Gone

Late Registration ends with three tracks, and the order matters. “Diamonds from Sierra Leone (Remix)” with Jay-Z is the closer everyone remembers. “Gone” — featuring Consequence and Cam’ron, produced with Jon Brion, sampling Otis Redding’s “It’s Too Late” — is the track that closes the album’s emotional argument before the coda. It is also one of the finest tracks in Kanye’s catalog, and it is consistently underacknowledged in proportion to its actual achievement.

Jon Brion’s arrangement — lush strings over the Otis Redding sample, the orchestral bed building as each verse arrives — represents Kanye and Brion’s collaboration at its most fully realized. The track was built in the period before Daft Punk’s influence moved Kanye toward electronic production, when he was still operating in the sample-and-orchestrate mode that defined College Dropout and Late Registration, and the result is a closing statement that feels genuinely Olympian.

Kanye’s final verse is thirty relentless bars of introspection about fame, escape, and the specific loneliness of achieving what you spent your life wanting. Complex named it one of his ten best verses. The content — the desire to escape the conditions that success has created, the knowledge that escape is impossible, the decision to go anyway — anticipates themes that would dominate his later work.

“And I’m gonna show y’all what it feels like / To be gone, gone, gone / Bye bye.”

The orchestral outro swells into something that several listeners have compared to Philip Glass — not in style but in the quality of accumulation, the sense of an emotional architecture reaching its full height. It’s the correct comparison. Jon Brion knew exactly what he was building.

Pitchfork placed “Gone” at #71 among the 200 best songs of the 2000s. It should have been higher.