An exploratory review of Kanye West’s Donda¹

 

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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

 

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1. This is a review of Donda proper, as it appeared on Spotify at time of writing. I’m not going to grapple with  the deluxe version of the album—I tried to listen to it a couple of times, felt it was weaker, diminished, in spite of its greater length, but can’t articulate how, exactly—or the multiple alternate versions of tracks that exist or have existed (save for a quick mention of the Chris Brown boondoggle).
2. Neither did. This review was published on 2/23/22. (Only a day late! A triumph by my standards!) Kanye held a characteristically messy listening event for Donda 2 on 2/22, but at time of publication the album itself has yet to materialize.
3. I’m so sorry. One sentence in and I’m already begging for forgiveness.
4. I really wanted to title this review “Donda, Dogma.” Two words. Five letters each. D O _ _ A. “Dogma” has religious connotations. It felt serendipitous. Intentional. But: Donda is anything but a dogmatic album. If anything, it’s anti-dogmatic, a complete rejection of rigid specificities of any given Christian sect in pursuit of a purely emotional religion that unifies (or at least emulsifies) all divergent strands (and brands) of Christianity through rhythm and abstraction leaving only: feeling, faith.
5. And that beat. Fuck. I’m a convert.
6. Following an argument with his father about what constitutes “christ-like” behavior, no less.
7. Dostoevsky would be proud. (Or, conversely: maybe he is.)
8. I took my Switch, television, teacups, a few books (still unread), and a couple suitcases filled with my least-tattered clothes home with me. I took everything but the television (theft risk) with me again when I moved to the Estate. I left the wooden rosary my Dad made for me in the storage locker, zipped up inside an old faded pink duffle with a knot of ethernet cables and a pair of battery-less Wii Remotes. It’s still there.
9. Donda West’s age at the time of her death.
10. There must be some connection between Donda’s death via botched cosmetic surgery and her son’s relentless struggles to escape the bottomless well of narcissism and ego, but it seems indelicate (or perhaps just fucking crass) to do more than vaguely gesture at it.
11. An earlier draft mistakenly claimed that both events happened to St. Paul. My mom would be ashamed of me. Following this correction, I admit, the Road to Damascus connection is much more tenuous but it feels intuitively true to me, so I’m leaving it in.
12. Well, not explicit in that sense. This track is as censored as the others. The purpose of censorship on this album could be the subject of a two page digression that I’m too fatigued to write. “Nigga” has to be, far and away, the single most excised word. Is this Kanye self-consciously modifying his speech in the hope (belief?) that his mother is listening? Is there a bit of “bury that word” at play here amidst the affected holiness? Or is it simply that he naively believes that it’s not Christ-like to swear?
13. Correction: Nope, see “Jesus Lord” below.
14. These screams are particularly unsettling to me, because to my ears they sound like a pleading cat. Other listeners might hear a hungry baby and experience the same sense of irrational, biological panic.
15. My memory of this track was completely wrong! Here’s something I wrote before listening to it again: “Absent is the latent dissonance of previous tracks. There’s a lot of struggle present, but it’s impersonal, abstracted, off-loaded on a society that Kanye seems disinterested in critiquing or complicating. Instead: Kanye’s life is hard. Ghetto life is hard. God intercedes. My kneejerk reaction: It’s one of the weakest tracks on the album, leaning hard on an established formula without providing fresh innovations or insights. This track could easily have appeared on The College Dropout, during Kanye’s flirtations with conscious rap. As formative as that album was for me, this is not a compliment.” None of this is correct! There’s a whole verse dedicated to Kanye’s personal despair! And probably the most explicit statement of religious doubt on the entire album! We’re all unreliable narrators. We’re all bullshit artists!
16. For real this time!
17. Kanye also directly references this divine/mortal wrestling match in “Follow God” on Jesus is King. There’s probably no need to (over)explain why this bit of scripture might have particular resonance for West.
18. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m telling myself it’s because I want this review to be about Donda as a piece of religious art, rather than focusing on the drama of Kanye’s personal story, but it’s probably mostly because I already feel like I’m out of my depth and I don’t dare absorb any new information that my further complicate my understanding, that might introduce more trepidation and doubt, that might, in short, give me more work to do.
19. Wait, no! Congratulations, Mr. Blackwood, you’ve been upgraded to the main body text! Respect to a master hustler.
20. How did I end up with the only room with carpet? I loathe carpet.
21. A rebel, apparently, in senses both modern and historical.
22. Is this screenshot a fake? Maybe. I couldn’t find a reliable source to confirm it. But, hey, look where you’re reading this. It’s unreliable narrators all the way down.