Kanye West: Wash Us in the Blood review – an intensely potent study of race and faith
America, divided along racial and political lines and led by its own Herod, faces an invisible plague and a public reckoning against its history of violence. It’s against this Biblical backdrop that Kanye West imagines the next apocalyptic event, in one of his most focused and arresting tracks for years.
Wash Us in the Blood sees the rapper call for a blood rain to deliver black America from evil. We’re at the point, perhaps, where normal water won’t wash; an emergency where we need something stronger. That sense of alarm is amplified by the two-note siren motif, a flattened-out version of the feedback sound on The Life of Pablo’s Feedback or Yeezus’s Send It Up, another of his warnings that puts the listener on alert. It gets your blood up.
Blood, of course, pulsed through another landmark Kanye track, Blood on the Leaves from Yeezus, which remains one of the most controversial and audacious moments in his catalogue for its seeming equation of violence and lynching (via its Strange Fruit sample) with the chaos of celebrity and scrutinised marriage. It had such operatic audacity and brilliant production that Kanye arguably carried it off, though many are still not convinced. But his blood motif is now more honed, perhaps coming in the wake of Jesus Is King, his gospel-influenced album in 2019. This was a slightly underrated release, with robust melodies (particularly on Use This Gospel) and flashes of the old sly Kanye wit (excusing the high prices of his clothing with the reasoning that he didn’t want to end up on reality show Dancing with the Stars), though it certainly had its longueurs too. But by taking the clarity of faith earned from that project, and circling it back to the industrial techno of his masterpiece Yeezus, Kanye could be finding some of his greatest potency for forthcoming album God’s Country (that surely ironic title hints at potentially lacerating contents).
Most obviously, he evokes the plagues of blood in the books of Exodus and Revelation. “Rain down on us,” Kanye pleads, “wash us in the blood.”
Antagonistic racists might interpret this as calling for violent insurrection, but this isn’t someone revelling in gore, Slayer-style, but asking for deliverance from it via Jesus’s sacrifice. In the repetition and invoking of God, there’s a touch of the spirituals that, via blues, gospel, soul and more, sit at the root of Kanye’s musical DNA.
Those spirituals were, of course, forged in the horrors of slavery, and in Wash Us in the Blood, Jesus’s blood mixes with that spilled on Earth, too. “Whole life being thugs / No choice, selling drugs / Genocide, what it does / Slavery, what it does,” he concludes: violence and crime, even inside the black community, is a legacy of the trauma done to it since the very beginnings of America. The disproportionate incarceration of black people is also mentioned, and guest rapper Travis Scott