This is Kanye West’s world and we are all just living in it—at least that is what the man himself and the swathes of Ye worshippers believe. If you find his music incomprehensible, it is because you either “just don’t get it” or that it is avant-garde music that is “way ahead of its time”. To most of us, chaos is Kanye and Kanye is chaos.
Ye, the showman: West sports a full face mask at a Donda listening event in Atlanta, USA | Getty Images
With the rapper’s latest album, Donda, the listener is served a smorgasbord of musical styles, contradictory thoughts and Christian symbolism in a 27-track, 108-minute-long album. One of the most awaited albums of the year, Donda is named after his mother who died in 2007, and features clips of her voice throughout. The production is grandiose and the length has us begging for an edit.
Kanye has always been a complex figure and his eccentricities are well documented. But in 2019, his music took a massive turn to reflect his newfound Christian faith. His ninth studio album, Jesus Is King, was a hurriedly compiled bunch of tracks in which he poured his heart out, particularly in the soulful ‘God Is’.
But it left us with questions. Was he just borrowing metaphors from Christianity? Was it going to be just a one-off album before he returns to his usual rap routine? With Donda, the first question is still hard to answer, but we now know that this shift is permanent.
The album is a projection of his muddled personality, beliefs and emotions. While Jesus is King famously had no curse words in it, the few expletives in Donda, by Kanye and his collaborators, seem to be censored in the current version of the album.
There are plenty of star guest voices including Jay-Z, The Weeknd, Young Thug, Travis Scott, Lil Baby, Kid Cudi and the late Pop Smoke. And that is where the album scores. For all his madness, Kanye is still one of the best music producers in the west. Standout performances include Roddy Ricch’s creamy vocals in ‘Pure Souls’, Fivio Foreign’s heartfelt verse in ‘Off The Grid’ and The Weeknd’s stirring tenor and signature hook in ‘Hurricane’.
The variety of voices adds soul to Kanye’s journey of figuring out his faith and personal demons. His confessions, his eagerness to be a good father, his struggles with his mental health and marriage, and his response to critics all come through in this opus.
That he leaves too much of his work in the abstract is a bummer. Or maybe Kanye, the living meme, has more depth than we can fathom.
Tailpiece: The track ‘Remote Control’ includes a few seconds from a 2018 meme video ‘I am the Globglogabgalab’. A few weeks earlier, popular YouTube gamer videogamedunkey streamed a parody of Kanye’s unreleased album, in which he used the same meme reference in one of the tracks! Did Kanye add that bit after listening to Dunkey’s fake track? It is anybody’s guess.