Against the tide again, with a new album of personal and political liberation
Kanye West’s latest album, Donda, was dropped (the industry term) into an unreceptive environment skeptical of West’s recent public statements and his nonconformist, uncelebrity-like political stances. This rather godless culture seems downright hostile to the album’s heartfelt entreaties and expressions of faith.
But Kanye abides. West has fashioned his own secular gospel: pop music molded from traditional gospel-music stylings but so preoccupied with worldly concerns that it often sounds as anguished as the most bitter, street-tough rap records. Through 27 tracks, West’s protestations go in circles, yet Donda arrives at extraordinary individual insight, such as “Never count on y’all / Always count on God / He’s done miracles on me” — essentially a praise song.
At a time when Missouri congressman Emanuel Cleaver contorts “Amen” with “Awoman” and the Reverend Al Sharpton pontificates on TV but never mentions God, it’s no wonder that Donda has been misunderstood. Reviewers are more confused about West’s brand than Sharpton’s or activist-minister William Barber’s — the misuse of their collars typifies the desanctification of the old faith-based civil-rights movement into today’s cynical social-justice campaigns.
Titled after West’s mother and dedicated to her memory, Donda pursues the ties to faith that once kept black American families and communities unified. When Kanye repeats the mama’s call “Boy!” it seems similar to George Floyd’s infantilism but is not merely pathetic. Consider the faith that Donda taught Kanye as a sincere version of the dreams of Obama’s father. The best songs on Donda recall the jubilant surprise of West’s first gospel hit “Jesus Walks” (2004), but they now offer lessons in difficult perseverance — a genuine confession of West’s distressed Millennial consciousness.
“We gonna praise our way into the light,” West ventures on “Praise God,” a track that articulates all the spiritual misery of the day that few others are willing or able to admit — or use to make art. In the stunning, emotionally explicit “Off the Grid,” West tries to articulate what it’s like for a modern black American to leave the Democratic Party plantation. He repeats certain words — ideas — like mantras to get his point across. This overexplicit ploy is part of rap’s rhythmic insistence and a signature of the style that West has developed on his own. The album lacks only an ideal sample — say, Ethel Waters singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” from The Member of the Wedding — worthy of a mother-loving pop adept like Kanye.
“Jonah” is instantly recognizable as the cry of a man who’s been swallowed by the whale of a corrupt culture: fame, wealth, the Kardashians, and all. On “Junya,” it’s clear that West has been listening to Migos, currently hip-hop’s most representative reprobates (and often the form’s harshest truth-tellers). West turns their example into his own soul-twisting solipsism that now, after WuTang Clan, exemplifies modern black male perplexity. And many other hard-pressed persons will identify with that perplexity. In these tracks, Kanye recalls Eugene O’Neill epic plain talk, which a critic once described as “banality in depth” that can “loose our common demons.”
The songs “Keep My Spirit Alive,” “Heaven and Hell,” and “Jesus Lord” are where Kanye achieves higher ground. He leads with “Tell me if you know someone that needs . . . ” and his Sunday Service choir responds “Jesus, Lord!” with ecstatic soprano urgency. Those choral harmonies and organ chords (as in “24”) supply rich emotional sweep and divine communal support that nothing in R & B can match.
There are some questionable spots on Donda where Kanye falls for ideological banalities of the moment (“Officer from overseer”) or quotes KRS-One obtuseness. “How many prisons they gonna make” parrots the same carceral madness that probably led to Kim Kardashian’s First Step petition while ignoring the bad lessons taught to criminal youth. But this sentimentality, while acceptable to mainstream media (“Remote Control”), is the least valiant thing about Donda. Kanye is brave when he reveals the depths of his filial love. It is the anchor to his faith, which some in his and our culture seem to have lost, while others long for it.
On Donda, Kanye has gone personal more than pop because pop culture is no longer listening (“I done made some mistakes and they rubbed it in”), and yet he remains a true pop artist the way Marvin Gaye was in Here, My Dear (1979), a boldly honest divorce album which is kind of what Donda also is, in both the private and political sense.