Words by Bailey Agbai
After three listening parties, Donda is finally here – and it’s a display of how someone as complex as Kanye West handles grief and loss.
The death of his mother, Donda West, changed Kanye West beyond belief. Had she not died only age 58, Kanye’s career and catalogue would undoubtedly look different. For the past decade, it seems Kanye has been trying to mourn his mother, using his music, his art and his talents to express his feelings. Donda, it seems, is the culmination of this pain, mourning and suffering – the ultimate tribute to his late mother – yet, instead of creating a project based upon the love and adoration he holds for her, he has made an album full of darkness that replaces love with grief – hope, with despair.
After the opening track, ‘Donda Chant’, it’s hard for Kanye to pique a listener’s interest again. The song is bizarre: it’s not a song, nor a skit or a spoken intro, it’s in fact something much more evocative. Seleena Johnson, who previously featured on the 2004 Kanye hit ‘All Falls Down’, repeats “Donda” in a number of different ways. The track only clocks in at 52 seconds, but its effect is massive: it’s hypnotic and haunting, heralding the darkness that is to follow.
Kanye once infamously described himself as the number one most impactful artist of our generation: he’s right. Donda only serves to further illustrate his point: its wealth of features – from JAY-Z to the late Pop Smoke– demonstrate how Kanye’s influence has transcended the confines of time and genre. However, it’s from his choice of features that the biggest failure of Donda manifests itself. His inclusion of alleged rapist Marilyn Manson and the homophobic DaBaby on ‘Jail Pt.2’ feels not only disrespectful and insensitive – but intentionally provocative, too. With a multitude of different sounds and vibes, Donda’s biggest issue lies in its inability to focus the listener on the story, a coherent theme across the body of work. Add the controversy, the multiple listening parties and the bravado surrounding the release of the album, and the ability to focus on the music alone becomes much, much harder.
By including the likes of Manson and DaBaby, Kanye puts himself at a disadvantage, distracting from his album’s honest message.
Nevertheless, there is light to be found amongst the darkness of Donda. ‘Hurricane’, featuring The Weeknd and Lil Baby, is lyrically grounded in light only due to The Weeknd’s foreshadowing of his upcoming album, The Dawn, a shift away from the moody After Hours. Besides ‘Hurricane’, there are other tracks with lighter beats, such as ‘Jonah’ and ‘Keep My Spirit Alive’, that offers a much-needed refuge from the often overwhelming darkness. The lightest song on the album is ‘Believe What I Say’, boasting a sample of Lauryn Hill’s ‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’, and providing feelings of comfort and nostalgia rather than heaviness like the rest of Donda.
The darkness of Donda is ultimately symptomatic of its rawness. This album is a tribute to the woman who created ‘Kanye West: the number one most impactful artist of our generation. The weight Donda carries is understandably reflective of the complexities that accompany being a self-acclaimed genius. For Kanye, the pain and pressure that would have been on his shoulders when trying to craft this album must have been both soul-crushing and mind-numbing.
It took three listening parties for the album to finally drop, and even still it only dropped because of Universal’s intervention, without Kanye’s blessing. At times, like Kid Cudi and Don Toliver’s feature ‘Moon’, the darkness of the album is replaced by sadness and pain, and it is at these moments that the album is at its best and most effective. In the way that emotion is never a perfect nor rounded experience, neither is Donda. In time, the album has the potential to become a cult classic, full of raw emotion and vulnerability. For now, however, its controversial features and rollout may have garnered its interest, but have also limited Donda‘s potential as Kanye, once again, places the public’s focus on his gimmicks and wrongdoings, rather than his artistry.
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