Who Will Survive in America

"Who Will Survive in America" is the final track of the standard edition of American rapper Kanye West's album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The piece, featuring no vocals from West himself, serves as the album's coda and is built on a sample of Gil Scott-Heron's "Comment No. 1", a blunt, surrealist piece delivered by Scott-Heron in spoken word about the African-American experience and the faded idealism of the American dream. Scott-Heron's poem, which criticized the 1960s Revolutionary Youth Movement for failing to recognize the more basic needs of the African-American community, is edited to a reduced version on the track that, according to music writer Greg Kot, "retains its essence, that of an African-American male who feels cut off from his country and culture". By contrast, Sean Fennessey interprets it as "a too-serious denouement for an album that is more about the self’s little nightmares than some aching societal rejection".