‘Donda’ Is Kanye West’s Darkest And Most Painful Record Yet
The sound of a man turning to the one figure who has never abandoned him: himself.
There is an ancient custom, handed down among beekeepers — when a member of the family dies, the bees must be told about the loss, lest they stop producing honey. Donda, the new release from Kanye West, is a “tell the bees” album.
It is an attempt to make a personal loss — the untimely death of Kanye’s mother, the titular figure who looms heavy over the record — a universal one. You might not know what it is like to lose your biggest supporter, your emotional bedrock, but Kanye wants to let you know, bridging between the foreign and the deeply familiar through the use of extensive religious metaphor. “This is like this,” Kanye says over and over again across a sprawling, oftentimes bloated record that runs at almost two hours in length. “This is how it feels.”
Indeed, the entire album can be explained by its very first track, a 50-second invocation called ‘Donda Chant’ that attempts to transform Kanye’s mother’s name into a kind of prayer. “Donda, Donda, Donda,” says a voice, stretching out syllables until they blur into incomprehensibility. It’s meaning through repetition. It’s the intimate broken down into its most accessible, most discrete moments. And it’s a man crafting a testament to the hole in his heart; to the pain that refuses to leave him.
A Dark World, Lit By Candles
At one of the first listening parties for Donda, Kanye stood in the centre of a near-empty stadium, shot from above, a lone figure battling at the edge of the shadows. It is a typical Kanye image — a mix of self-aggrandisement and ugly, raw pain — and one that hangs heavy over the record.
As ever, Kanye casts himself as the sole bastion of honesty and truth, a lighthouse at the edge of the world; God’s lonely man. ‘Believe What I Say’ lines up the rapper’s enemies against a wall, taking aim at everyone from the paparazzi that hound him to anonymous late night callers disrupting his precious time alone. “Even if I gotta do it solo, even if I gotta do it with no promo,” he raps. Whether he is speaking to himself or his doubters is unclear.
Of course, this time around, Kanye has Christ on his side. He submits to his spiritual North Star on almost every one of the record’s haunted tracks, turning to his faith when he falters. And falter he does. There are references to his divorce; to his numerous controversies; to his sense that the world is snaking around him, trying, in the words of just one of his foes, to drain him of his energies.
This is the Kanye of Ye, a man whose Sisphyian task is equalled only by his sense that he is right, that God is on his side. “We gonna be okay,” the refrain of ’24’, is tinged with desperation, a crooked self-assurance that casts further doubt each time it is repeated. Are we going to be okay? Is Kanye?
Donda Has Its Ugly Edges
Because this is Kanye, the sacred mixes with the profane. ‘Jail’ and ‘Jail Pt 2’ are harsher and meaner than anything on Kanye’s last religious-themed record, Jesus Is King, unravelling a doomed fatalism like Rosary Beads unspooling past knotted fingers. That’s not even to mention the guest spots reserved for Marilyn Manson and DaBaby, two performers whose controversial alleged pasts should have barred them from appearing on a major label record.
For better and for worse, Donda feels unfinished.
That Kanye would fall into a tiresome and endless culture war, let alone one that legitimises a man accused of violent sexual assaults, hurts this record, and Kanye’s reputation more broadly. It should not have happened. That much is simple. Kanye deserves condemnation — this is not just one of his many publicity stunts. It is part of a system that lets alleged abusers skim past due process; that normalises alleged assault. After all, what would have the young Kanye, the socially conscious Kanye, have said about such a pathetic and damaging attempt to generate headlines?
As Long As The Gospel
For better and for worse, Donda feels unfinished. It is the scrappiest album that the rapper has put out in years; more unformed even than Yeezus — that low, rusted buzz of an album. If Kanye is right, and Universal released the record before he was done with it, then here’s to hoping he trims it down rather than beefing it up. There is too much filler here — songs like ‘Jonah’ drastically overstay their welcome at even just three minutes in length.
But at times, this self-same scattershot feeling is what reveals Kanye at his most unguarded and honest. ‘Hurricane’ feels like catching a glimpse of the man in the studio, bent over the dials, re-shaping and re-forming the same old hurts.
And alone. Always alone. Donda is gone; his family has left him. And so Kanye turns, with weary resignation, to the one person that has never doubted him: himself.