Skip to content
News

Kanye West and Kid Cudi’s Kids See Ghosts Samples Kurt Cobain

Kanye West and Kid Cudi‘s duo album Kids See Ghosts was debuted on a ye-style listening party livestream late Thursday night, though it’s still unavailable on traditional streaming services as of about 10 a.m. Friday. As Pitchfork notes in a post of observations about the original stream, the album’s final song prominently samples Kurt Cobain.

The song’s title is difficult to confirm, due to multiple versions of the Kids See Ghosts tracklist that have been floating around. It samples a distinctive guitar part from “Burn the Rain,” a solo acoustic demo by Cobain that was released in 2015 as part of the Montage of Heck soundtrack, which provides the backbone for much of the song.

The Kids See Ghosts track itself is both bleak and uplifting, balancing verses about struggle and turmoil with a refrain of “Stay strong / Save me, Lord.” Kanye’s verse is a lament about violence and incarceration, and includes a reference to Alice Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense until President Trump pardoned her at the urging of West’s wife Kim Kardashian.

To hear the official version of the song, you’ll have to wait until Kids See Ghosts hits streaming services, which presumably will happen at some point today. For now, you can listen to Cobain’s “Burn the Rain” below.