Tear Jerker / Kanye West

Tearjerking moments from Kanye West.

• Large parts of 808s and Heartbreak, especially the concluding track, "Pinocchio Story." After the deliberate iciness and polished nature of the other songs comes this lo-fi, mono, off-key, improvisational live track that serves as an epilogue to the album. Given the context of the album and the recording (it followed the death of his mother and a breakup with his girlfriend), there is something deeply sad about Kanye nearly in tears singing that he "just wants to be a real boy" while the audience screams obliviously. He originally didn't want to put it on the album, instead planning on concluding it with "Coldest Winter," but Beyoncé convinced him to keep it on.
  • The aforementioned "Coldest Winter" stands out as particularly heart-wrenching with its sparse instrumental and repetitive, despair-filled lyrics. Special mention goes to the final chorus of the song:
    Goodbye, my friend
    I won't ever love again
    Never again
• Parts of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. "Runaway" and "Blame Game" are particularly good examples.
  • "Lost in the World" especially, which is not helped by the transition of the bitter "Who Will Survive in America" outro followed by clapping.
• Some of his infamous on-stage rants can qualify. His speech at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2013 is particularly notable- about five minutes in he starts screaming about how he lost his mother. You get the impression that all his narcissism and publicity stunts are just his way of attempting to cope with a death that he's never really gotten over.
  • Another case was a concert where he stopped the show to give a long, off-topic rant about running for president (being "on [his] Trump shit"), which then led to him begging Jay-Z to call off alleged snipers Kanye fully believed that Jay had sent to kill him (which makes absolutely no sense since he and Jay are old friends and would have no reason to want Kanye dead even if he could do that). This might seem comical at first but became Harsher in Hindsight when it became known Kanye has severe bipolar disorder and was having a manic episode which wasn't being treated.
• The entirety of "Only One," which serves not only as an ode to his late mother, but a message to his young daughter too. Especially sad when his voice audibly breaks from emotion at the line, "I just want you to do me a favor."
• "Roses", which is about when Kanye's grandma being hospitalized under conditions so severe that she could die at any minute, and her doctors can't even do their procedures since anesthesia will put her even more at risk of death.
• And now we have "Real Friends", which is about Kanye having become distant from friends and relatives in the wake of his rise to fame. The mix of sympathy and resentment, combined with the gorgeous instrumental, really makes this one hit home.
• "Hey Mama", while initially an incredibly heartwarming and endearing song, has become very retrospectively sad, considering Kanye's mother has passed away since the creation of the song, and live performances of the song are sparse. His performance of the song at the 2008 Grammys only a few months after the passing is sad enough, but then there's this Yeezus Tour performance, where he starts the song but then gets overwhelmed with emotion and falls to his knees, even with the crowd trying to support him. He then just motions for the DJs to skip to the next track ("Street Lights"). The image makes you wonder if past the controversial, angry, and vicious exterior is just a sad boy who still misses his mother.
• The soul-crushing but comforting unreleased track "I Feel Like That" is Kanye at his most vulnerable and honest. It's a mellow, drum heavy R&B song with spoken-word verses where Kanye asks the listener about their anxieties and fears before admitting he himself feels like it all the time. It's completely heartbreaking and shockingly personal, with Ye revealing he has suicidal thoughts at one point. It's one of the most passionate songs Kanye has ever made, which has sadly never seen the light of day officially.
• Like the example above it, "Never See Me Again" is another unreleased track. While "I Feel Like That" had just a little bit of comfort in the You Are Not Alone sense, this song does not. A 9-minute long song created during the lull period between the VMA incident and the release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy while Kanye was in Japan, this track was described as some to be a "audio suicide note". It is completely soul-crushing and could have potentially been Kanye's very last song.
• There's something heart-wrenching about "Lost In the World", coming off about a Heel Realization about the fakeness of the celebrity lifestyle and simply being with a loved one, empowered by the "RUN FROM THE LIGHTS!" choir chant. And then there's the transition with the Call-Back to the chanting from "Power" and closing out with a bitter rhetoric about America in "Who Will Survive in America".
• ye as an album is without a doubt Kanye's most introspective and personal album since 808s and Heartbreak, with a major emphasis on the state of his own mental health. When he's not being cathartic, he's painting a really tragic image of the kind of thoughts that were going through his head.
  • "I Thought About Killing You" can be seen as Nightmare Fuel due to its unsettling beat and lyrics that can be seen as Kanye wanting to kill the listener... until you realize he's speaking about himself.
    See, if I was tryin' to relate it to more people
    I'd probably say I'm struggling with loving myself, because that seems like a common theme
    But that's not the case here
    I love myself way more than I love you
    And I think about killing myself
    So, best believe, I thought about killing you today
  • "Yikes" details Kanye's opioid addiction following his hospitalization circa late 2016-2017. Combined with his ending rant about suffering from Bipolar Disorder and clearly acknowledging his erratic behavior, the refrains of how scared his suicidal thoughts made him are especially harrowing.
• "Cudi Montage" from Kids See Ghosts is a tear-jerker right from the opening sample (an unfinished demo from Kurt Cobain), and both Kid Cudi's and Kanye's verses are sad in their own ways. The final chorus - "Lord shine your light on me, save me please" - can hit especially hard for some listeners.
• "Can't Tell Me Nothing" is a particularly poignant work of Self-Deprecation that describes the existential emptiness of success and Conspicuous Consumption.
  I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny
  And what I do? Act more stupidly
  Bought more jewelry, more Louis V, my mama couldn't get through to me
• DONDA itself has a few moments, in particular with "Jesus Lord" where it's pretty clear that despite everything, Kanye still misses his mother dearly and finds refuge in Christianity as a way to hope she's at peace.
  • The opening "Donda Chant" is both unnerving and heartbreaking in its simplicity, chanting Donda's name amidst a silent background for just under a full minute. It's delivered in such a rhythmic, yet dry and despondent way that fans have theorized it likely represents his mother's heartbeat as she passes away (or her age at the time of her death, as the chanting goes on fifty-eight times) It really doesn't help that at the listening party, the visuals for the song include numerous images of Kanye and his mother and finish with a dove ascending to the sky.
  • "Jonah" was a song made in dedication to the late Jonah Ware, a young Louisville artist who tragically died in a gunshot death in August 2020 at the age of 19. Both of the song's features, Vory and Lil Durk^note The song was originally Vory's — after releasing a snippet of it in December 2020, it got passed between hands, making its way to Lil Durk and eventually Kanye, both knew him personally, and their performances — while still beautiful and heartfelt — put on full blast just how devastated and hurt they were left from his all-too-early passing.
• The unreleased "By Your Side", featuring Kanye singing the line "I'll always be by your side" with an angelic like beat can come off like this, especially with some edits being put of Donda West speaking about her son.
• The whole track "Blood On the Leaves" is a six-minute epic that tells the story of a failed romance that ends in a bitter divorce, which is made even darker by the sample of Nina Simone's "Strange Fruit" (an anti-racist protest song that talks about the lynching of African-Americans). This became Harsher in Hindsight after his divorce from Kim Kardashian in 2021.
• "True Love" is essentially this, with Kanye ranting and lamenting about how his divorce with Kim has left him broken and worrying about whether or not his kids love him over what's happened and assuring them that he's "not gone". All while combing his frustrations with the late XXXTENTACION's verses simply being:
  True love, shouldn't be this complicated
  I thought I'd die in your arms
  I thought I'd die in your-

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