So pretty much two months from now, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – Kanye West’s magnum opus, arguable to some – will have been out for 10 years. I wonder how West will commemorate it. Probably with a Twitter rant of some kind. He probably won’t. He has admittedly said that he doesn’t care for the album that much and considers it a backhanded apology for that VMA incident in 2009 that made him one of the most hated people in America. I was 15 years old when the album came out, but somehow completely missed the GOOD Fridays campaign that led up to it. For all I knew, ‘POWER’ was the only song he’d released before it. I want to say that I remember the exact first time I listened to it in full… I can’t. I do remember listening to it a lot in those first few days though. I was just glad he was rapping again. A decade has passed and it’s a bit of a bummer, a bit scary too.

‘Lost in the World’ is the final track on the album in which Kanye is present. Very much the climactic point of the whole record. It’s largely based on the song ‘Woods’ by Bon Iver, and I think West bought that band’s leader Justin Vernon into the studio to re-record some lines as well as just add some vocal embellishes on there too. The whole message of the track? Basically, being a rapper in this crazy world and dealing with the struggles that come along with it. And it’s done amidst this massive musical backdrop of pummeling percussion, synthesizers, vocal samples, live choir-vocals…. the lot. The track is essentially its chorus repeated with elements built on top with each iteration, apart from one sole verse from West full of contradictions that was later confirmed to be inspired by Kim Kardashian.

The only thing that bugs me about this song is that following outro, and the album closer, ‘Who Will Survive in America’ is its own separate track. ‘Lost’ feels horribly incomplete without it. If the birthday skit with Chris Rock was appended onto the end of ‘Blame Game’, why couldn’t the same be done with ‘Lost’ and ‘Who Will Survive’? Whatever. That’s just a minor thing for me. I’m there are a lot of people who appreciate the separation. Despite this minuscule issue I hold, there’s no denying that both tracks are worthy of their place in closing out one of the greatest hip-hop albums of this century.