![]() The moments where he brings in samples remind you of how clever and excellent he can be at playing to a crowd - Lauryn Hill on ‘Believe What I Say’, for example, dipping in and out of muddiness as West discusses his own public image. West’s vocal abilities are as good as they’ve ever been and his vulnerability has never been so pronounced as in some of these verses. Lorde, Solar Power, review: a sun-bleached, melancholy rejection of fameĪt its best, Donda is brilliant. Herein lies the crux of West’s dilemma: he wants to be this God-adjacent figure, airing and fighting his worst self (“Man it’s hard to be an angel when you surrounded by demons,” he raps on ‘Jesus Lord’ - maybe stop inviting them to be on your records then?) but he’s also a Brand, a corporate entity, a human man who loves flashing the cash, who thrives on attention be it good or bad.Īnd that’s fine, human contradiction is something that has been explored through art for aeons - but do we need this particular two hours of erratic and often middling music about it? It’s strange to hear these sacramental moments alongside songs like ‘Junya’, two and a half minutes on a designer fashion label. Religion is very much present throughout the album, sometimes reverential (‘God Breathed’, underpinned by a Gregorian style chant, punctuated with thunderbolt flashes that feel like smiting), sometimes merely a way to invoke West’s own power: Jay-Z’s verse on ‘Jail’ equates Hova and Yeezus with Moses and Jesus. It feels something like the precursor to religious ecstasy. ![]() It’s a hypnotic minute, deconstructing the syllables of the name into sounds that stop making sense as a word. It opens with ‘Donda Chant’, a beguiling 52 seconds of Syleena Johnson repeating West’s mother’s name. You can preach separation of art from artist for as long as you like, as a woman trying to engage with this record I cannot find a way to forget: it is actively alienating.ĭababy, Kanye West and Marilyn Manson perform during the Kanye West Donda event on 26 August, 2021 in Chicago (Photo: Brian Prahl/MEGA/GC Images)Īnd so to the actual guts of the album. Sure, West is ‘making a statement’ with all this controversy - something something cancel culture - but it falls flat when the crimes these men are accused of are so violently against women. ![]() West also endorsed Donald Trump, whose mistreatment of women has been well-documented. Last week’s listening event was notable mainly for its guests Dababy, who is fresh from making homophobic comments and Marilyn Manson, a man who stands accused of sexual abuse.Īlso featuring on Donda - an album named for West’s mother - is the man who pled guilty to felony assault charges after beating his girlfriend, Chris Brown. ![]() He has not made it easy to feel that way. That fans are invested in it enough to basically watch him knob-twiddle in a football stadium for six weeks, at various ‘listening parties’, is irrelevant, it’s a sprawling, scrawled journal of a man in flux, grieving, struggling with his tangled interior life while trying desperately to present to the outside world an image of a troubled genius, a man for whom it is worth waiting. As I listen to this enormously over-egged 27-track 108-minute album, it seems that West has made this record for no one but himself.
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