15 Best Kanye West Tracks

3. Blood On The Leaves (Yeezus)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0QcxWPB59o Best Line: "She instagram herself like bad bitch alert, he instagram his watch like mad rich alert" Sampling a classic Billie Holliday song about the lynching of African Americans in the South and repurposing it into a song about the dangers about getting your girlfriend pregnant... sounds exactly like something Kanye West would do. He uses the song without irony, but more importantly he uses the song with self-awareness. Kanye understands what the song meant to black people when it came out in 1939 (and what it could still mean today), but he fits it into his more personal artistic purposes because that's what he does with samples: he takes something that means something to everyone and makes it about himself. But isn't that the goal of most great artists, to leave their stamp on their work? More than being a think-piece about postmodern ideas of authorship, Blood on the Leaves is a great song. When the horns of TNGHT's R U Ready? come on one minute and seven seconds in it is like the scene from Pulp Fiction where John Travolta sticks the syringe with adrenaline straight into Uma Thurman's heart, an explosion of life-altering proportions. By the time Kanye gets around to his verse the song is already a classic, but he then proceeds to blow you away with his patented brand of humor mixed with insecurity. Blood on the Leaves is the highlight of Yeezus, and it may be the song of the year so far.