Single Review: Kanye West – ‘All Day’
2 min read
Taking time out of his busy schedule of staging award ceremony protests and gearing up for the release of So Help Me God, Kanye has finally found the time to release a second single from the upcoming album. After a leak last year and recent performances of the song, All Day has finally been released to the public. It marks his third collaboration with Paul McCartney, albeit one that serves as a contrast to previous collaborations Only One and FourFiveSeconds.
Rather than being a touching ballad or an acoustic song, All Day is a return to a hip hop sound. Buzzing electronics and adlibbing merge together for the introduction, gaining a drill style beat accompanying a keyboard similar to Only One once Kanye begins rapping. The song changes things up for the final minute, with Paul McCartney making a short appearance whistling and playing acoustic guitar. This interpolation of a 1969 McCartney song leads into a backdrop of dissonant synths layered with heavily edited vocals, closing the song.
It’s strange that this is what came from another Kanye and McCartney collaboration, but despite the obvious sonic differences to everything else we’ve heard from So Help Me God, the song is well constructed. Kanye, alongside a veritable legion of fellow producers, managed to fit himself and his collaborators Theophilus London, Allan Kingdom and the aforementioned McCartney into the song without making it feel too cluttered.
It’s just hard to avoid the fact that All Day isn’t as interesting as its predecessors. Rather than feeling like a true collaboration, it feels like an older Kanye song that samples one of Paul McCartney’s songs, and very inconsequentially at that. With McCartney’s appearance being so short, the last minute feels unnecessary in the grand scheme of the song. It’s a pleasant diversion, but considering this song has been in the works for the better part of a year, it doesn’t quite live up to expectations.
