The 2007 song Kanye West describes as “life-defining”
Of all of Kanye West’s hit songs, there’s one that Ye himself once claimed represents his personality most astutely. But it wasn’t exactly the most obvious choice.
‘Drunk and Hot Girls’ appeared on Ye’s third album Graduation, which included the far more famous songs ‘Stronger,’ ‘Good Life,’ and ‘Homecoming.’ Released in 2007, Graduation saw Kanye shift from his more soulful style to one befitting his popularity and ability to sell out massive venues. It bore a notably bigger sound than anything he’d put out before.
‘Drunk and Hot Girls’ was an album track, but Kanye, as he explained to Rolling Stone in 2007, believed it to be the song that “represents [him] the most.” More than ‘Touch the Sky,’ ‘Jesus Walks’ or anything else that featured on Graduation.
“That’s my life-defining song,” he said at the time. “Jay-Z said that that’s the anthem, a stadium-killer.” As well as attracting Jay-Z’s approval, ‘Drunk and Hot Girls’ also received the backing of Yasiin Bey, who, still operating under his old stage name of Mos Def, featured on it.
The track sees Kanye venting his frustration with hot, but very drunk girls approaching and trying to get with him. It’s an odd song, on the one hand presenting a very famous figure expressing a sort of despair at the attention that his fame brings him, but also adopting a sort of misogynistic tone as he does so.
In any case, in 2007 Kanye felt the song represented his perspective better than any other. “At the end of the day,” he told Rolling Stone by way of explanation, “everything relates back to trying to do something for a girl.”
His “entire life” could be characterised this way, he claimed, “from being a five-year-old trying to reach for that porno magazine all the way to the 30-year-old getting into an argument with his girlfriend.” Operating for the sake of a girl summed up his “whole fuckin’ life.”
Ye then went on to paint a rather old-fashioned caricature of male-female romantic relationships. He insisted that a man’s role in life was “to provide for that girl in that white dress, that missing picture in your wedding photo.”
He liked the sound of that. “That was poetically put, if I do say so myself,” he said, although the poetry of his statement is questionable at best.