I was in high school when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first and only time. According to my memory—distorted now, over twenty years later, faded and compressed, fragmentary, a sample of a sample, eroding as it repeats, like The Disintegration Loops—it was a joyous and glacial experience: a chapter a night (or maybe less, maybe just a page or two) read slowly, before sleep, tucking the book back into the space between my mattress and the bedframe¹ whenever imagination overwhelmed me and my brain, feverish from escapist overstimulation, fled from Tolkien’s manufactured world into one of my own (derivative) construction. It wasn’t the birth of my love of fantasy or the genesis of my (pathological) story-telling impulse—I had already begun subjecting my sisters (and later friends) to my homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaigns²—but it was formative, catalytic; it triggered an [al]chemical reaction that transformed insubstantial, foggy juvenile tastes and compulsions into a concrete obsession that would color³ the rest of my life.⁴ 

And, more urgently, it was palliative care for my freshly discovered fear of death, which started as an innocent adolescent doubt (“What if the things I’ve been taught are wrong there’s no heaven, or anything, after we die?”),  evolved into a phobia of falling asleep (because I was terrified by the possibility that I could die in my sleep and that the short-term loss of the self could become permanent), and terminated in my other lifelong fixations: anxiety, neurosis, despair. Fantasy provided me an alternative to terror, even if it was ultimately outmaneuvered and outived by its resourceful enemy, who had all of reality at its command, no scruples to restrain its strategies, and a lifetime to wage its war of attrition.⁵  Fantasy was the only path to sleep.

In some other universe, I would go back and reread the trilogy in preparation for this review. I would check my nostalgic priors against my matured (read: jaded) tastes. I would confront my past love, unromantic, sober, and clear-sighted, ready to be disappointed and disenchanted.⁶ But in this universe, I’m tired. I’m back living with my parents,⁷ sleeping in a bed that is not quite my childhood bed, in a room that is not quite my childhood bedroom, but that’s decorated (without my knowledge, against my will) with crayon drawings and scholastic ribbons,⁸ the detritus of my childhood. I haven’t had a quote-unquote “real job” in two years. I haven’t finished a piece of writing, of any length, in more than six months. I’ve barely tried. I’m single. I’m sad. I’ve amounted to nothing. I’m afflicted with the increasingly universal delusion, the global folie à deux, that we are on the cusp of some great systemic societal collapse. (When you’re sufficiently disillusioned, the apocalyptic becomes the only strain of fantasy that you can indulge in without feeling like a fool or a tool.) I’m so tired that I cannot imagine an unexhausted world. So: I cannot be fucked. 

And there is more than simple exhaustion holding me back: I’m afraid. My nostalgic memories of Tolkien’s novels are among the last remnants of my lost childhood wonder, the wispy contrails of a pre-cynical age. I don’t dare attempt a close reading; I don’t dare to get close, breathing, lest they evaporate from exposure to the hot air of my open mouth. I can’t take the risk; I will trust memory, which only lies.

So here is what my memory, the liar, tells me: The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy road trip novel, a panorama flipbook of imaginary landscapes, a gentle journey into beautiful and dangerous territory, the hazy outline of that moment when Sam and Frodo navigate the will-o’-wisp haunted swamp, a few short sword fights, thinly described, the tragedy of missing Entwives expressed in Treebeard’s languid speech, Denethor self-immolating on his funeral pyre, the scouring of the Shire, a poetry collection interrupted by prose, Gandalf being dragged into darkness and hellfire and rising again like Christ in white, not a religious allegory, an elven riddle even a twelve year old could solve, Bill the pony being tearfully sent back to Bree, Bilbo’s vengeful birthday party, giant eagles on the horizon, and, above all, beautiful places rendered in beautiful words.

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Peter Jackson’s film adaptations were released during my transition from high school to college.⁹ My feelings about the films are hard to separate from my feelings about that time. If I say that I entered The Fellowship of the Ring full of honest hype and youthful enthusiasm and exited The Return of the King with snickering contempt and an ironic sneer, that tells you a bit about my growing dissatisfaction with the movies and a lot about the corrosive effect of the intervening years on my soul.  College was hard. It was an alienating and lonely experience. I lost my faith and gained no friends, connections, or marketable skills in the exchange. All I got of value was greater self-awareness and a passion for “real”¹⁰ literature.¹¹ And even these came at the cost of the loss of my (already meager) self-confidence and my ability to love reading simply, unpretentiously, to be enraptured by pure plot and to root unequivocally for characters I liked without considering abstract bullshit like aesthetics or meaning or subversion, to read for adventure alone and feel no shame.¹² But causality is complicated. Maybe my rejection of fantasy was caused (at least in some small part) by watching Jackson’s movies, and not the reverse. I can’t be sure. I’ll leave that knot tangled.

Whatever the reason,¹³ I grew to hate the film adaptations. I remember them being oppressive and loud, an abuse of the privilege of theatrical surround sound. And they only became louder and more oppressive as they went along. Some of the early scenes in The Shire perfectly matched the gentle, romantic residue the books had left in my imagination. The casting, the costuming, the pastoral landscapes, the bittersweet promise of travel into the unknown and accompanying homesickness, all of it felt roughly right. But somehow each progressive scene was more dimly lit and abrasively scored than its predecessor, more full of overcoreographed violence presented at a more traumatic volume; each movie had more tedious bombast: more and longer battle sequences, more screeching and whizzing and banging and wailing, less tranquility, less beauty, less, fuck me for saying it, magic.  And, ultimately, on the screen and in my heart, a pervasive and growing ugliness and darkness.

And yet Jackson cut the Scouring of the Shire,¹⁴ arguably the darkest and ugliest moment in the original novels, perhaps because it was dark in the wrong way; the desolate bleakness of The Shire (temporarily) being reduced to a despoiled wasteland by opportunistic industrialists and war profiteers may have been too outside of the template of epic fantasy sandpapered smooth by Tolkien’s simpering successors, too stark in its portrayal of the consequences of war and too unsparing in its unwillingness to place even the most idyllic and beloved of homelands beyond desolation’s reach,¹⁵ or maybe it was simply too small in its scale and its stakes and too slapstick in its tone¹⁶ to serve as a proper conclusion for Jackson’s overwrought epic.¹⁷ 

If it was dropped for pacing, that’s ironic, since it would have addressed one of the grievances that even many fans of the films have with the trilogy: the protracted, lethargic epilogue. The original novels actually have superior pacing, since the conflict in The Shire happens after the journey home and before all the damn elves (and Frodo and Gandalf) get on a boat and (finally) sail out of Middle Earth for good, it proves a vital moment of tension and conflict in the midst of the series’ otherwise peaceful denouement. The final twenty minutes of the films feel so fucking long not because of what was left in, but because of what was cut!

Maybe the Scouring of the Shire is a necessary moment of nasty, clarifying reality, without which fantasy cannot be cathartic or transformative, and must instead settle for being diversionary, a novel perpetual motion machine that we can abstractly admire for the ingenuity of its construction but that we can only watch spin in one direction for so long before our attention lapses or before the noise of its hidden gears becomes unbearable and we start to think that it would be better if, like the mechanical turk, the whole apparatus was an elaborate hoax, because then at least there might be something human concealed inside.

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And now, finally, we get to the putative topic of this review, after the passage of ten paragraphs and twenty years. Amazon is in the midst of releasing their long-gestating and obscenely expensive Lord of the Rings prequel series The Rings of Power. I’ve watched the first six¹⁸ episodes, numbly. They’re bad. Worse, they’re joyless.

Even before the appearance of the first episode’s title card, we’re subjected to a battle with an ice troll that has all of the silly excess of Jackson’s films without their (vacant) style or basic cinematographic competence. At one point the flat-affected elven warrior woman Galadriel makes a running leap off the blade of another elf’s sword in order to … stab the troll slightly higher than she would have otherwise. There’s no real sense of the impact or importance of this attack. Watching the scene again, muted, as I type this, I’m not even totally sure if it connects. It’s simply, flatly delivering on the expectation set by Jackson’s movies that elves must be superhuman combat acrobrats. And that would be fine if the acrobatics in question were elegantly choreographed or skillfully shot. I’m not some wargamer nerd who evaluates fantasy action sequences by the standard of historical or tactical accuracy. I just want to be thrilled and enthralled, rather than incredulous and bored. I want my eyes to pop, not roll.

Though, honestly, I eventually started to yearn for the goofiness of elven sword gymnastics, as most of the battles later in the series are so gruesome and dour that they can’t even be enjoyed as camp. The sixth episode is almost completely consumed by a protracted orc-on-man battle—clearly inspired by setpiece episodes of Game of Thrones like “Blackwater” and “Battle of the Bastards” but nowhere near as impressive, even as pure spectacle—and is so full of grisly dismemberment, extralegal civilian executions, and bloody uncauterized wounds that it probably only secured its TV-14 rating by being so poorly lit throughout that most of the violence is completely incomprehensible and the fact that orcs bleed black instead of red.¹⁹ Tonally and philosophically, it felt more like I was watching an adaptation of Hobbes than Tolkien. If only the episode had completed the trifecta and been short²⁰ in addition to being nasty and brutish.

The non-violent scenes fare no better, consisting mostly of static, artless shots of actors with prosthetic ears or feet or noses standing in front of bland digital concept art, reciting agonizingly bad dialogue. And the dialogue is not simply one fixed kind of bad, but rather a grab bag of every variety of bad that dialogue can be.²¹ Of course you have entire scenes where characters engage in dry plot exposition. That’s a given. And obviously the magical thermodynamics and/or arcane history underlying every stupid fucking shimmering orb and glowing dwarven rock is going to be explained to us, stripping them of their intrinsic wonder. And, yes, everything has a stupid multisllaybic name full of “L”s and “Y”s. And, yes, we are given a lot of those names: the names of men, the names of elves, the names of dwarves, the names of kingdoms, the names of dead kings and heroes, the names of trees, and on and on and on. Those are just the essentials of worldbuilding. Grizzled veterans of fantasy bullshit know what they’re getting into.

And then there are the clichés. Characters truly (and unironically!) say things like “There is no harsher master than the sea” and “You vex me, elf.”²² But just as you begin to wonder if perhaps the show went so monstrously over budget on IP acquisition and computer-generated cave trolls that scripting duties were offloaded to GPT-3, you get ponderous exchanges that are bad in such an unfathomably unique way, so full of linguistic Dunning–Kruger, that they could only have come from an authentic human mind. Here’s a representative sample: “To what port do we sail?” “See for yourself. We’re nearly there.” “Nearly where?” “Home.” Think about that for too long, try too hard to understand what is being said and why, and you’re liable to reach a level of thought-annihilating un-knowledge previously achievable only by mediating on Buddhist kōans. Almost every spoken word is unbearable.

Much of the time, it’s impossible for me to see the series itself through the fog of the countless other books and films and series that it “draws inspiration”²³ from. There are no truly original scenes. Everything is pilfered. Everything is something I’ve seen before, sometimes many times before. It’s a collage of recycled plot points and framing devices. Except that collage implies transformation, an original whole made from appropriated parts. Here it’s as if someone cut up a print of a famous painting and also a bunch of reproductions of that painting by unskilled amateurs and glued the pieces together into the closest facsimile of the original work that their  trembling hands could manage. So all you notice are the seams, the flaws. Everything has been stolen not so much from Tolkien but from his generations and generations of imitators, and reincorporated awkwardly into the subject of their imitations. A whole genre of derivative works have been swallowed back up by their source, digested, pulped, excreted in shades of brown. Saturn devouring his son; a calculated lens flare obscuring the sun.

Even the title sequence has been bungled.²⁴ It has no sense of the grandeur of the world, no promise of adventure or discovery, nothing wonderful or wild, magical or mystical.²⁵ Instead, we get … vibrating pebbles? I’ve seen the sequence half a dozen times, and I’m still unsure of what it’s depicting and why. It’s all particles, glyphs, abstraction. I’m guessing that the symbols formed by the dancing dust have some significance within the world of Middle Earth and/or Tolkien’s writing, but they mean nothing to me. The show has done nothing to give them context or meaning. They’re empty, dead. The only connection I can ascertain between the title sequence and the series it prefaces is that both make me feel nothing. Well, alright, not quite nothing. I feel impatient. I feel bored. I wait for the intro to be over, so I can start waiting for the show to end. When the show does end, the credits are a relief, the soft music playing behind the scrolling names offers more enjoyable stimulation than anything that came before, but even that is ruined after ten seconds as I search desperately for the remote to prevent the Amazon app from autoplaying the trailer for the next episode. I do not want to have to watch any scene from this series more than once.

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If the series is a string of offenses against taste and patience, the elves are the most unrepentant sinners. Everything they say is mannered and bland. Everything they do is [super]heroic and obnoxious.  This isn’t new. The Lord of the Rings has long had an elven problem. Before the trilogy was published, Tolkien used to read from his work-in-progress to The Inklings, an Oxford-based literary society²⁶ that he was a prominent member of. During one of these readings, while Tolkien was in the midst of sharing an excerpt from what would become the seminal, genre-defining work of epic fantasy, Hugo Dyson, another member of the group, interrupted Tolkien midsentence by rising to his feet and yelling, “Oh no, not another fucking elf.”²⁷ Hugo, I hear you, man. Even now I hear you.

Some of the non-elven races fare better. The dwarves and the harfoots²⁸ (harfeet?), with their rustic accents and lives revolving around food and drink and work, are the most grounded in something resembling relatable reality, feel the most human. This isn’t ironic, or, at least, it’s not a fresh irony. Tolkien chose his hobbits, and not his men (who are only incrementally less aloof than his fucking elves²⁹) to be the reader’s point of entry, the point of departure from our world to his. He must have understood that we see ourselves most clearly reflected in characters that are small and vulnerable, petty and provincial, hungry and scared, and that more idealized human forms have to be rationed, or at least introduced later in the narrative, after the audience has already been won over. The Rings of Power has been made by people who lack this understanding, and so we don’t get acclimated to the world through a single consistent, sympathetic perspective but instead get jerked disorientingly between the low and the high, tossed recklessly between midgets and giants until we barf. 

That said, the Harfoot sections are imperfect. They’re certainly easier to bear than tedious trials of elves and men, but they’re also deeply derivative, heavily and obviously influenced by Jackson’s “second breakfast” Shirese banter, another wan imitation of an imitation: empty, depressing, sad. There are moments of promise though, scenes that evoke the general feel of Tolkien’s hobbits without being rigidly shackled to past iterations and adaptations of his world. One of the best is a speech given by a harefoot elder on the eve of their annual migration³⁰ that briefly teases us with the memory of Bilbo’s comic birthday address, only to take a sudden dark turn and become a memorial to the dead (“left behind” is the harfoot euphemism of choice) who were lost or abandoned during past journeys.³¹ It’s surprisingly poignant and somber without being demoralizing, unexpected while still seeming entirely at place within the traditions of Middle Earth.

The dwarves, meanwhile, are downright fun. They’re industrious workaholics. They hold grudges. They shit-talk the elves. They miss their friends and bicker with their wives. They even have one or two authentic-feeling relationships. It’s glorious to behold. It makes you wish the show was about them. It makes you wonder why the rest of the series makes these simple pleasures seem so impossibly hard to capture. It makes you hate the elves so much more.

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Of course, there has been discourse about the series. Apparently, the fact that non-white actors³² have been cast as elves and dwarves and hobbits has sparked a backlash against the show, with the now bog-standard accompanying accusations of performative wokeness and advancing progressive cultural politics at the expense of the source material. Note that there are no links in the previous sentence. That’s because I’ve never actually seen anyone seriously condemn the show’s multiracial casting. I’ve seen people condemning the (hypothetical) people who (hypothetically) condemned the casting, and I’ve of course seen jokes and memes about about the casting and about the (still hypothetical) backlash to the casting, but the original outrage is elusive and possibly imaginary,³³ like one of those phantom islands that cartographers confidently add to generations of maps until someone bothers to sail out to them and finds only empty sea or, perhaps, a tiny sandbar occupied by a few combative crabs, warped into bizarre forms by generations of genetic isolation; there’s often no safe harbor for our biases except imagination.

But let’s take the existence of a large and vocal anti-black-hobbit bloc as a given, if only so I can pose the following question to someone, since it’s already written: Is this casting something that childhood you, the iteration of yourself who first encountered (and loved) Middle Earth, would have cared about, or even noticed? Or has the wellspring of your joy been poisoned by the dual discursive toxins of fandom pedantry and the culture wars? Is that racial purity of elves and dwarves fundamental to your immersion in Tolkien’s world, or have you been bamboozled, and, in fact, it’s the existence of this polarizing, meta-textual conversation itself, in which you’ve become gleefully complicit, that is the actual barrier that separates you from childlike wonder and joy? What if it’s your inability (or unwillingness) to stop talking and thinking in terms of the culture and politics that you purportedly hate that walls you out of the wilderness of pure fascination and prevents your escape from dreary reality? 

And, of course, all of this goes for those relentlessly pointing out the foolishness of melanated hobbit paranoia too; don’t think the apparent rightness of your position means you haven’t had something fundamental stolen from you. Has your obsession with dunking on the silliness of your ideological enemies driven you beyond the reach of simple passion? When was the last time you thought you caught a glimpse of the thing itself, beautiful and disinterested in your pursuit of attention? This applies doubly to all the memetic ironists, vacant of principle, who see only opportunities to be seen. Even passive voyeurs can be corrupted if they stare too long, too hard.³⁴

If you don’t give a shit about abstractions like the slow erosion of your human soul, there’s another, more pragmatic reason to dismiss the racial casting debate: The cast is the only area where the show succeeds (almost) unequivocally. The gap in quality between the performances and everything else in the series is tremendous. If the actors were even slightly less persuasive, even the patina of prestige TV would be annihilated and you would be left with Xena: Warrior Princess or Hercules tier camp, the sort of show that would air in syndication on a Saturday afternoon in the ’90s, filling space between cartoons and Dateline, straddling the line between adolescent and adult audiences; only those shows didn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Any moment that you look at the screen and see the lives of elves and dwarves and hobbits and men rather than CGI and prosthetics and concept art and the smoke rising from the monetary funeral pyre burning just off camera is a testament to the talent of the cast, who spontaneously generate real emotion from nothing, even while sealed in the airtight jar of a transparently fake world and while enduring transparently fake scenarios and reciting transparently fake dialogue.

And this credit very much extends to the non-white members of the cast, who do far more to enrich immersion than break it, regardless of their violation of Middle Earth’s supposed pigmentary canon. Perhaps the most cruelly misjudged is Sophia Nomvete, who had been memed into a belligerent, ebonics-spouting DMV clerk before the show even dropped, but who gives one of the series’ most endearing and gently charismatic performances as the dwarven princess Disa. Likewise, Lenny Henry’s Sadoc Burrows is exactly what you would want from a hobbit harfoot elder statesman. He vacillates between gregarious and dignified in a way that foregrounds the tension between his stature and his stature.  Ismael Cruz Córdova is stiff and cold as Arondir, but he’s playing a fucking elf, so what do you expect? 

Though, admittedly, the series’ most enjoyable performance is one of its most conventionally cast: As Durin, Owain Arthur is exactly as stout and loud and Welsh as you’d expect from a dwarf, and it’s wonderful. It’s not wonderful just because he owns the stereotype—Galadriel is as stereotypically elven as an elf could be and she’s insufferable—but rather because he takes the stereotype as a starting point and transcends it through self-deprecation, humor, and, some-fucking-how, actual pathos. Perhaps The Rings of Power is too fundamentally, conceptually flawed to have ever been great, but when Arthur is on screen—and especially when he and Nomvete are playing off each other—you get glimpses at what the good version of the series might have looked like: gleeful, funny, sincere, and, most importantly, totally uncynical.

The racially indifferent ensemble casting feels fundamentally theatrical, what you would expect from a stage performance, where the audience understands that a certain level of suspension of disbelief regarding menial details is simply part of the experience, and that trading fidelity to petty logistical details for high quality performances is always worthwhile. If this approach is good enough for Shakespeare, why should Tolkien’s spectre turn up his nose? If Denzel Washington can be nominated for an Oscar for playing Macbeth, who could possibly object to Larry Henry as a cavehobbit? I suspect that what’s being objected to is less that the integrity of the fantasy has been somehow broken, than that the casting evokes one of the great bipartisan bugaboos of social media grifterdom: true racial invisibility

That’s not to say that the series is totally raceblind. At time of writing, it prominently features one elf/human romance—the only truly scandalous and dangerous variety of interracial relationship within the borders of Middle Earth—and has hinted at another. The mixed-ear couple even features Arondir, the show’s only prominent black elf. It’s hard to imagine this was fully accidental. Meanwhile, human/elf tensions are central to the subplot set on Númenor, a Greco-Roman-inspired isle where elves, who we’re told originally gifted the island to men, are now barred from setting foot. The nativist³⁵ sentiment in these scenes is garishly (almost hilariously) conveyed. There’s talk about elves stealing jobs from human craftsmen. At one point, an enraged mob actually chants, “Elf lover! Elf lover!”³⁶ It’s … blatant.

Does this layer of real world racial subtext add nuance or texture to the series or is it a grating distraction? Certainly this is an area where Tolkien, who was notoriously critical of fantasy as allegory, would likely have raised objections. Personally, I was just happy to have anything at all to think about, any reason for my enervated neurons to keep firing, during these scenes, which were otherwise as wooden,³⁷ uninspired, and predictable as the rest of the show. While it’s true that, as Galadriel didactically proclaims, “[o]ne cannot satisfy thirst by drinking seawater;”³⁸ sometimes, when all of your other options are sufficiently flavorless, you’ll endure a mouthful of brine just for a taste of salt.

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As critical as I’ve been of the series, I have to admit that there were moments in The Rings of Power that caused me to feel the vague, intangible tinge of something, the nervous twitching of the phantom limb of authentic emotion:

The first was the melodic monastic chanting that accompanied the elves sailing into Valinor at the end of the premiere episode. Yes, this scene was obscenely over-the-top, with its cascade of doves and the parting curtain of sky revealing only intense light beyond the edges of the visible world. It’s an almost too-Christian image of entry into heaven. But, motherfucker, that’s what got me. Here, momentarily, Tolkien’s lifelong Catholic devotion and my residual lapsed Catholicism intersected. I caught a hint of his passion and my lost grace, a trace of spiritual transcendence amidst this fallen universe of crass IP exploitation.

The second came when Arondir was coerced into cutting down an ancient tree in the midst of an orc-ravaged wasteland. Yes, this scene also touched on one of Tolkien’s personal hobbyhorses, the industrial blight consuming the idyllic countryside of his youth,³⁹ but that’s not what got me. No, in my imagination it evoked a different Waste Land, one that Tolkien was far more reluctant to discuss than the one created by industrialization: No man’s land. Trench warfare. World War I. Where Tolkien served and was wounded. Where most of his friends died. Perhaps the actual birthplace of epic fantasy. The horror that necessitated a lifetime of traumatized creative evasions. The broken world that Tolkien tried to mend through fantasy. Or am I just resorting to hollow psychoanalysis? Have I lost sight of the mythic ideal that Tolkien was straining towards and replaced it with, as I bitched about only a few paragraphs ago, “ugliness and darkness.” I don’t know. But, regardless, when that tree fell, I felt something.

My third and final moment of authentic human emotion came during the (admittedly cheesy) traveling montage of the harfoot migration. The catalysts: fantasy landscapes, celtic folk music, the illusion of a journey into a virgin world. I won’t overthink this one. I choked up a little. Maybe my eyes got damp. Lord forgive me, I’m a sucker. 

The refrain of that song that might have brought me perilously close to tears features Tolkien’s enduring regurgitated platitude, his involuntary tribute to the peddlers of inspirational plaques and gift shop tchotchkes, his “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”: “[n]ot all those who wander are lost.”⁴⁰ I am sedentary; I am lost. I have no escape. I’m sick of the subversive, weary of transgression. I crave the pure feeling of adolescence, the prospect of adventure, the believable hope of a future with some purpose, some beauty. I’m desperate for wonder, hungry for joy. I need to be born again. But instead all I’ve been given are these fucking elves.

Editor’s note: This review of the original Donda was conceived with the intention that it would drop on 2/22/22 to coincide with the planned release of Donda 2, which will now apparently only be available on Kanye’s weird proprietary stem media player. At time of writing, I have no idea if this review will make its release date (today) or if Donda 2 did (because I’ve been too busy manically trying to meet my self-imposed deadline to check).²

Christian art has a bad rap.³ This is mostly the result of a taxonomic sleight of hand whereby all banal and dogmatic⁴ evangelical apologia is labeled “Christian media,” while works that confront the agony of Christianity—the struggle and striving, the backsliding, the persistent doubt that can only be resolved in death—are simply regarded as art, period.

Thus: God’s Not Dead is a Christian movie. Silence is cinema. The Left Behind series is Christian fiction. The Brothers Karamazov is literature. VeggieTales is Christian television. Rectify is prestige TV. And on and on until heat death (or the rapture).

Enter Kanye West. Enter the Holy Spirit into Kanye West. Exit Kanye West, the gleefully self-absorbed provocateur, whose music stretched self-awareness all the way around the sphere of human consciousness and back to its starting point: oblivious vanity. Enter Kanye West, Christian Artist. Enter fan outrage. Exit critical acclaim.

To the critics’ credit, Jesus Is King is largely the sort of vapid, superficially inspirational work that gets slapped with the “Christian Music” label. It has a few moments of transcendant honesty and vulnerability: “Selah”‘s “keeping perfect composure while I scream at the chauffeur” line.⁵ Kanye’s screaming breakdown at the end of “Follow God.”⁶ The confidence, assurance, and technical precision of the unwavering apostate Pusha T and his devout brother, No Malice, in delivering their opposing worldviews contrasted with Kanye’s shakier nascent faith on “Use This Gospel.” And the album’s most devastating line—”Jesus saved me, now I’m sane”—is easy to miss, as Kanye drops it hastily and unassumingly into the middle of a hectic verse on “God Is.”

But mostly the album perceives Christianity the same way an untrained ear perceives hip-hop: as a collection of superficial, infectious samples, haphazardly assembled. There’s a lot of uncomplicated gospel uplift sprinkled with pop-Christian iconography (“CHICK-FIL-A!”). It’s clearly the work of a fresh convert whose understanding of his faith extends no farther than the church choirs of his childhood and Trumpian cultural free association. It’s born again juvenalia.

Donda, on the other hand, is startlingly mature and complex, full of dissonance and doubt, desperate in its pursuit of spiritual and psychological clarity, subversive and innovative in its use and abuse of the traditional, fully aware of faith’s deep, irreconcilable contradictions, resonating with impossible hope in the faith of the irrefutable logic of hopelessness; so, Christian, through and through.⁷

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Consider the section above my pitch. It’s what I would have used to con an editor into allowing me to write this review, if I weren’t always and only my own editor, to the benefit of my brittle ego, to the detriment of my writing (and my wallet). 

It was sketched out early, based entirely on the evaporating memories of my experiences with the album late last summer, when there was more than four hours of sunlight in a day, and I would spend hours walking down the road just beyond my parents house, where it turns to dirt, or sitting in the backseat, like a child, with my earbuds in, freed temporarily from the need to think about job hunting, and hundreds of miles away from the South and the storage locker with (nearly) all my earthly possessions⁸ in it and, while the sleep and and the safety and the sun incrementally healed a solid two and a half years of unbroken disillusionment and trauma, put me in a place where I could, abstractly, hesitantly, entertain the possibility of God. And, of course, those beats.

But now it’s February. And it’s dark. And I’m squatting in a dilapidated Mississippi plantation house with a bunch of indigent writer-reprobates that I met on the internet. And I didn’t empty out that storage locker on the way here, so nothing is resolved. And I’m worried the album will hit different now.

It doesn’t, but. But I doubt myself, my judgment, my insight, my vision. I listen to each track over and over. I take notes. I lose perspective, forget my argument, am subsumed by the album’s many inconsistencies and contractions. Lose faith.

********

The notes, mentioned above, are reproduced below.

Donda Chant: The first track and already I’ve encountered an immovable obstacle. This may be the most bewildering part of the album, the most opaque and resistant to interpretation. Yes, it’s just a voice chanting the name of Donda West, Kanye’s deceased mother, 58 times.⁹ But the voice’s tone seems intentionally pitched to elude meaning. It’s not overtly mournful or triumphant or cathartic or weighted with any emotion at all, really. But it’s also not monotonous or trancelike. You hear a little mirth, maybe, sometimes, something vaguely childlike, but that’s fleeting too. And Kanye is a perfectionist. I wonder how many times he made this poor woman say his mother’s name before she hit exactly the tone he wanted, a tone that evades me. What’s Donda West’s actual connection to this album anyway? She’s the putative focus of this entire project (perhaps even more so than God) if the title is to be believed. But yet, it’s not at all clear what Kanye wants to say about (or to) her. Genius suggests that the chant is supposed to sound like a heartbeat. Maybe. Reddit theorizes that the heartbeats symbolized are Donda’s last. Nah. Maybe the absence of meaning here, the way the name unravels and resounds until it’s more beat (of whatever variety) than word is the point. An intrusive thought reproduced again and again, long after its real world referent is gone. I think about the vanity of Donda West’s death (in all senses of the term).¹⁰

Jail: This track immediately brings to mind two biblical moments: The apostle Peter’s miraculous release from prison and the conversion of Saul (later Paul) on the road to Damascus.¹¹ Liberation from captivity and bondage: the central narrative of both Christian tradition and Black American history.

Man, in the state of original sin (“Priors, priors, do you have any priors?”; “I’ll be honest: We all liars.”) is liberated (“God gon’ post my bail tonight”). This is how every Christian story must, by necessity, begin. Even here, at the outset, there’s a sense of deeper understanding and engagement with the structure and themes of religious art.

And then there’s Jay-Z’s uncharacteristically desperate delivery. A rapper normally known for his cold precision hyperventilating on the track. The intensity an vulnerability of his delivery are made all the more potent but the subversion of our expectations. (And his decision to namedrop “Return of the Throne” takes on a different meaning in the larger context of the song.)

But conversely: “Made in the image of God: That’s a selfie.” Even God is vain, like Jay, like Ye.

God Breathed: The moment of conversion. The Holy Spirit descends. The breath of God, tongues of fire. It makes perfect thematic sense of this track to follow immediately on “Jail.” Our first glimpse of the true euphoria of the conversion experience, the euphoria that exists in the moment before the spirit recedes and life’s realities reemerge  There’s so much bliss here. And take in the extended, harmonious monastic chant on the outro. A sensation of perfect serenity that seems to extend, echoing, for eternity.

And, there, in the background: The first sampled scream. This will become a motif. This is one distorted, stretched, shocked. Feels unstuck in time, like it’s being dragged into a wormhole. A transformative experience. Distorted sample joins the monastic howls. It’s not simple serenity. It’s a system shock. It’s jarring, wordless, outside of the reach of language of explanation or human comprehension. It’s the sound of being unmade, remade.

Off the Grid: Post-conversion confidence, euphoria. But hints at the return of vanity, difficulty in sustaining faith. The guest verses are stuffed with wanton materialism, but Fivio Foriegn gives us another use of release from prison as spiritual metaphor. And then there’s Kanye’s sublime messy/Messi verse. You really feel the tension between his two lives (spiritual, material), the struggle to maintain his focus on the divine amid the constant temptations and distractions of wealth. And the whole damn thing ends with a silly (racist?) joke about Adam’s rib. Everything present at the beginning of the song (once again: confidence, euphoria in faith) is deflated. “Off the Grid”: the promise of a spiritual escape from the material world, unfulfilled. “I was forgettin’ you. Now I remember. Now I remember.”

Hurricane: The most unambiguously gospel track on the (early?) album. The most unambiguously (classic?) Kanye track on the album. [Need to go deeper. This one keeps bouncing off me.] “I can walk on water.” (more spiritual euphoria) “I was out for self; I was up for sale.” Kanye presents a confused litany of personal weaknesses, insecurities, and moral failures, only to close with: “It was all so simple.” (The desire to have Christ be the final, unambiguous answer to a life full of noise and anxiety and doubt.) Hook: “No more dark for me.” (And yet.)

Praise God: Opens with Donda West reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward”: “Even if you are not ready for the day, it cannot always be night.” Kanye (on the chorus, his mother sampled in the background): “walkin’ out the graveyard, back to life.” A reference to Kanye’s spiritual resurrection, but also possibly the most explicit¹² statement¹³ of Kanye’s desire to resurrect his mother through all means available, by any means necessary: through Christ, through music. What we all desire from religion, from art. [More to this song. Revisit.] [I did. And still it eludes me.]

Jonah: So much resonance/echo. Sounds like it was recorded in the belly of the whale. Thematic connection to lyrics? (Obviously, yes.) Chorus is an explicit cry for God’s help (“shoulder to lean on” / “demons to be gone”) in a time of trial and despair. A true spiritual darkness/belly of the whale/dark night of the soul moment.

Opens with Kanye appealing to God to let him (Kanye) “step in” (intercede) and resolve Chicago’s gang violence. (The “smoke a opp pack” verse.) So Kanye isn’t just pursuing his own salvation in this album. There are elements of  “social gospel” here as well, the thought that God wants to bring about peace, equality, and justice in the world, not simply the next. But the end of the same verse gets personal again. 

And then there’s that perplexing “speak to me with only no cap” line. Genius implies this is a request for sincerity, but I wonder if this is also a direct statement of Kanye’s fallible humanity (contrast with God, whose pronouns are always capitalized.)

Ok Ok: A fall from grace after the darkness and doubt of “Jonah.” Opens with bleak, dissonant looping tones that go on longer than you expect, an ominous building towards [something], then Kanye’s first words are: “OK, now they got me wanna rap again / heal the wound and then you stab me in my back again.”  Backsliding. Funny Kanye seems to associate even the desire to rap with sin and betrayal, the loss of focus and faith. 

Also: “Angel Investor” is a fascinating pun that gives insight into Kanye’s unique version of Christianity. “OK, OK. I’m not OK.” 

And there’s real desperation here: “Find God ‘fore it’s too late.”

Junya: Vanity, vanity. Junya Watanabe, icon/idol of the material world. Fashion. Old superficial, self-absorbed Kanye is back in full force. The beat conforms to this change, evoking Kanye’s fully debased Yeezus era. (Yeezus replaces Jesus.) “Wrist” is treated like one of the album’s excised swears (“wri–, wri–“). Materialism is recognized as obscenity. But there’s an exception: In “God’s time can’t fit on a wrist,” suddenly “wrist” isn’t censored. And later: “Junya wanna have me on my—” Here the “wri, wri” actually does drop in to replace a swear (presumably: “shit”). A direct statement of the fashion as temptation theme. 

But yet, there are those church pianos (organs?) in the background. And the need to find God is back from the last track, quoted almost directly, only with more urgency now, almost a threat: “Better find God ‘fore he finds me.” And the end: “Tell the devil good night, go to sleep.” An exorcism. Casting out the demons. Cut.

Lingering question: “This is on Donda. On my Momma. Made a promise.” What was the promise? Once again, Donda appears on this album more as a mystery, a person gestured towards, but not known.

Believe What I Say: Satan has been (temporarily) banished via the previous track’s exorcism. Spiritual serenity returns. Dramatic shift back to inspirational sound. Another track, like “Hurricane,” that evokes “old Kanye” (College Dropout – Graduation era; ie, pre-Donda’s death). 

Why Lauryn Hill? Parallel to Donda’s role in “Praise God”? [I leave these questions here, unanswered, mostly forgotten, honestly.]

Some of Kanye’s religious similes on this album are hilariously irreverent: “Nail me to the cross with long nails like Coko.”

24 Hours: The despair is back. Dissonant screaming in the background, precariously balanced between inspirational and desperate. Such a quick fall after a one-track return to grace. The struggle is real. Call & response: a synthetic charismatic church experience. I picture the laying on of hands, the congregation calling God down. Foreground: “We gonna be OK.” Background: screams.¹⁴ Begging God. (“God, please set it all right.” / “Nothing else ever feels right.”) 

So much grief in the lyrics: “Never the right time to go.” “God please set it alright. Nothing else ever feels right.” “Gotta make it right ‘fore you left / Gotta make it right before you—” Is he talking about Donda? Kim? Christ? “Save me, yeah, make it alright.”: The hope that religion will deliver him from emptiness/vacancy, absolve his grief, and save his marriage. All these needs intermingled. The desire for complete salvation. 

Kanye’s first word: “Exhausted.”

Remote Control:  Kanye turns to predestination for comfort. The hovercraft of faith. Denial (in all senses of the term) of the struggle. Superficial surrender to God’s will, but is this evidence of faith or a comfortable, self-serving delusion? Narcissism. 

Semi-serene whistling with a hint of menace on the beat. Dark “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” vibes. 

Materialism is back with a vengeance: Kanye: “on my instagram it get outta hand”  Young Thug: “Jesus sent me brand new clothes.” Kanye, again: “like a CEO.” Who’s the CEO here? God or Kanye? Unclear. Wait, “He got it on remote control.” So God.  “Feelin’ like the man (Man?)” The line between Kanye and God gets blurrier. “How you roll with them when you know I’m him [Him?]?”  

Sinister outro. Kanye twists the otherwise comic sample to sound almost like a malevolent deity. Implies that there’s a spiritual ugliness to the song that’s not present on the other tracks about divine intervention, underscores the possibly that Kanye recognizes that there’s something insidious or (as I said earlier: delusional) about his perspective on this track (Or maybe it’s just a silly shoutout to gaming youtuber Dunkey.)

Moon: “Don’t leave so soon.”  “Never forget all the memories.” (Donda West, back again.) Gentle, despairing. “How can I get through?” (Spirit of God receding? Lost faith? Might be a stretch. Given the overt spiritual struggle of the next track, maybe not.)

Heaven & Hell: Once again, doubt and despair and lost faith are answered with an exorcism (“Devil, lay down!”). But maybe of more than just personal demons this time around See: “No more chokeholds.” And: “This that level that make devils pray now.” There’s a potential dual meaning of devils here; devils in the Nation of Islam sense: whites. 

Kanye seems to both reject and embrace materialism and vanity in the opening of this track: “No more promos. No more photos. No more logos.” becomes “We on Bezos. We get payrolls, trips to Lagos.” But the “we” here implies more than just West. Maybe he’s not preaching social gospel as much as a sort of universal black prosperity gospel. “Chokeholds” and “devils” are banished and replaced with wealth and luxury. Note the “Everyone’s got to make a living” sample. 

How many different versions of Christianity will Kanye march out here? He seems to be in pursuit of some grand unifying theory of Christianity, seen through his own deeply conflicted, myopic lens. (“Make this final!”) I’d call this “syncretism,” but that implies a synthesis. Does Kanye ever get there?

Donda: “It feels good to be home.” It’s framed almost as Donda West speaking from Heaven … maybe not to Kanye, but about Kanye. The instrumental and chorus conjure an almost cartoon version of Heaven. We don’t learn much about Donda West on this track. Just more Kanye. The dead only live for us. It’s perverse.

Keep My Spirit Alive: We’re now entering a more universally uplifting and inspirational section of the album. (This is where my attention always starts to flag. The album’s fault or mine?) The exorcism is over. The dead have spoken. Listen to that instrumental. We’ve arrived at true serenity, spiritual transcendence.—Wait, here’s Westside Gunn, thanking god for luxury cars and guns that don’t jam. And Kanye griping about his marital difficulties—”How I’m forty-two and got a curfew?”) —over his own melodic crooning about God’s providence. The dissonance is back. The dissonance can’t be resolved. (Or maybe the point is that God cares for his soldiers, even through their pettiest battles.)

Jesus Lord:¹⁵ Kanye seems to be channeling the ghost of Tupac Shakur here, with story rap vignettes full of  personal agony and hood tragedy, and there’s even a surprising hint of Shakur’s love of dark religious irony. We get the most explicit acknowledgment¹⁶ of Kanye’s agony over the loss of his mother and his struggle with doubt and despair: “And if I talk to Christ, can I bring my mother back to life? / And if I die tonight, will I see her in the afterlife? / But back to reality, where everything’s a tragedy.” [I had a deadline-stress-induced dream last night that I was working on this review and wrote something like “you can give your life to Christ and renounce selfishness and try to live a good life and it won’t bring the dead you loved back to life or heal your broken relationships” and then I started sobbing. Awake now, this seems like the most banal, obvious thought ever. Our subconscious desires embarrass us.] The chorus seems like an invitation to salvation and redemption, but there’s not much to be found in the verses, not for Kanye, not for the tortured family in the story rap. Kanye’s ends the story of a teen out to avenge his dead brother with him pulling a gun on the boy’s murderer and then … “all you seen was the light.” The song leaves it ambiguous whether this is Heaven or a muzzle flash.  

Meanwhile, Jay Electronica prophecies God’s judgment on America for its accumulated historical evils like a more verbally dexterous Pan-African Pat Robertson. Doomsday jeremiads are not the exclusive property of any ideology. (Yakub / Ezekiel’s Wheel: more weird syncretism in Jay Electronica’s verse, this time full of conspiratorial portent.) 

The outro is a plea for justice, but also a personal thank you to Kanye. (We can talk about centering God or social justice, but how can we ever hope to decenter ourselves?)

New Again: Opens with more text message etiquette. Shades of “Jonah.” 

“And I repent for everything that I’ma do again.” The cyclical nature of sin and forgiveness is fully acknowledged. Vanity and redemption. Possibly the closest thing to a (ew) “thesis statement” on the album. Hints towards intentionality in the album’s rising/falling spiritual rollercoaster construction. Kanye sees the cycles.

Why was Chris Brown’s verse cut? It seems like Brown would be the perfect guest for a track about our debasement and need for redemption and how asking forgiveness doesn’t protect us from the temptation to sin again and again. Did Kanye think such a controversial guest would soil the power and moral authority of the album? Well, he didn’t cut Marilyn Manson. Was Brown’s mention of group sex irksome to an artist trying to do right in the eyes of his dead mother? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the Brown’s verse kind of sucks, and, in fact, purely artistically, the track is probably better without him.

Tell The Vision: Ominous. Pop Smoke’s delivery and the sinister production (voice modulation?) are at serious odds with the inspirational “Thank God that we made it” lyrics. Kanye’s voice is totally absent. What’s going on here? Sounds borderline demonic, like the theme that would play as the devil materializes in an old Betty Boop cartoon. By the end of the short track, thankfulness has been replaced by violent threats. (“We come where you live, Glock 9, infrared.” “Do not play with me, [redacted], I keep a K with me.”) And that beat just keeps pounding, like a warning siren, like a threat is approaching.

Lord I Need You: And another dramatic tonal shift. One of the more straightforward tracks: Kanye lays out his marital struggles with surprisingly gentle humor and tenderly asks for God’s intercession. Has Kanye grown? Is there real spiritual progress here? Are all these cycles of faith and despair, of self-denial and narcissism, of sin and regret converging on some greater insight? Is Kanye really learning to surrender his life to Christ’s will? (I’m reminded of the ascent of the spiral staircase in T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,” the seminal poem religious doubt incrementally maturing into understanding.) 

And then there’s the duality of the title. Lord, I need you. Directed just as much at Kim as at God. 

Some choice vain Kanye lines in this one: “You had a Benz at sixteen. I could barely afford an Audi.” “How you gon’ try to say sometimes it’s not about me? / Man, I don’t know what I would do without me. “

Pure Souls: Instead of reversing or backtracking on the tone of the previous track, there’s a sense of a direct step upward, a growing spiritual clarity and uplift. This song almost sounds like it’s set in the Heaven that Donda West was speaking from earlier. We’ve never actually seen Kanye occupy this space on the album before. The dissonance is gone. The lyrics are nostalgic. The struggle is acknowledged and instead of provoking angst or delusion, it’s subsumed into the journey. Ends on literal high notes. “The truth’s the only thing you get away with.”

Come to Life: “Here go all your problems again.” And yet, the tone of this track is so different from the previous “fall from grace” songs. The harmony is still here. Kanye acknowledges his full emotional range and, like the previous track, pulls it all together harmoniously.

“Three, two, one, you’re pinned.” Is this a reference to Jacob wrestling with God in the dark?¹⁷  A final surrender to God’s will. Renaming: After this, Jacob becomes Israel. “Ever wish you had another life?”

Even the yelling/pleading in the background is back, but now it’s working with the music instead of against. No dissonant agony here. The calls for purification and sanctification are no longer desperate but confident, certain in their outcome. 

Even Kanye’s pre-conversion legacy is integrated through the “ultra, ultra light beam” reference, repurposed like the “Throne” from “Jail” as a symbol of divinity. And, most spectacularly, Kanye himself is finally dethroned: “This is not about me.” 

But yet, Kanye can’t resist suggesting that he’s been crucified like Christ, so. And there’s this repeated line: “I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want to die alone.”

No Child Left Behind: The last original track and the title is a play on a failed Bush administration initiative. Alright. I guess this recalls Kanye’s first moment of non-musical infamy, his public fall, his future of histrionic sincerity: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” 

Kanye is absent for the first half of the track and then appears only to ascend to heaven as triumphant music blares (almost too much, almost comic). “He’s done miracles on me.” (Vory: “Back again.” The cycle is acknowledged even here, at the end that isn’t.) Why doesn’t the album end here? Thank goodness the album doesn’t end here.

The pt 2s: “Jail pt. 2” plays out like the DaBaby/Marilyn Manson cancellation tour. Why? (Cancel culture jail, lol.) God’s forgiveness vs. culture’s eternal judgment? Eh. Manson is almost invisible on this track. Distressingly, this almost reverses the emphasis of the previous track. Now “guess who’s going to jail tonight?” becomes the focus; it becomes a song about cultural condemnation rather than redemption, especially with so much of DaBaby’s verse devoted to righteous indignation. It’s a different, worse song.

“Ok, Ok pt. 2” is a breakup song! (“Mi bruk up wid mi ex, him dead to me, I’m a widow” – Shenseea. “Showed you love and you constantly cold-shouldered me / But ain’t no goin’ back to fixin’ up, that’s the older me, yeah” – Rooga.) Are we seeing the unraveling of Kanye’s faith on these alternate cuts? Is this some musical premonition of the man who would a few months later be embroiled in a tabloid marital feud with a nominal standup comedian? The return of superficial Ye. 

“Junya pt. 2” seems to lean into the song’s celebratory materialism—though “wrist” is still “censored”—and “tell the Devil good night, go to sleep” is gone! There’s no exorcism here. All watch, no watchmaker.

And “Jesus Lord pt. 2” features The Lox in a series of verses than I never seem to actually hear because my attention flags during the six preceding minutes that are copy/pasted from the original version of the song. Too bad, because Jadakiss is the archetypical example of a rapper who kills every track he’s featured on, even while his solo work is mostly forgettable. Here, unfortunately, I keep forgetting to listen at all. 

Why does Kanye end the album by subjecting listeners to lesser, diminished versions of existing tracks? Is this another attempt to reflect the cyclical nature of faith and the struggle?

Or does Kanye simply have no restraint and let his ego get the best of him one final time? Order or impulse. Am I straining to find meaning in banal art? Am I straining to find meaning in a banal life? Signal and noise, back again God give me clarity. It feels like a slow fade out. My attention dissolves.

********

Days pass. I catch a cold. I sneeze. I cough. I procrastinate. I debate the album with my dissolute coconspirators-cum-cohabitants. I make very little progress. I find no grand unifying theory of Donda. I catch no sign of God, either.

The night before my this review is due I’m sitting on a black-mold-trimmed faux-leather stool in the breakfast nook, scrolling through seven pages of disorganized notes on my phone, trying in vain to finish this fucker, wondering why I’ve never seen any of the ghosts that my roommates insist haunt this house, this room, when Jake enters. 

“I have a theory about Donda, Kanye, Donda 2—all of this shit.” He’s manic, confident. He was a Kanye skeptic earlier. But now I’ve heard Donda playing through the cracks in the plasterboard walls of his room and caught him on the too-shabby-to-be-chic loveseat in the living room at 3 am watching the new Netflix Kanye documentary series.¹⁸

“He’s not trying to make great albums. He is trying to make albums that will be sampled from for a hundred years. I’ve listened to Donda three times over the past two days and as a weird music guy: He’s making sample tracks. He wants to be the source, so that music years from now will be pulling from all his albums for the sample sources. That’s why stem player. Literally giving you the tools to sample whatever specific track. He wants to be the Amen break. Can’t make music without his beats. His kid and kids kids will be getting paid from sample royalties for generations. He said he’s Shakespeare. He doesn’t mean overall importance; he means the language he’s created: ‘beat/samples’ becoming mainstream turns of phrase.” 

I blink. “Jake,” I say, “I think you’ve found your way into another Last Estate footnote.” 

“What mean?” he asks, his mouth full of Stuart’s leftover Chicken Tikka Masala, his face illuminated by the light from the open fridge (one of seven still-functional lightbulbs in the entire plantation house).  “I’m probably going to include your theory in a footnote in my review,” I clarify. “Oh I got you,” he says, swallowing. “I mean I’m correct, so add that to the footnote.” (I comply.)¹⁹

I return to my room and lay on the half-inflated air mattress on the molding carpet.²⁰ I stare at the peeling Confederate flag decal that some urbex punk²¹ must have stuck up there before our arrival. I unfocus my eyes and try to see the cross concealed, askew, within this symbol of white supremacy or geographic tensions or man’s inherent love of internecine war or whatever it is that I’m supposed to see there instead of a tacky bumper sticker.

I wonder if any of this fucking matters. After all, if the couple of tracks that have been released in the buildup to Donda 2 are any indication, Kanye’s Christian period appears to be on the wane. “Easy” in particular sees him back at his debased, narcissistic best/worst. The most sincere expression of his faith finding it’s form in the suggestion that “God saved [him] from that crash, just so [he] could beat Pete Davidson’s ass.” Hey, it’s as valid a faith as any, as believable a cosmology as any.

I shrug and look back to my phone. I pull up a screenshot of Freddie Gibbs’ recent sublime troll of Kanye.²²

I use my fingers to zoom in. I read the exchange to myself aloud. I hesitate at the last two words. I laugh.

5 false narratives

Downstream

“Politics is downstream from culture.” This is what Andrew Brietbart said. And he was right. He was right in the way that every maneuver appears right once the war is won, in the way that every tactic is brilliant until it lands its tactician in The Hague.¹

Andrew Brietbart was right, so the generals moved their armies upriver. And their enemies followed. And their enemies’ enemies followed. And their enemies’ enemies’ enemies followed. And the forests were full of game. And the towns were ripe for plunder. And they choked the river’s mouth with corpses. And the wellspring erupts below the putrefying dead. And the corruption flows downstream.² And the puss and blood and piss and shit flows downstream. And sometimes you see an intact body, just bobbing there, floating by and you know that they had a life and a family and maybe a career once. And you wonder what the fuck they did. And now all the water is fetid. No matter where you make your camp along the bank, you choke and gag. The water is red. Then the water is yellow. Then the water is green. 

And we drink the water because we have no choice. And we drink the water because everyone lives along the river and the wilderness terrifies us. And because anything in the wilderness could prey on us, could kill us. Because in the wilderness we still die, but we die alone. 

So we drink this fetid water and we grab our stomachs and writhe and scream and vomit. We drink the water and we hallucinate. We see the undine rise from their stagnant pools and sing to us in tongues about our insecurities. They sing to us about our inadequacies and about our loneliness. They sing to us about the problems of their undersea world, the tyranny of Triton, the internecine acrimony between the fae, the war of nymph against nymph. They sing, and because we are lonely, and because we drank from the river and the water has made us sick, we imagine their problems are ours. We submerge our heads in the water and mistake the water flowing into our ear canals for flirtatious giggles. We go deeper and mistake the sound of our eardrums popping for spiteful laughter.

We drink the water and we fill with hate and resentment towards our enemies, whoever they are, who refuse to move or desert or die and leave the river to us, so we can drink without fear and disgust, without feeling the scum form a film on our lips, and drink without the agony of knowing everything we drink must be expelled, soon, and with intense pain. We lift the befouled cup to our lips and wish our enemies dead. We lift the cup to our lips and wish our enemies lived. But our enemies are algorithmic code. Our enemies are words that have no meaning beyond their caustic pronunciation. Our enemies are onomatopoeia. Our enemies are the babbling of the brook. The sound of water. The sound of water where men have drowned.

Meanwhile, I’m on YouTube, listening to soft-spoken, flat-affected men explain the mechanics of retro video games that I’ve never played, soaking up speedrun strats for games I’ll be content to abandon, unfinished, after 40 or 50 hours, letting my eyes unfocus at the sight of simulated scanlines, getting drowsy as lines of code are read to me in a language I’ll never learn. Then when I can no longer hold my eyes open and my brain is too sedate to scream in grief or despair, I switch over to a 12 hour black screen video of thunderstorms or ocean waves. I fall asleep to the sound of running water.

Cadaver Synod

In 897, Pope Stephen VI had the body of his predecessor’s predecessor, Pope Formosus, exhumed and put on trial.³ Formosus’ desiccated remains were accused of crimes against the church, including perjury and having claimed St. Peter’s throne (even then already tarnished by centuries of papal and ecclesiastical misconduct) illegitimately. Unable to mount a convincing defense, the corpse was convicted, mutilated, and thrown into the Tiber River.⁴

We stand before the dead pope’s throne and read off an inventory of his crimes.

We condemn him for indoctrinating our children with Critical Race Theory, or curse him for failing to produce an iconic queer Superman of color, after all these years. We ask him why he never issued a papal bull denouncing the War on Christmas, why after two decades of ceaseless secular aggression there is still no holiday detente, no silent night devoid of cable news cannon fire (and can[n]on fodder), no men crawling from the service industry trenches to embrace in no man’s land and wish each other a—well, you know.

And the dead pope sits with his jaw hanging open. Or the dead pope sits with his mouth glued shut.

And please, we demand of the pope’s corpse, tell us, without resorting to equivocation or excuses or whataboutism or bothsidesism, exactly what your position is on Trump’s twitter ban, and, while we’re on the topic, misinformation writ large, that topic so central to the continued functioning of our great democracy?

And the dead pope’s eyes do not move to acknowledge us, because they are painted on. Or the dead pope’s eyes do not move because they are coins.

Is it so unreasonable, we cry, to expect just one authentically black playable character in Super Smash Bros., and, no, alts and costumes do not count and neither does Ganondorf because he is some kind of Arab and also evil and don’t you fucking dare joke about Donkey Kong unless you’re prepared to eat a lifetime ban from ResetEra and an underpaid staff writer from Kotaku with a quota to fill will take a screenshot of your post and use it as a basis for an entire article about endemic racism in gaming culture.  And why, we implore, did you efface Lara Croft’s⁵ voluptuous, angular tits, leaving her chest as flat as our affect? Our hands that were so soft then, in our bedrooms, unlubricated, are now so coarse and dry, our dicks so chafed and sore.

And the dead pope does not hear our accusations, because his ears are made of papier-mâché. Or the dead pope’s ears are ash and dust.

We upbraid him for his incessant queerbaiting of fandom communities, who only want to see Sherlock and Watson, kiss a little, not even necessarily sexually, but definitely on the lips, in exchange for all their ceaseless devotion. 

We insist that he explain why Star Wars is woke now, with anti-capitalist subtext and feminist generals with purple hair and chubby Asian comic relief characters who we swear we will never masturbate to again, when all we really want is for the technicians from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to creep into our bedrooms at night and erase from our minds all memory of The Empire Strikes Back so we can watch it fresh every evening after work and before bed and also to be thirteen forever.

And the dead pope will not turn his head to address us, because then his head, which is held on by nothing, would fall off and we would be forced to consider the void where his head once was, the void where his head never was.

We rend our garments and scream and order our imagined legions to bring us the pope’s lifeless hands or heart or head. We scream and scream and scream, our demands unheeded, unheard.

The show trial didn’t have the desired outcome: the populace turned on Stephen and he was overthrown, imprisoned, and murdered in his jail cell. After Stephen’s death, his successor nullified the results of the synod and Formosus’ body was recovered and reburied in Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Joseph & Jacob

Joseph’s brothers stripped off his many-colored coat. They beat him, threw him into a pit, and sold him into slavery. They tore the coat and killed a goat and smeared its blood on the polychromatic fabric. They smeared the coat with complicity. And then they showed their father.

They did this because they didn’t dare to lay hands on their father; their father who did not treat his children as equals; their father who robbed his brother of his birthright; their father who put on goat skins and defrauded his own dying father; their father who took two wives but loved only one; their father who wrestled God to a draw in the dark; their father who wrestled with God until God, exhausted, cheated.

So they brutalized their brother; their brother who did nothing; their brother who was idle and beautiful.

But as a child, hearing this story, again and again, I didn’t think about injustice or providence or family dysfunction. “What happened to the coat?,” I wondered. It disappears from the narrative as soon as it’s no longer useful as a plot device. It seems so important (symbolically, psychologically) and then it’s simply gone. It’s defaced and vanishes, taking its irrational, meaningless, gaudy beauty with it. Let me wash the blood from that coat. Or, better still, let me admire it bloody and feel even greater satisfaction.

NEET

I’ve opted out. I wouldn’t say so in conversation.⁶  I would tell you that I’m between jobs, that I’m looking. If we were relatively close, I might say that I’m lost, that I’m figuring things out. I might even mention how hard things have been for me lately: the boss who hanged himself, the people I lost, the multiple moves, my lifelong struggle with social anxiety, the drama, the fear, the grief. Then I would change the subject as soon as I felt allowed. But, no, I’ve opted out. I’ve fled. I’m on the lam and will not be taken alive. I’m fucking done.

I wish I could rationalize this to myself as an act of principle or courage, as a rejection of capitalist exploitation or corporate hegemony. I’d settle for the understanding that I’m acting out of calculated laziness or cowardice. I’d love to romanticize it or aestheticize it, to embrace the stereotype of the starving artist, to tell myself that at least, as clichés go, it’s a noble one, with a rich, pretentious history.⁷

But I cannot rationalize my behavior, because I cannot begin to understand it, and I cannot understand it, because I refuse to consider it. It’s unfathomable. There is no story I can tell myself. No explanation I can imagine, let alone believe. Whatever the truth is, it cannot be internalized. I try to swallow and I spit and choke.

I cannot imagine going back to work in the same way that I cannot imagine being dead, cannot visualize the vacuum and the void, the nonexistent sensation of nonexistence. I only know the terror of the anticipation of both, the horror of knowing that a thing is simultaneously impossible and inevitable. Memories of being a teenage insomniac, writhing in bed, losing my faith, so afraid, thinking, “I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”

The local Dunkin’ always seems to be closed when my dad attempts the drive thru. (Do I want something? … No, I guess not.) There’s a paper sign in the widow saying they can’t find enough employees. “Help Wanted” becomes “Help Needed.” The minimum wage in upstate New York is $12.50 an hour, among the highest in the country. I wouldn’t work at Dunkin’ for $12.50 an hour, or any wage. I would rather die. I would rather die than do most things. (Do I simply want to die? Why should I aspire to be productive? Tuberculosis is productive.) Is this feeling universal? Is it growing?

Maybe I’m not alone. Maybe something systemic is happening. Sometimes the headlines penetrate my willful fugue. Speculation about supply chain failures. Escalating worker shortages. Maybe we’re in the midst of some mass disillusionment. The Great Opting Out. I don’t know. I don’t have the desire or energy to investigate for myself, to sort fact from propaganda, to separate partisan death drive fantasies from sober, dispassionate, impartial doomsday scenarios. 

Recently, I’ve begun supplementing my tranquilizing gaming videos with a missing persons channel documenting true accounts of lost hikers and others who vanished in the woods.  Sometimes they’re found alive, disoriented and naked, with a warped perception of how much time has passed and no explanation to offer for why they shed the protection of their clothes and gear. (The distance between us and our feral state can be measured in days, not millenia.) More often they’re found dead, their corpses dismembered by carrion animals or buried in shallow graves amid the exposed roots of crooked trees. I squirm and scoff when the narrator’s speculation turns to the insidious or the supernatural, to traceless killers and forest monsters. That’s not the fantasy I’ve tuned in for.  Isn’t there wonder and romance enough in the notion of vanishing into the wilderness and being unmade?

And now I’m in flight again, to a purely imaginary place: The Last Estate. A post-haunted post-house in the American Post-South. A home in no practical sense of the term. A home in every sense I need.

The Empty Tomb

Culture is not art. Culture is not the arts. Culture is not the melting pot or the stew. Culture is not a unifying, clarifying metaphor. Culture provides no lasting insight, reflects no honest light, and has no reality outside of our fevered minds. Culture is the collective interpretation of noise as signal.

The vile phrase “cancel culture” actually becomes salient once culture is viewed through this lens; you could likewise have said that Salem had an authentic “witch culture” before it had a culture of tourism subsidized by the memory of murdered witches that never were (witches, that is; they were certainly murdered), not because the witches were real once, but because the shared delusion of their reality created a culture.  I know that there’s a crass obviousness to comparing cancel culture to a witch hunt, but understand that I’m not using this metaphor (only?) in the popular “innocent people are being scapegoated in pursuit of an evil that does not exist” sense, but rather that all of it—the belief in witches, the hunt, the show trials, the executions, the enthusiastic bystanders, the doubtful bystanders who said nothing, the sense of meaning and escape from boredom and existential dread it gave both participants and rubberneckers, and, most importantly, the tacit agreement of everyone to all look in the same direction at the same time, even though there was nothing there (except perhaps a pyre they lit themselves)—is culture. 

Culture is mass hysteria. Culture is folie à deux. 

Culture is dead, but it wasn’t murdered by social media or socialism, multiculturalism or fascism, by woke scolds or vicious trolls, by foriegn interference or civil war. Ask your favorite boogeyman to show you their hands. They’re bloodless, clean. (At least until your imagination paints them red.)

Culture is dead because we’ve imagined it so. Culture is dead because when we look in the direction where it is not but where we’ve been told that it is, we all see its great, rotting corpse. We see its corpse regardless of our ideology or partisan affiliation, regardless of whether we revered or disdained it while it lived. We see its corpse, together, in a rare moment of unity: the one surviving universal delusion. The corpse of consensus. The corpse as consensus. And so all cultural commentators, all critics and pundits, are resurrection men, but only in the crassest, most opportunistic sense. They’re profit-minded graverobbers. There’ll be no resurrection, man.⁸

Culture is dead and its tomb is empty.

Culture is dead and there’s joy in the mourning. Culture is dead and there’s joy in the morning.

Culture is dead, so let’s move the fuck on.

Culture is dead. It is survived by art.