The Scroll Reviews Kanye West’s “Donda”
By: Ross Anderson
“All black everything.”
So repeats the chorus of the clipping track “All Black,” about a slave on an
abandoned spaceship, crying out hopelessly against the infinite emptiness of
space.
I’ve been thinking about this song a lot. For all the bombast and theater of
its launch, and all its various controversies and delays and the stories of its
guest appearances and maker, Donda is fundamentally about that blackness: the
darkness of the void and mind, which colors Kanye’s flak-jacket costumes and
fills Donda’s empty album art. It’s about a post-divorce dad and long-mourning
son in the midst of mental shadows, reflecting on his place in the dirt and how
little the extravagances of his life actually matter but—unlike that space-faring
slave—seeing a way to meaning when he looks to the sky and sees light from his
creator.
The reason Christian rock can only aspire to mediocrity is for the same reason
that propaganda never reaches true artistic greatness: The messages always override
and dominate the artistry, so experimentation and novelty can never be
tolerated if it obscures the point.
Often, Kanye’s experimentation does harm this album, but it also allows him to
grasp greatness that only art inspired by the divine really can. I share
Christopher Hitchens’ argument that the great religious artworks could never
have been made about evolution or the cosmos, for art made in awe and
celebration of a divine creator can capture a spirit that no secular art can.
And Donda is a great example of that.
Or, at least, that’s what Donda aims to be, when its maker isn’t wandering down
detours in this 27-track goliath.
Each Kanye album brings with it a new style and sound for the artist—and often,
the whole industry after it—and that of his 10th album, Donda, is a blend of
gospel, rock, and traditional Kanye production. This is introduced immediately
with the odd, eerie “Donda Chant,” in which Syleena Johnson repeats the titular
name of Kanye’s beloved, lost mother as a heartbeat and religious mantra before
spilling into the bombastic electro-rock “Jail,” and in these first two
minutes, you are introduced to both how Kanye uses strong gospel elements, in the
choirs throughout and the emphasis on repetition and mantra over lyrical
complexity, and how he smashes this into sounds he’s played with before. “God
Breathed” takes inspiration from the glitchy electronica of (his greatest
album) Yeezus and the beautiful transition of its best song, “New Slaves,” and
melds them with choral ecstasy. “Heaven and Hell” is a lyrical power ballad,
akin to “Gorgeous and Power” but with a new emphasis that goes beyond
disregarding consumerism and nay-sayers, to considering a purpose other than
yourself. And there’s a lot of Life of Pablo too. This infusion of gospel and
preference for electric guitar over drums also elevates otherwise flippant
songs, such as the “Moon” interlude and fame ode “Pure Souls.” Both sound far
more impactful, and deep, than they ought to.
Songs such as “24” and “No Child Left Behind” return to a more traditional
gospel style, which he also played with on his last two albums, Jesus Is King
and Jesus Is Born (the latter with his “Sunday Service Choir”), but it’s in the
less traditionally religious songs that Kanye is at his best. “Hurricane” was
originally recorded in 2018, years before his return to religion and recent
divorce that makes its central verse so potent and heart-wrenching:
It’s a lot to digest when your
life always movin’
Architectural Digest, but I
needed home improvement
Sixty-million-dollar home, never
went home to it
Genius gone clueless, it’s a
whole lot to risk
Similarly, though “Jail” is a pulsing, energetic hit with a rascally chorus,
the lyrics speak to loss and the acceptance of it, either as a part of God’s
plan or an inevitable failure on the path of righteousness. And then there’s
“Jesus Lord,” his longest, most narrative verse in many years. He slightly
stumbles through each of its many lines, trying to express more words than the
beat can hold, but this rough tone gives them urgency and significance—that
they have to be said—and an intimate, personal tone that polish would ruin.
Throughout the album, his words are often powerful precisely because he isn’t
spilling his emotions but rather communicating how he feels as men often do:
indirectly. The deflection and complex emotions behind lines such as “you made
a choice that’s your bad, single life ain’t so bad” is what makes it hit.
However, the lack of discipline and consistency erodes the quality when it
comes to the (many, many) features. When making his opus, My Dark Beautiful
Twisted Fantasy, Kanye rejected good guest verses, telling them that he knew
they could do better; and they did. Donda is anything but that, bloated with
unnecessary guests whose quality varies dramatically.
Some are stunning. Vory’s inclusion on “God Breathed” and “Jonah” are utterly
beautiful, and Lil Durk interjects the latter song with the album’s best verse,
about loss and violence. Similarly, Fivio Foreign distinguishes himself with an
extended verse on the drill-inspired “Off the Grid,” and Conway the Machine is
surprisingly intimate and sensitive on “Keep My Spirit Alive.” However, the ad-libbed
gun-pops of his Griselda co-member, Westside Gunn, shows where laziness and Kanye’s
belief in an artist let the quality slip—as also seen in Jay-Z’s unremarkable
“Jail” verse, written four hours before the first Donda performance and
sounding like it. And then there’s complete garbage, such as Baby Keem’s verse.
There is no excuse for lines like “Bada the bada the boom, I bada the boom, I
bada the bing” and “Tame Imp—, Tame Impala, Tame Impala, stay outside, huh”—and
certainly not with an album of this tone.
There’s no discipline here, and it’s particularly frustrating considering Kanye’s
blanket “no cursing” policy, which weakens his guests verses and cost him André
3000’s contribution on the leaked track “Life of the Party.” André’s other
issue with that track was Kanye’s inability or unwillingness to stay on point.
André’s verse spoke beautifully about mourning, religion, and his mother—the
core themes of the album—which Kanye followed with a long verse about … Drake?
Similarly, some of his typical, corny Kanye-isms add to the album—such as the
joke about Adam being black at the end of “Off the Grid”—but others just
detract from otherwise sober verses: for example, describing his relationship
with Kim Kardashian as “the best collab since Taco Bell and KFC” in the raw,
tragic “Lord I Need You,” about the collapse of his marriage and how it has
wrecked him too.
There’s a similar fog in the theology of the album, as it features many
biblical references (though fewer than on Jesus Is King) but also plenty of
unapologetic sinners, be that Marilyn Manson (sexual assault/grooming), DaBaby
(homophobia), and Jay Electronica (constant antisemitism, and he opens his
verse with a reference to Rothschilds—again). I have no objection to music by
“problematic people”—be these claims spurious or all too credible and
serious—but serial domestic-abuser Chris Brown singing on “New Again” that “I
repent for everything that I'ma do again,” is more than slightly sickly and
treats divine forgiveness like a loophole.
And yet at the core of this album is the yearning for God’s embrace, the
singing out to the silence of God; and when it touches that spirit, the effects
are heavenly—namely on the album’s gold star, “Come to Life,” one of Kanye’s
all-time greatest songs. With a rising, complicating piano backing and
dissonant choral vocals, Kanye sings from his post-separation darkness,
imagining that he had lived another life: one in which he listened to his wife
more, and she was still there, and the fear of dying alone and regret for his
mistakes weren’t. And, in vain hope, he asks if by putting these thoughts into
“pen, maybe they’ll come to life.” It’s no accident that the powerful visuals
from the last live performance have been the album’s only music video,
with Kanye sitting alone, in a specter of his childhood home, engulfed in
flames, and then coming into the light, living that alternative life and
remarrying his now separated wife. If you’re anything like me, you’ll watch and
listen to it on repeat and have a tear in the eye more than a few times.
Like the best of this album, the video is pious, vulnerable, epic, and
intimate, and everything you want from Kanye; the religious embrace of Donda
allows him to achieve something that none of his previous work truly could.
This is a uniquely flawed album among his discography, having the least
discipline and most inconsistency. There’s a 10-track
album-of-the-year masterpiece within this, but it’s bloated at 27
tracks, with the four “part 2” bonus tracks being wholly unnecessary for the
“standard” edition of the album, and tracks such as “Remote Control,” “Believe
What I Say,” and “New Again” completely incongruous with the overall themes and
tone of the album. Similarly, the inclusion of a reworked version of Pop
Smoke’s already threadbare posthumous “Tell the Vision” is a nice tribute, but
an utterly unnecessary downgrade.
But when Donda is great, my god is it great. And, in many ways, it’s due to
Kanye’s rough spontaneity.
In its vulnerability and honesty about his confusion and disarray and darkness,
it’s relatable and moving; but unlike that great clipping track, Kanye shows a
way out of the shadows.
For a religious man like him, it’s through divinity. For an atheist like me,
it’s in the inspiration and brilliance that people like him can create amid the
darkness.
It isn’t all black everything. There is still light in the darkness. And it’s
truly spectacular.
From Tablet magazine’s The Scroll, September 9, 2021