Late Registrations longest track, the seven-minute-long "We Major", implements exuberant, amplified backing vocals and a "splashy disco groove" featuring a bassline, electric piano glissandos, and horns. The melody of "Hey Mama" is laced with a looped "La-la-la" vocal sample from the 1972 track "Today Won't Come Again" by Donal Leace, while its beat contains Tin Pan Alley-styled drums. Additionally, the song features vocoder-processed background vocals, an xylophone solo, and a cascading synth outro. "Celebration" is a cinematic-styled song that includes contributions from a 20-piece orchestra and contains a sample of the KayGees's "Heavenly Dream" (1979). A columnist for The Guardian described the song as evoking "the lavish 1970s psychedelic soul of Rotary Connection". Some of the most elaborate orchestral arrangement expressed on the album is contained within its final official track "Gone". The composition begins with a vocal sample of "It's Too Late" (1965) by Otis Redding that develops into a two-chord piano ostinato, followed by a simplistic funk beat. As the song progresses, its structure gradually morphs and experiences growing musicality. The composition later adds a string arrangement from ten violinists, four violists, and four cellists, which initially comes in brief staccato bursts and acts as a counterpoint to the rise and fall of West's voice. After its third verse, the song enters an instrumental passage. Themes and lyrics According to Time magazine's Josh Tyrangiel, Late Registration acts as a demonstration of West's deliberate storytelling mode. West stated that his goal for the album was to touch on topics that people from all walks of life could find relatable, while remaining true to himself, intending his rapping to be "just as ill as Jadakiss and just as understandable as Will Smith". University of North Carolina scholar Kevin Pyon sees Late Registration as a continuation from The College Dropout in demonstrating how West's Christian heritage has informed his relationship to the capitalist market economy. In his analysis, the album reaffirms West's "paradoxical articulation of market and religion—that is, his simultaneous sacred critique and secular valorization of capitalism". The scholar elaborated that West being an authentic Christian "does not replace or merge with his market authenticity as a materialistic rapper but co-exists with it in uneasy tension". West later told Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal in 2021 that being "under capitalist rule" is "killing us" and declared, "It's time to change that." Robert Christgau summed up West's lyrical persona to be "mammon