Top 100 2010s: 98. KANYE WEST - "Runaway" (Patreon)

One of the decade’s themes – across media of all kinds – has been dudes winning plaudits for admitting what shitheads they are. For me, the ‘asshole confessional’ style mostly makes for boring art: the scab-picking and raw honesty oscillates wanly between morose and narcissistic. “Runaway” incarnates all the style’s worst impulses at extreme length, so why do I rate it?

Three reasons. First, once I had this song in my life I didn’t need anything else remotely similar – no other soul-dredging is likely to compare to “Runaway”’s pushing the simultaneous limits of self-flagellation and self-regard.

Second – and this goes for all the better stuff on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – the opulent extra-ness of it wins me over despite myself. From that portentious one-note piano intro, to ending the song with four minutes of corrosive autotuned flailing, it goes all-in on fucked grandiosity. MBDTF is a determined attempt – one of the last, maybe? – to make a ‘classic album’, it gives me the sense of a man making recording decisions with at least one eye on future documentaries about them. The force of will carried a lot of people along. 

“Runaway” is a massive, self-destructive, mess of a song. That absurd intro leads into one of the hookiest choruses Kanye West has written, which he follows with a couplet of such sleazebag self-disgust it might be from an Arab Strap song. Pusha T’s verse – controlled disdain next to West’s purgative thrashing – is a snapshot of the viciousness the rest of the song confesses to, a reminder of why forgiveness is not deserved.

And third, I’m not immune to feeling this toxic. One thing that can make great pop music great is its power of crystallising a sliver of feeling in a single line or moment. Those feelings aren’t always noble. In the real world, when you realise that you’ve been a fuck-up, or how damaging you can sometimes be, the right next step is to pick yourself up and start finding out how to put it right. That isn’t what “Runaway” is about – it’s the song for the selfish moment before that, where you want to be irredeemable. You’re a black hole and you know it, but at least that still makes you the centre.