And starting tomorrow: AMNESTY WEEK 2K10…

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[5.69]

Chuck Eddy: Point of song is kinda “You don’t wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel,” except Pee Wee said it first. The more self-critical hooklines grab me until they start boring me (though they always remind me queasily of Gnarls Barkley); Pusha-T’s rap is just dull, period. Plinky-plonky production plinks and plonks. Only line that stirs my brain is the one about jerkoffs not taking work off, because what does being a workaholic have to do with anything? Well, OK, maybe something, but if so, the Isley Bros already said it way funkier back in “Work To Do.” Track-as-a-whole comes off approximately as smarmy as I’ve come to expect, and makes me feel less guilty about not caring if I hear the album.
[6]

Martin Skidmore: I’ve never really clicked with Kanye, and this isn’t helping. The odd use of the piano is interesting, but the rapping is ordinary (Pusha T never struck me as a terrific rapper either), sometimes leaning firmly towards very bad singing. Take the horrible rock guitar break out and hand the backing track to a better rapper, and that might well make something very good.
[4]

Tyrone Palmer: Kanye West’s douchebaggery has been a central theme throughout his music since College Dropout. It is a large part of his appeal – his self-deprecation and self-awareness is totally endearing (or maddening). This song is a perfect summation of the Kanye West ethos: it’s Kanye West doing his best “Kanye West” — toasting the douchebags and assholes over a trip-hop inspired backing track. Lines like “I sent this girl a picture of my dick” would be cringe-inducing coming from anyone else, but they’re par for the course with Kanye, and ultimately that is exactly why we love (or hate) him.
[8]

Zach Lyon: I don’t see how this whole deal, Kanye’s whole methodology behind apologizing profusely to everyone he’s ever wronged to the media and then releasing a stream of singles about being an asshole (or, as it’s awkwardly edited on the radio, a “…toast for the…”) can be interpreted as anything but annoying. I could see how someone would say that songs like this and “Monster” are filled with reflection and introspection, but really, fuck that, the guy just doesn’t know what to do with his brand. Or maybe he’s a genius of a capitalist and people (RS/P4k/uuugh) actually fall for the conflicted-prince storyline he’s peddling. What’s truly silly is the fact that every review (including this one) of his new shit is 90% mythology and 10% The Work Itself. When it really comes down to it, the only thing that matters is that Kanye was never a very talented writer, never a very talented rapper, he hasn’t gotten any better in those departments since Late Registration. He is only ever as good as his beats and his features. And hey, at least Pusha is pretty respectable here.
[5]

Al Shipley: Everything outside the hook is a charmless mess, and even that chorus boasts the awkward mix of inspiration and first draft clumsiness that defines Kanye more and more these days. “The jerkoffs that’ll never take work off”? Yeah, how about those cads that never use their sick days, they sure do fit into the rhyme scheme well, huh?
[1]

Edward Okulicz: Kind of impressive how Kanye so expertly recreates the fag-end of trip-hop, dull production and gloomily inept lyrics and all. The chorus doesn’t even scan properly; it sounds as if the lyric was half-finished, and the verses, replete as they are with details about sexting, elicit yawns rather than “oh my god, did he just go there?” Hardly provocative stuff – Kanye is capable of taking his troubled persona and making great pop with it — see “Paranoid” — but it’s never a given.
[3]

Mallory O’Donnell: Poor Kanye. I’m pretty sure he could write an amazing tune while blind drunk and falling through an empty elevator shaft, but then he has to go and eff it all up by putting words and stuff on top. Words and stuff which pretty much address the fact that he always effs it up. It’s a nice conceit, but unfortunately it amounts to little more than another exercise in self-mythologizing and chest-thumping, buried underneath a confessional about as contrite as a Tucker Max quip. So yeah, as far as songs by unrepentant shitasses about how cool it is to be a shitass go, this is still pretty mediocre.
[3]

Alex Macpherson: Only interested if Taylor Swift gets on the remix, to be honest – really, the lilting singalong melody of the chorus is just calling out for her to join in. She’s already missed a chance to be (even more) amazing by failing to get on stage with Kanye and do it in front of the world. Maybe it’s just that she’s better at being a triumphalist asshole these days than Kanye, whose “crazy” Twittering and sexting and such just seem faintly pitiable when his music is so weak, flat and uninteresting.
[5]

Anthony Easton: The only interesting line in the song – about talking to god, like He’s there – is immediately negated with the surety of His presence. Dull from that point on, with no attempts whatsoever at expanding an already moribund practice.
[3]

Alfred Soto: As Kanye West’s confidence in the studio has swollen, so has his penchant for grotesqueries no one need hear. My first thought upon hearing “Runaway” was Death of a Ladies’ Man, the album in which Leonard Cohen met Phil Spector and found a symphonic correlative for self-pity and mocking women who actually thought they could redeem his terrible performances in bed. “A picture of my dick/I don’t know what it is with females/But I’m not that good at that shiiii-t”, moans the unredeemed cad. After the shock faded, my usual fascination with a certain kind of masculine self-disgust asserted itself. 808s & Heartbreak failed because Kanye assumed that singing best conveyed his sorrow; his sonic details adduced the depth of his ‘heartache’ more fully than his vocoderized pipes. He gets it right here: note the minor key rumbling of what could be sampled strings or a synth at the 2:40 mark adding terror to the “run away from me, baby” part that’s the song’s best moment. Then again, “Runaway” may be his “Love The Way You Lie”.
[7]

John Seroff: Both the video and the song for “Runaway” serve as ongoing proof of Kanye’s continuous drive to be taken seriously as an artiste; I halfway expected an opening announcement skit exhorting listeners to turn off their cell phones to adorn the start of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. West does his best production work when he’s given enough latitude to cycle through layers of textures and ideas at his leisure but kept on a short enough leash that he doesn’t either color exclusively outside the lines or just phone it in. 808 and Heartbreak‘s stabs at vulgar, tortured minimalist emo-poprap as art came off as self-involved, barely-engaged set pieces to me, more congealed than crafted. My expectations for “Runaway” were duly lowered, but it feels like a step back in the right direction, spare but with a dense sonic heart. Shame about the lyrics and Kanye’s almost-as-good-as-Eminem singing voice though; I would really like some more circumstance to go with this pomp.
[6]

Renato Pagnani: The anti-“Heartless”, this is what Kanye would’ve came up with had he waited six months to record 808s & Heartbreak instead of six days.
[9]

Jonathan Bogart: Graceful meld of 808s And Heartbreak-style songwriting and the careful attention to sonic detail that’s marked his production work for a decade. I’m not sure the song can mean much to anyone not named Kanye West, but that’s the price you pay for being the most vitally important narcissist working today.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: The sadness at the heart of “Runaway” isn’t Kanye’s sorrow at his own unpleasantness, but rather the sick realization that he doesn’t care enough to change. If that skeletal piano figure were augmented by industrial rhythms rather than boom-bap drums it would be a Nine Inch Nails tune, only with Trent Reznor outfitted in Louis Vuitton and cursed with a case of public logorrhea. Self-loathing is a kind of narcissism as well, so this is less new terrain for an eternally vain West and more a novel means of traversing it. The innovation is that his self-infatuation has shifted from coyly copping to having to get dressed up nice every time he heads out to buy milk and eggs to one that doesn’t notice anything outside of his own skull. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a flawed album, but its best moments, “Runaway” included, often result from this hall of mirrors Kanye’s set up inside his own head warping. It distorts and repeats, his own brilliant ideas overcoming form and becoming content. “Run away fast as you can” is a really shitty plan, a small and miserable one, and West realizes this. But he can’t come up with a better plan either; so caught up in his own funhouse is he that he can only involve us in the depths of his own fatuous sadness, and, worse, demand that we acknowledge the brilliance of it all.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: What’s most striking about “Runaway” is how haphazard it is. No, I don’t mean the production; it nails the mammoth/wistful feel that, say, Eminem’s producers keep trying for, three singles straight. But just listen to Kanye. His vocals sound like he’s singing off-pitch in some other key, and every line’s delivered under duress, apologies-turned-raspberries turned confessions most people would pretend never happened. Half of them don’t even scan right. He leaves Pusha T in the sequence as if he’s even relevant. And Kanye clearly knows just how many douchebags are going to join him singing the chorus — so he lollygags through that just like the rest. Everything here is put together wrong. Which is sort of the point.
[8]

Josh Langhoff: Way to show the Primitive Radio Gods how it’s done! Although I will say this: if you title your song “Runaway” it’s bound to be good, sort of like if you call your song “Do It Again” (the conflicting implications of these phenomena will be fully explored in my forthcoming EMP paper, Should I Stay Or Should I Stay Somewhere Else?: Primitive Radio Gods and the Ineluctable Modality of the Transitive). Speaking of which, does anybody remember the Pearl Jam song “Who You Are”, which according to my copious research followed “Waiting To Use the Phone Except I Don’t Have Any Quarters” at #1 on the Modern Rock Chart? Well, don’t look it up. ‘96 was bleak, man.
[7]