admits he can’t sing or dance, not even close to how Michael could. But even though he can’t sing, he made an almost entirely lyrical album with 808s and significant lyrical elements in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. And even though he can’t dance, he’s an energetic performer, leaping and bounding across the stage. In those moments, he feels earnest, which is more important.

If “Everything I Am” is Kanye in a cultural context, “Jesus Walks” is him in a more personal one. “Jesus Walks” represents Kanye reconnecting with God in a public way that, per the song, would pose a challenge to his popularity: “They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus / That means guns, sex, lies, videotape / But if I talk about God my record won’t get played, huh?” His relationship with God continues to play a role in his music, and went from being afraid to talk to God “cuz we ain’t spoke in so long” to “I just talked to Jesus, he said what up Yeezus.”

Winner: Considering what I’ve already said about “Jesus Walks” musically, compared to the more simplistic “Everything I Am,” I think “Jesus Walks” wins here.

“Through the Wire”►

vs.

“We Don’t Care”►

Presumably a lot of the things he talks about in songs have happened to him in one form or another, but rarely does he speak about them at length; they’re just clever references sprinkled here and there. “Through the Wire” is an achievement, and a meta-achievement, in that he worked on it while still recovering from the accident he describes.

“We Don’t Care” isn’t autobiographical or his lived experience, and I continue to feel bad for liking it because, per Complex’s oral history of the making of The College Dropout, the original title was “Drug Dealing,” but was changed to appeal to a mainstream audience (myself). Still, it’s another song that I know all the words to.

Winner: Still, Kanye’s wordplay is the best thing about this song (Kanye’s cynical black version of Having It All: “We forced to sell crack, rap, and get a job”); for that, I have to give it to “We Don’t Care.”

“Blood on the Leaves”►

vs.

“Power”►

“Power” is peak Kanye braggadocio. “I guess every superhero need his theme music.” This could well have been my favorite song, or at least one of them, pre-Yeezus. The way he bounces each of his verses off of the disco sample and the beat is hardly matched by any other song in his catalog. And it gets better: the unhinged prog-rock “we don’t sleep” sample, and the way the beat and vocals cut out for a synth melody before the claps and disco sample come back full-force to build to a blow-out finish.

The problem I have with it in this match up is it’s pretty narrow in emotional range. I love “Power” for what it is. “Blood on the Leaves” has the tell-off verse (“He only wanna see that ass in reverse / Two-thousand-dollar bag with no cash in your purse”), but the rest of the song is one of Kanye’s rawest. His wailing plus the blaring horns feel like such desperation next to the “Strange Fruit” sample. By the end of the song, he’s resigned to quiet singing, like he’s emotionally spent. It’s a much more complete song.

Winner: “Blood on the Leaves”

“I Am a God”►

vs.

“Runaway”►

“I Am a God” is a song that is about Kanye right down to its production. It’s not meant to be pleasant. The repeated dissonant alert tones keep in tense throughout, and Kanye is defiant and aggressive. It’s me, I’m the one screaming and panting in the middle of the song, Kanye has intimidated and unnerved the shit out of me to the point that I’m running and screaming. Is this song deprogramming? Probably, for the people who are still stuck on pre-2008 Kanye.

Another way I love Kanye is how his self-love, like a lot of the emotional modes he inhabits, is performative. There is no way to hear “I Am a God” and think Kanye literally thinks he is a god when you have the context of him as an artist. Kanye doesn’t think he’s perfect, but he also doesn’t have regrets, another of his best qualities. Words failed him when speaking about this to The New York Times around the time of Yeezus, but he says he does not regret what he did to Taylor Swift, probably because it was a humbling experience he learned from. And you can see it, in the way he acted at the Grammys: He wasn’t there to mealy-mouth praise at the winners, and he gave his opinions freely: Beck shouldn’t have won! But he’d learned not to force them on everyone else. Maybe I’m giving Kanye too much credit for just learning life lessons, but people who think he is simply an arrogant person spouting off self-aggrandizement to anyone who will listen are clearly not paying attention to how he’s developed as an artist and person. This song is consistent with that, another reason I meta-love it.

But “Runaway,” though. I feel things from “Runaway” and feel like I understand Kanye, or Kanye circa that era, in a closer way than with “I Am a God.” “Runaway” is a portrait of Kanye as that asshole everyone knows, even the people close to him, the person he feels helpless about being. As a writer, I’m guilty of being too in love with my own thoughts, which is probably why I deeply relate to “Runaway.” For the first time in the last year, I heard this dumb saying that is too simple to even have a source because it’s just common sense: “It’s harder to be nice than clever.” True! Easy! But hard for me because I’m too concerned with what I think all the time to worry about how people feel, and I shouldn’t be. “And I always find, yeah, I always find something wrong / You been putting up with my shit just way too long / I’m so gifted at finding what I don’t like the most / So I think it’s time for us to have a toast.” I know Kanye is a critical person, and I am, too, and I just dissolve in front of this song describing how I feel when I realize I’ve been going on considering no one but myself and, yep, I deserve what I’m about to get for it, and I’m bitter about it, and this happens every time, so why do I keep doing it? I don’t know.

Winner: “Runaway”

“Jesus Walks”►

vs.

“We Don’t Care”►

Do you know when you do something so much, like play Minecraft, that when you close your eyes in bed at night your brain projects little game-hands continuing to scratch at raw materials and combine them in recipes with the goal of making something as you try to go to sleep? That is me now with these four songs’ lyrics and corresponding interpretive dance moves.

I’ve waffled back and forth between personal and more objective criteria in evaluating these songs, mostly on a whim, but I’ve mostly exhausted the technical and qualitative analysis angles. What is left? I’ve said a number of times how smart I think “We Don’t Care” is, and it leads off an album I still love for an artist who has changed so much in 11 years. There’s a reason The College Dropout was represented more heavily than any other album here. “We Don’t Care” is still an important song for me in defining what Kanye is to me, it’s hugely influential to me in how I chart his development as an artist in my head, and how I understand him and what everything he’s said after means to me.

But I can say the same, probably even more so, for “Jesus Walks,” which is a song that’s more about what Kanye is about now. My specific hesitations about “Jesus Walks” have to do mostly with how mainstream it is, or has become; in his appearance for SNL’s 40th anniversary, Kanye used it as his contextualizing opening number. I’d like to think that’s because it resonates with people and it changed their minds about stuff, but it’s also just a song that amps people up. I can’t ask everyone to enjoy everything on its deepest available level, though; I know there are many things in the world I enjoy without thinking about them much at all (drugstore candy, Taylor Swift, reality TV, dumb iPhone games). What I think I’m trying to say, in so many words, is I want you to know I am picking “Jesus Walks” not for the reasons a casual Kanye West consumer might, but for Reasons.

Winner: “Jesus Walks” to the finals.

“Runaway”►

vs.

“Blood on the Leaves”►

These are both, to me, very strong. They are both emotional, musically evocative, lyrically compelling. The main difference in composition is that “Runaway” brings in melodic Kanye, whereas “Blood on the Leaves” leaves all of the melodizing to the (incredible, incredible) sample.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is, on some days, my favorite album of Kanye’s, and “Runaway” is, I’d say, the best song on the album. It’s personal and relatable. If it has a weak point in wholly representing Kanye as an artist, it’s that his angriest, most arrogant moments in the song are tinged with bitterness and defeat. I often go to Kanye for answers, to fill gaps in my certainty and pretend for a minute like he does that I’m more than I am. “Runaway” is a Kanye without answers, nothing to offer but questions, problems, and mistakes.

“Blood on the Leaves” is about a more specific type of situation, and has more to do with Kanye’s celebrity than “Runaway” does. Kanye displays concern for the welfare of this apparent side-piece he’s getting involved with (“Before the limelight tore ya / Before the limelight stole ya / Remember we were so young / When I would hold you”), and only later when she gets pregnant does the resentment come out (“Then you gotta go and tell your girl and report that / Main reason ’cause your pastor said you can’t abort that / Now your driver say that new Benz you can’t afford that”). “Blood on the Leaves” is about a loss of innocence, anger about what happened ending with Kanye trying to soothe himself.

Ultimately, “Blood on the Leaves” feels like it contains important elements that we haven’t seen pay off all the way yet in Kanye’s development, rather than being the culmination of something, like “Runaway” is. That “Runaway” doesn’t contain confident answers seems like an answer itself: Even the Kanyes of the world have flaws they can’t own (yet), and that’s okay.

Winner: “Runaway”