Review Summary: God's not finished.
How can we reconcile someone like Kanye West?
The largest problem Donda has is anyone even being able to hear the music over the deafening voice of the music industry’s most prominent and unstable narcissist. The noisiest entity in culture, Kanye has been a five-alarm fire in the past several weeks, literally lighting himself on fire in front of hundreds of thousands of fans this past weekend. If there’s anything about the man you can appreciate – at least he’s honest. West has done nothing but cannibalize himself. After years of unmitigated mental breakdowns in full sight of everyone pushed him deep into mediocrity and evangelical Christianity, Kanye came out of the shadows last month to introduce everyone to his most unhinged, chaotic, bizarre and absurd social performance of his yet. There’s something respectable and welcomed about a black man being so unapologetically egocentric and being as successful as any white man to play the same game, but goddamn, if we have learned any lesson these past five years – you can only carnival bark for so long before every just needs a damn nap.
Donda leaves no hope for that.
What do we look for in art? The problem with Kanye’s music is there is no hope of separating the art from the artist. Underneath the raging waters of his gargantuan ego, there is a quivering, tender core of pure vulnerability, and what has always made Kanye great is his uncanny ability to present himself bare in front of the world, married to the most extravagant and vivid pop instincts of a generation. It’s raw confessional autobiography. While there is usually something inherently relatable, likeable and even desirable about such vulnerability, when that vulnerability is the underside of the world’s most dazzling and outlandish ego, one must pardon a whole lot of ridiculous things to empathize. If one is looking for art with clear and compact vision, one won’t find it here. Kanye hasn’t made a fully-envisioned record since Yeezus – he makes hastily assembled collages now. If one is looking for fine-tuned masterful demonstrations of talent and skill, it’s found in abundance here, but nothing is fine-tuned. Very little is even organized. But, suppose one is looking for daring, ambitious, intensely creative representations of the human experience – well, in that case, you’ll find no greater a representation than you will with Donda, Kanye’s most daring, ambitious, deeply creative record in over a decade.
But, one must pardon Kanye first. There’s been a shift in Kanye’s music since Jesus is King, and it’s not the sudden somersault into Jesus music. Instead, it’s something far more profound and evermore vulnerable than what’s been asked of listeners before.
Kanye is asking for clemency.
It’s hard to contextualize this project without referring back to the three album release parties held – the first of which, held over 40 days ago, featured a very different, shockingly unfinished record – which opened with a nearly seven minute version of 24. That version of 24 starts similarly to the final product, except terribly mastered, Kanye singing far out of tune. As the song reaches past the three minute runtime of the final product, branching out into the following four, there’s only really one significant difference. Kanye singing “we’re going to be okay” over and over and over and over again, to the point of hoarse desperation. The final trimmed version is far superior, converting the undercurrent of frenzied forlorning into pure rebellious jubilee. It’s that dichotomy of two radically different emotions, listless despair and joyful, resistant faith, that lays the foundation for everything on Donda. In some ways, it is to be expected – Kanye has been pursuing a sound of gospel-hip-hop fusion since 2015. Still, that sound coming to fruition in a project centered around the death of Kanye’s mother and the collapse of his family makes a stark cocktail indeed. That tug of war is embodied prominently in the sound itself. Most tracks carry instruments of pure uplift, organs prominently, but choir work is also often underlying, when not pushed to the very front. The drum work here can be sparse, as many have criticized the record for - but what the drum work is – is impactful, dark, muddy, deep – anchorlike – tethering the rising tides of Donda to its murky depths. Much of it is thrillingly cinematic. This is a record of profound grief, vulnerability and overbearing darkness, stitched together with moments of pure praise. An entanglement of ascension and descension. It’s a sentence I never expected to write, but Kanye finishing the record, modestly stating “he’s done miracles on me” in an offering to his God, is one of the most remarkable, mature, complicated, beautiful representations of faith I have heard in any media. Kanye, who proclaimed that he is a God in 2013, now comes to us as a very flawed human being. It’s that honest vulnerability, the reckoning of all the past that proceeded it, that allows this project to become more than the sum of its parts.
There are brief moments of this record that are undercooked and questionable – the less said about the Pop Smoke cut, the better – but I think more than anything else, the record is an exercise in thoughtful simplicity. Jesus Lord, possibly the best song Kanye has ever written, is deceptively plain – a 15 second loop of rudimentary drums, less than a few chords of bass and a sample –underneath the most meaningful verse Kanye has ever laid down and an absolute showcasing from Jay Electronica. Sometimes the scarce production is a mission statement, all three or four elements impactful with purpose. Less often, it seems like the record is on a ration – but what the production always does is give this record a grittiness that feeds richly into the album’s themes.
What the minimalistic production also does exceptionally well is highlight the performances on it. There is a prominent criticism that there isn’t a whole lot of Kanye for an hour and half Kanye record (putting the Pt. 2 tracks to the side). What Kanye there is often doesn’t carry the tracks. Rather, an incredible cascade of features just gives the performance of their lives. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a very valid criticism. Kanye’s role is almost akin to a conductor, and what’s entirely so wrong about West using a roster of his peers as tools to materialize his vision? One of the most impressive aspects of Donda is how much it is used as a platform to uplift the features within it. Lil Yachty in Off The Grid, the Weeknd in Hurricane, Fivio in Praise God, Kid Cudi and Don Toliver in Moon, Vory in just about the whole record – all examples of artists giving performances better than what you’d find in their own projects. If you consider further on how these songs are constructed, Kanye is typically the last artist to enter in these tracks, almost as if he wrote the beat for the artist being featured and then filled in whatever hole was left remaining. There’s even a strain of thought that the reason the Pop Smoke track even exists is so that the family could get royalties. It’s downright Christ-like. It’s a testament to not only Kanye’s production, as bare as it can be, but also just to his presence itself – consistently bringing the very best out of who he’s working with.
Kanye certainly has his moments as well. West riding a drill beat on the end of Off The Grid is perhaps the most inspired and even technical –as strange as that is to say – rapping of his entire career. Heaven and Hell is a similar showcase, simple, masterful, impactful songcraft married with Kanye’s ever-rising intensity. And then there is Come to Life, undoubtedly Kanye’s best singing performance of his career, in a truly emotional and profoundly beautiful song which clearly showcases West's growth as an artist. To experience Kanye is to navigate his blemishes. The project is admittedly overlong –the album doesn’t need Jonah and Moon, nor Praise God and Junya or OK OK and Remote Control or New Again and Pure Souls, but even when the record suffers from redundancy and fatigue, the creativity and the quality of the tracks stay remarkably consistent – the variety on this record is wide-ranging, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that a peak-moment in Kanye’s career tends to land every 15 minutes. Far more troublesome are the features of Chris Brown, Marilyn Manson and DaBaby within the record. There’s no excusing or justifying it. But, Kanye and all his very questionable chaotic decisions are who he is, and wrestling with his myriad flaws is perhaps the most captivating aspect of grappling with him as an artist. This record isn’t polished, production-wise or content-wise, but even accounting for all of the factors that drag it down, it comes off more authentic for the exchange.
Granted, that unrivaled authenticity is true for any Kanye project of the last 12 years - what truly sets Donda apart is the ceaseless ambition of the project. Something is invigorating about experiencing a man at a profound crossroads in his life use those emotions to swing for the fence again and again. I always come back to the two minute and a half instrumental closure of God Breathed, which is so overwhelmingly extravagant, even in its needlessness, that it sets an early tone for the record of rare combustion. There’s not much telling where the record is ever going to turn. After a half-decade of half-hour projects with songs that sounded like they were written in the space of an afternoon, if nothing else, this record is a daring re-emergence. There’s still something quite relentlessly manic and half-cocked about Kanye’s creative process, but it’s transformed into something of far more weight. Donda is a testimonial submerged in the darkness of Kanye West, it is a juggernaut breathlessly straining to rescue a legendary and damaged career, it is a signal flair of pain, depression and desperation, and it is, without a question, some strange form of a gospel album yearning for resurgence, redemption, and rebirth. No one album has ever quite reached for what this record does, never has one album ever sounded quite like this record does. It is the most audacious record of Kanye’s career and stands Kanye up again as an idol worthy of contemplation – in all his problematic, troublesome, sporadic, and brilliant ways. Reconciliation or not, Donda is a statement that ensures that.
