Kanye West Donda
If the surprise release of Donda last Sunday felt surprising at all, it sure was anti-climactic. It’s a story we’ve seen before: three different unveilings, shifting release dates, and conflicting reports on the album’s degree of completion made for an exhausting rollout that brewed frustration in diehards and skeptics alike. West’s tenth studio album finally materialized last week (with or without the artist’s approval), and reception has been mild to say the least. But after years of disappointing fumbles and false leads, Donda is a respectable, if complicated, step in the right direction.
It’s a predictably messy affair, bloated by ambiguous ideas and crowded with too many guest spots. Collaboration has always been an essential part of Kanye’s art - his group writing process has drawn criticism from hip hop traditionalists over the course of his career - and the list of performers and producers here far out-shoots his brimming opus, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. But where that album felt guided by West’s unyielding presence even in its most ridiculously overstuffed moments (“All of the Lights” famously credited fourteen guest vocalists), Donda often feels like a showcase of other, hungrier artists. Some of the features are truly awe-inspiring: “Remote Control” is piloted by a tirelessly creative Young Thug, and “Praise God” lends almost half its runtime to an ever-improving Baby Keem. There are duds too: the almost obligatory, posthumous Pop Smoke feature is rote and ill-fitting - the Brooklyn drill quota is filled twice over by Fivio Foreign anyway - and Griselda emcees Conway the Machine and Westside Gunn sound conspicuously out-of-place on the otherwise excellent “Keep My Spirit Alive.”
The extra creative padding is not always a bad thing; Kanye has a way of putting his foot in his mouth when he’s given the chance to do so. He’s uncharacteristically well-behaved here, though, coming across as a Kirk Franklin-type worship leader, hovering, encouraging, and often embarrassing. There is notable lack of explicit language - West’s mention of panties on “Off the Grid” might be the coarsest lyric here - and its pious, sanitized posturing feels fairly contrived coming from a man who has mused freely on anal bleaching. But Donda is pointedly less preachy than Jesus is King, where Kanye played televangelist to a crowd of lost souls no one asked him to save.
When he shines through the gimmickry, it can be magnetizing - West sounds particularly inspired on “Keep My Spirit Alive” and centerpiece “Jesus Lord,” and solo number “Believe What I Say” feels victorious for its sample credit alone - centered around the intro to Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing),” the track recalls Hill’s clearance denial for a sample on 2004’s “All Falls Down,” and its inclusion is a marker of just how far Kanye has come since his debut. Late highlight “Come to Life” is reflective, almost pastoral, adding layers of delicacy to an overly muscled body of work, and title track “Donda” drops the floor out of the cathedral entirely, resurrecting his mother’s voice in warm, choral light.
For all of its holy grandeur, Donda is not without its controversial moments. “Jesus Lord” ends with an affecting treatise on mass incarceration from Larry Hoover Jr., son of the infamous leader of Chicago’s Gangster Disciples. Kanye pled to Donald Trump for the commutation of Hoover Sr.’s sentence in 2018, a moment of vulnerability buried in the jumble of pro-Trump antics and ass-backwards conspiracies. It’s difficult not to be moved by Hoover Jr.’s personal account of the generational torture enabled by the prison industrial complex, even as it nudges towards pardoning the actions of one of America’s most despicable figures. It’s a complex, loaded moment that speaks to West’s undying love for his hometown as much as it does his warped moral compass.
Infinitely less forgivable is “Jail, Pt. 2,” which features Marilyn Manson, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault by multiple women this year, and DaBaby, now known best for his homophobic tirade at July’s Rolling Loud Festival. Shock value has always been part and parcel of Kanye’s artistry, but his deliberate inclusion of Manson and DaBaby feels vile. Perhaps the attempted arc here is forgiveness and empathy, but for two of the year’s least repentant hate-mongers, it feels misguided and wholly undeserved. It compromises the album’s vision and reminds us why we’ve been so down on West the past several years.
The nearly two-hour runtime is too ambitious for its own good, but it works against concerns of the hasty, Ye-era sketch-work many assumed West was doomed to repeat. Donda ends up being his best project since The Life of Pablo, and its scattershot execution reaches for that album’s kitchen sink eclecticism. While it falls short of excellence, the result winds up being as confounding, complicated, polarizing, and selectively brilliant as West himself. C-