Jay Electronica has a commanding verse on “Donda.” Fivio Foreign has a great verse on “Donda.” Lil Baby has a very good verse on “Donda.” Lil Durk has a striking verse on “Donda.” Sheek Louch, who sounds like he’s been mainlining Ka records, has an excellent verse on “Donda.” Jay-Z has a decent verse on “Donda.” Westside Gunn has a lovely verse on “Donda.” West has long been shifting into conductor mode, and on several songs here, he is the ballast but not the focus.
This continues on the album itself, which is 27 tracks long, nearly two hours of music it is sonically cohesive but also overlong and full of heavily assembled songs - multiple producers and writers, a bounty of male guests. Also, even though the scale of the event was overwhelming, it was less elegant than earlier concert performances where he communed with his mother’s spirit. If that is a coherent politics, it is animated by West’s longstanding sense of grievance that he is misunderstood, but it was ultimately a distraction from the album’s intended tribute. DaBaby recently made homophobic statements during a festival performance.) West’s choice to include these widely derided figures exists somewhere between empathy for those who have been shunned for their misdeeds (suggesting that even those who have sinned are worthy of love) and aligning with the maligned for easy outrage. (Manson is facing accusations of sexual abuse. Onstage, the guests looked bored, purposefully bored, above-reproach bored. At the beginning of the show, he was almost immediately joined on the porch by Marilyn Manson and DaBaby - a Kanye’s Ark of the canceled and disbarred. He also presented the home as a safe harbor. This was a phalanx of protection, a way to consecrate and protect the place he was raised.
He had a faithful re-creation of his childhood home built on a hilltop at the center of the stadium, then encircled it with rows of sentry dancers and black vehicles driving in concentric circles. That approach went hand in hand with how West channeled his angst at last week’s Chicago listening event. They’re corporeal studies of psychological hurt. His late-period music makes a trade-off between complexity and directness. Once a wordplay-obsessed, self-aware lyricist, West has shifted in the last decade to a more terse and immediate approach, one that complements his musical shifts toward the industrial and the spiritual. As a Kanye West album, it feels more like a stabilization than an innovation. (He excised all cursing from this album, even bleeping out his guests.) But there are songs, like the recycled Pop Smoke collaboration “Tell the Vision” and the drowsy “Moon,” that feel purely decorative. Several songs, including “No Child Left Behind,” “Jesus Lord” and “24,” sound like kin to the music West was making during his embrace of gospel. The music itself has been in flux - the version of “Donda” played at each event has been different - and West’s refining of it in public, a method he introduced with “The Life of Pablo,” is his true artistic project now. Instead, these last few weeks have been album rollout as multimedia soap opera. New music may have been the raison d’être for these events, but it is not his sole goal, not anymore, not really.
A vast expanse of ranch outside Cody, Wyo., annexed for work and play.Īnd now, for the rollout of his 10th album, “Donda,” stadiums - two listening sessions cum performance pieces in Atlanta starting in July, and a third last week in Chicago. A domed prototype for affordable housing built on his property in Calabasas, Calif. His Imax film, “Jesus Is King,” filmed in James Turrell’s land art installation Roden Crater, in Arizona. There was the 2016 Yeezy Season 3 fashion show and album debut held at Madison Square Garden. For the last few years, Kanye West - perhaps tired of the insufficiency of the album, or music-making in general - has been seeking increasingly grand canvases for his various projects.