The record should have ended at “No Child Left Behind,” a stunning drone piece that mixes menace and ethereality the way really good doom metal introductions often do. He should not have tacked on the alternate versions of four songs to the end of the canonical track listing that appears on streaming services, a decision that badly undermines Donda’s otherwise excellent sense of pacing and harmony and pushes the runtime by 20 unnecessary minutes (though Kanye alleged that Universal released the album without his permission, so maybe this wasn’t his call). (That honor goes to Tyler, The Creator’s Call Me if You Get Lost.) Kanye’s religious conversion has turned him into an anti-cursing puritan, and the lack of an explicit version of the record disrespects his featured guest artists, few of whom hot-dogged their contributions, while also aurally vandalizing the end-product. It is far from the best album of the year, nor even the most innovative or ambitious rap album of the year. I have a few complaints with Donda, and in the interest of proving I am not a reflexive Kanye apologist I’ll list a few of them.
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Sarah and JVL talk about free speech, cancel culture, and whether or not we have…
That this is all condemned as “ jackass-dom,” rather than hailed as one of the few truly original mass cultural events in a time of derivativeness and fragmentation, is a reflection of widespread critical cynicism, and marks a revealing refusal to engage with Donda on its own terms, as a piece of art.īut what do you expect? Donda is the work of a maximally free artist tortured by the fundamental questions of existence, and our culture gatekeepers tend to be too stricken with irony and intolerance to have much of a frame of reference for that sort of thing anymore. Millions are listening to a legitimately challenging record, many of them after watching the performance art blow-outs of those three listening parties, major productions in which Kanye lit himself on fire and levitated and sank to his knees as Kardashian watched from a nearby luxury box. The payoff has been remarkable: Donda’s 27 tracks racked up nearly 100 million Spotify streams on its first day out, the second-biggest debut in the platform’s history. To my ever-fallible ears, Kanye has made the most Wagnerian major hip-hop release in history, a heavy and difficult meditation on eternity delivered through the weirdest album rollout in recent memory. Does “Jesus Walks” have a line that’s so spiritually vexing? When’s the last time “Gold Digger” made a grown man cry without the aid of psychedelics? “God is still alive,” Kanye proclaims at “Come to Life’s” climax. There’s no “Gold Digger” on it, and there certainly isn’t a “Jesus Walks.” But then another acquaintance reported that he’d cried listening to “ Come to Life,” a soul-baring, drumless, decidedly radio-unfriendly track where Kanye sings of spiritual and personal crisis above ascending peals of piano and organ-like synthesizer, intercut with audio of a woman speaking in tongues.
It’s true that Donda doesn’t aim for the same pleasure centers that Kanye once accessed by reflex, and that it often doesn’t seem to care about any pleasure centers, period. True enough! Why doesn’t Kanye make normal shit anymore? another asked, getting right to the heart of the matter. There’s too much Fivio Foreign on it, one noted. After three listening parties held at NFL stadiums in Atlanta and Chicago-the former of which West appeared to be living in for a number of weeks-debuting three different versions of the album, critics have moaned that Donda is an overlong, substance-free monument to toxic ego and the work of a man not only broken by his divorce from Kim Kardashian, but also suffering from a mental illness he refuses to have adequately treated.įriends of mine-people who, notably, aren’t paid to write about music-furnished comparatively more valid complaints. Everyone’s finding something to hate about Donda, Kanye West’s critically panned tenth studio album, released last Sunday amid a stunt-filled extravaganza of head-fakes and delays. Once again he is being attacked for presenting new ideas.