Who Will Survive in America
| "Who Will Survive in America" | |
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| Song |
"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] The piece, featuring no vocals from West himself, serves as the album's coda and is built on a sample of Gil Scott-Heron's "Comment No. 1",[2] 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".[3] 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".[4]
Kanye West’s “Who Will Survive in America” functions as a modern day negative critique of the inequality of opportunity in the United States and the falsity of the American Dream. The album, released in 2010, seeks to comment on the continual repression of African Americans in the United States today and the dichotomy between the American ideals of freedom and every day life for African Americans, whom Kanye argues do not have the equal opportunity to pursue the American Dream. Kanye’s profound choice to sample Scott-Heron’s piece from 1970 reinforces the fact that African Americans are still not yet treated equally 40 years later. The album comes at a time of widespread police brutality and ensuing race riots across the United States which is still trending today, revealing the inherent bias in the treatment of African American people and is all the more significant in its expression of this modern day inequality.
