Man, to be a fan of Kanye West in these times. I’m not a huge fan of the guy myself, not like those stan-like, crazy ones you can find out there. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a full solo Kanye project since 2016’s The Life of Pablo. Everything since then has been met by me with a firm shrug of the shoulders. But the man’s made some good music, you have to admit. He said some things all those months ago that you can’t excuse. Heck, he might have even said another by the time this is out. I’m not looking to excuse them. I honestly couldn’t care that much about the guy. I mean he doesn’t know I exist, right? Not much point in investing too much time into what he’s doing. But ‘POWER’ is the song that I’m writing about today because it’s the track that’s next up in the list, so if you’re aggrieved by the mere mention of Ye’s name, might just wanna skip this post and wait for the next.

I have a small, small memory of seeing the ‘listen to the new single ‘Power’ by Kanye West’ webpage – I think on NME – when the track was released in the summer of 2010, a few months before My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released. Obviously, this was the first thing West had released since the whole Taylor Swift/VMAs controversy, which had also happened a few months before. And to the 15-year-old I was at the time, the main thing I took away from it was that I was glad that he was just rapping again. No matter how influential 808s & Heartbreak is considered to be, singing Kanye has never the era of his that I’ve ever looked on too fondly. On ‘POWER’, he was back doing what he does best, sounding like he had nothing left to lose with the amount of confidence in his delivery. I didn’t realize the magnitude of this track off that initial listen on the NME website, and it wasn’t until I heard it within the context of the full album that I did. When that moment came, it all sort of started to make sense.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, here was Kanye West returning with a huge middle finger to anyone who criticized him in the aftermath of the VMAs incident – using the hate as fuel to write a cinematic hip-hop song telling you why he’s actually one of the greatest to have ever lived. Like he says in the lyrics, it’s essentially a supervillain’s theme song. Barack Obama called him an jackass. He was mocked by the cast of Saturday Night Live. He was one of the most disliked people in the US. That title still hasn’t faded that much since that time. And yet with ‘POWER’, he bathes in the glory that he was able to make so many people react so negatively as they did, literally laughing it off before telling them how small-minded in comparison to the treasures within his vault of a mind. This track also introduced me to King Crimson’s ’21st Century Schizoid Man’, which I have to thank it for. Not saying that I would never have listened to that particular song. But I would have heard it much, much later had it not been used as the main sample in ‘POWER’. Only made sense to have one extraordinary track be utilized so effectively in another.