"Blood on the Leaves", from Kanye's newest album Yeezus, uses the Nina Simone version of Billy Holiday's "Strange Fruit". For those of you who have heard this track before, you know how gut wrenching, and downright difficult it is to listen to. For those of you who don't know it - a bit of background: the song describes the torture and lynchings faced by African Americans in the southern United States many years ago. With references to the scent of burning flesh and spilled blood, the "Strange Fruit" hanging from trees is revealed to be the dead bodies of African Americans that have been lynched by an angry mob. Obviously, quite heavy stuff.
Flash forward to 2013, when Kanye snags the Strange Fruit sample for a song in which he...complains about his girlfriend. Yes, really. Here's a bit of what the media has to say about this seemingly inappropriate and troubling use of this somber song:
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Then there’s his use of Nina Simone’s gut-wrenching version of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”. While he obviously knows the power of that song, juxtaposing its stark anti-slavery imagery with the rest of “Blood on the Leaves”’ petty bitching about alimony payments and Jay-Z’s old girlfriends seems like a malicious non-sequitur.
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Surprise, surprise: A song from Kanye West’s new album has drawn a lot of controversy. “Blood on the Leaves” gets its most prominent sample from Nina Simone’s rendition of “Strange Fruit”:
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Blood on the leaves
No one seems to know what the sample is supposed to mean in the context of the song. Vulture’s Jody Rosen captures the emerging consensus view: “he’s well aware how audacious to interpolate that sacred song into a monstrously self-pitying Auto-Tune-strafed melodrama about what a drag it is when your side-piece won’t abort your love child.” Pitchfork calls it “a nightmarish story of divorce and betrayal.” The use of “Strange Fruit” is seen as either audacious—slipping a powerful song into a morally repugnant context—or offensive.
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On the former track, West pitch-bends Nina Simone's cover of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," -- a song about lynchings, with lyrics like "black bodies, swinging in the summer breeze" -- into the backdrop for ruminations on infidelity and alimony. Those who extolled the track suggest that the discomfort inherent in the juxtaposition is West's point, but others aren't buying that intention or just find it unsatisfying. " To cap it off," Dorian Lynskey writes, "he describes being forced to seat his wife and mistress on opposite sides of a basketball court and says, 'I call that apartheid.' Do you, Kanye? Do you really?"
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So what do YOU think? Has Kanye stepped way over the line and in selfishly comparing his own struggles to those faced by African American slaves who have been killed? Or does he get a free pass because "He's Kanye, and that's just what he does"? Can he get away with this in the name of "art"?
Please share your thoughts but do so in a sensitive and intelligent manner. Obviously this is a troubling topic and needs to be handled respectfully. It's been weighing on my mind since I first listened to Yeezus and I'd love to cultivate some quality discussion on the matter.
He butchered it. (Referring to Blood On The Leaves, not Strange Fruit)