‘Donda’ can’t save Kanye West
After flirting with right-wing politics, the rapper seeks to redeem himself and settle the question of his relevance as an artist
It has been nearly two decades since Donda West excitedly parked her car outside of a Best Buy store in Chicago to buy her son’s debut album in 2004. The rapper, now a billionaire, has returned with his tenth studio album and it bears her name, Donda. Suffering a tragic death caused by post-plastic surgery complications in 2007, she is not alive to see her name on the title of her son’s latest album.
Her unexpected death is an event many critics believe Kanye West has never really had an opportunity to properly process and is responsible for triggering many of his public breakdowns and outbursts in recent years. West’s closeness to his mother was something unheard of in a culture with a preoccupation with unhealthy relations, thriving on narratives of traumatic violence.
But he was not the first rapper to flaunt his adoration for his mother. Rappers had been narrating singleparent struggles and celebrating their influence long before West — most famously Tupac with his 1995 heartfelt appreciation of his mother, Afeni Shakur, in Dear Mama. But where Pac and others performed their love as a retrospective act of maturity, West saw his love as what many progressives would call “a praxis” and was unapologetic about his mother’s continued influence on his music and life.
“You’re like a book of poetry, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni,” West raps on the song Hey Mama from his 2005 critically acclaimed sophomore album, Late Registration. But of course, hip-hop’s penchant for misogyny meant that West’s respect and adoration for his mother would not be extended to other women.
West’s middle-class background meant that more than anyone else, he sought what writer Mychal Denzel Smith calls “desperate ’hood acceptance”. Being born into partial privilege in an industry that recognises only triumph over struggle should have been limiting, but for West it meant not being bound by the same masculine codes as many of his hip-hop peers. He could freely perform his love and still keep his street cred(ibility) intact.
Losing his voice
Despite the history behind its title, Donda is West’s least anticipated album in nearly a decade. The last time a Kanye West album generated the kind of buzz we’ve come to associate with him was in 2016, when he released his seventh studio album, The Life of Pablo (TLOP), three years after the release of the polarising Yeezus album. With that album fans and critics who had been disappointed by Yeezus hoped West could redeem himself and deliver a coherent album. Although The Life of Pablo did achieve some redemption for West, it was a far cry from the acclaim garnered by his earlier albums.
The album also failed to address the elephant in the room: was West an artist past his prime? Those who’ve long argued that this was the case, were not entirely wrong. What followed after The Life of Pablo was nearly a half-decade episode of erratic public behaviour, a complete embrace of former United States president Donald Trump and his right-wing base and a failed 2020 presidential bid that saw West cast himself as a custodian of conservative American Christian culture and life.
But of all West’s sins, his comments about slavery being “a choice” in 2017 were the most shocking. Those comments effectively emptied his seventh studio album Ye of any substance or relevance. But a turn to gospel in 2018 with two albums, Jesus is King and Jesus is Born, acclaimed among West’s Christian audience, could neither save him nor win him the votes he needed for political office.
Donda, the album
With Donda, West seeks not only to redeem himself as an influential liberal black figure but to settle the debate about his relevance as an artist. It’s not the first time that he has been written off or one of his albums raises hopes of a return. In 2008, West released his genre-bending fourth studio album 808’s and Heartbreak and ushered in an era where it became possible for hip-hop artists to explore their vulnerabilities and their emotional state. Despite that it performed well commercially and proved West’s range as an artist, the consensus among critics and fans was that it spelt the beginning of the end for West.
But those who held hope for West’s musical redemption looked to My
Dark Twisted Fantasy, an album comedian Chris Rock has likened to a great rock album, in that it was an album ahead of its time and therefore defied categorisation. But the argument, which West brilliantly settled with My Dark Twisted Fantasy, was purely about his ability as a musician. He had not toyed with the dark magic of right-wing politics or insulted his ancestors by making light comments about slavery. Hence, the expectations for Donda far outweigh those of My Dark Twisted Fantasy.
West has recently been making what appears to be amends, setting up a university fund for George Floyd’s daughter and volunteering to cover the legal costs of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, both victims of police brutality and racism. It is perhaps these moves that left fans hopeful of a return to the days when West’s music, though still selfcentred, carried some form of social commentary. But anyone who’s betting on Donda for West’s redemption will be disappointed.
“I told him to stop all that red cap/ we going home,” West’s longtime friend and mentor Jay-z raps in a surprise feature, one of the few moments in the album where West’s political decisions are addressed.
Jay-z’s appearance marks the return of one of the most important relationships in mainstream hip-hop, after a rumoured feud. West and Jay-z, through their musical and business endeavours, have ensured that hip-hop’s reign as the “new opium of the youth” endures. Another surprise appearance on the album is that of Jay Electronica. Like Jay-z he adds a necessary political element to an album that’s mostly about West’s issues.
“Earthquakes will strike this nation for what Bush did to Rwanda/ What the Clintons did to Haiti and what Downing Street did to Ghana,” he raps.
West returned to some of the soulful elements that have made him a household name, like the introspective poem from his mother in Never Abandon Your Family. It is as close as West gets to an honest reflection, reckoning with his failed marriage. And to keep his pulse on current trends, West has surrounded himself with younger artists and producers such as Travis Scott, The Weeknd and Digital Nas. But there’s an obvious disconnect between his music and the realities of his life.
At 44, with a failed marriage and an album that bears his mother’s name, the expectation was that West would do some introspection and reckon with his contradictions. But Donda isn’t an album of honest reflections. Instead, West continues to cast himself as a victim and survivor.
“He’s done miracles on me,” West sings in the album’s lead single, No Child Left Behind. For him, Donda isn’t an opportunity to repair and reconnect, but a victory lap. I Know God Breathed On This reinforces the message from the lead single; West is marvelling at his own triumphs, never mind the wreckage in his path.
An identity crisis
West would like us to believe that he’s still “the voice of a generation” he once proclaimed himself to be, but Donda is a continuation of an ideological crisis that has possessed him for much of his career. Though it incorporates some secular themes, it is still an album devoid of complexity and mostly rooted in West’s pseudo-spiritualism. Both West and his fans seem to be caught up in a moment of nostalgia, if not denial, where they believe he can still achieve the kind of genre bending and era-defining music of The College Dropout and 808’s and Heartbreak.
Much of that denial rests on the idea that West is supremely talented. That he’s one of the most talented artists of his generation isn’t questionable. But his fans seem to forget that it wasn’t just music that catapulted West to political relevance. Yes, he injected hip-hop with a new sound but his music resonated because it mirrored the realities of black American (and global south) youth in a way that had been almost nonexistent in mainstream hip-hop.
If West’s more recent albums left us with more questions than answers, then Donda should settle things. The Kanye West of The College Dropout and Late Registration isn’t coming back.
Donda is a continuation of an ideological crisis that has imbued him for much of his career