Kanye West song’s becoming soundtrack to this summer’s movies

When he’s not dropping albums, fathering babies with reality-show celebrities or feeling uneasy about answering questions, Kanye West has another pursuit: supplying songs to popular movies.

He’s long been a favourite of music supervisors: Miami Vice, Jarhead and Coach Carter all feature Kanye tracks. So do Mission Impossible: 3 and across the Hollywood spectrum, the emo coming-of-age tale It’s Kind of a Funny Story.

But if you’ve had the sense that Kanye has become especially prevalent in films lately, you wouldn’t be wrong. The Chicago rapper has tracks in no fewer than three movies currently in theatres: The Hangover Part III, The Great Gatsby and The Bling Ring.

The piano-driven Dark Fantasy makes an appearance in Hangover, continuing the musician’s pattern of providing a backing track to the Todd Phillips franchise. The religion-skeptical No Church in the Wild with Jay-Z, helps bolster Gatsby’s over-the-top, nothing-but-the-cult-of-money vibe.

And in Bling Ring, the King Crimson-sampled Power and ode-to-the-good-things All the Lights (chorus lyric: “Fast life, drug life, thug life, rock life, every night, all of the lights”) provide an added gloss to the indulgent lifestyle of Sofia Coppola’s protagonists (not that they needed it).

On Monday, Kanye popped up yet again with the release of The Wolf of Wall Street trailer. The spot features Black Skinhead, off his much-hyped new album Yeezus. The inclusion of the song (which itself references movies such as 300 and Inglourious Basterds proves once again that if it’s a movie about Leonardo DiCaprio and greed, a Kanye track is what’s called for. (Expect more Yeezus cuts in movies in the seasons ahead.)