Welcome back to our continuing coverage of Donda, the tenth album from the artist formerly known as Kanye West, Ye. If you’ll recall, last time we made it through a little over half the album, running through fourteen tracks that somehow weren’t all one single song featuring eleventy billion guests, and yet we’re not even close to finishing this exercise in gluttony. The back half of Donda features even more guests, along with alternate takes of songs featuring different guest verses that I guess our host couldn’t bear to part with or something? I mean, did we really need a “Jail Pt. 2”?
(No. No we did not.)
We now join this write-up for Donda already in progress.
15. DONDA (FEAT. STALONE & THE WORLD FAMOUS TONY WILLIAMS)
A bit of breathing room on a project just fucking overflowing with empty space, “Donda” is a sort-of interlude which features the titular subject. Kanye West works in another recording of his mother into the proceedings, allowing her the opportunity to speak for herself in the only moment of the project that feels even remotely like it was dedicated to her memory. Ye, Stalone, Tony Williams, and the Sunday Service Choir all provide various levels of crooning around Donda’s voice, and for what it is, it sounded fine, if a bit indifferently sequenced.
16. KEEP MY SPIRIT ALIVE (FEAT. KAYCYY, WESTSIDE GUNN, & CONWAY THE MACHINE)
One of my biggest takeaways from Donda thus far is how all of this plays as one long song with only minor variations sprinkled in throughout. That’s a problem, you two. If anything, Ye is known for his disparate soundscapes, often occurring alongside one another within the same instrumental. The primary reason “Keep My Spirit Alive” is of any interest to you two is likely because it introduces Buffalo brothers Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine into the gospel fold (I suppose their cousin Benny the Butcher was simply unavailable at the time?), and their inclusion shifts the sound a little bit, at the very least. After a not-great high-pitched hook sung by KayCyy (who I understand was mostly replaced by our host himself on the latest revision to Donda), Gunn unleashes a brief verse, ad-libs and all, praising the Lord for his current spot in the hip hop pantheon, while La Machina uses eight bars to talk about how grateful he is to have survived the gunshots that ultimately changed the course of his career. Both sounded pretty good (Gunn, especially, seems to be more focused than he has ever been behind the mic – I assume the potential to reach a wider audience persuaded him to take a bit more time with penning his verse), although it’s still really weird to hear either of them on Donda to begin with. Ye himself provides a strange, kind of lazy performance that pays all of the disrespect to the concepts of “rhythm” and “song structure”. An uncredited Royce da 5’9” pops up toward the end to recite some of the lines in Ye’s verse, which means to me that he obviously wrote this song and Ye thought it would be cool to incorporate Ryan’s reference track into the proper mix. SPOILER ALERT: It isn’t. Not the best listen (maybe the revision corrected this, I don’t know), but certainly much more memorable, at least when it comes to the collaborators.
17. JESUS LORD (FEAT. JAY ELECTRONICA & LARRY HOOVER, JR.)
Jesus fuck, is “Jesus Lord” long. That reads like a juvenile critique, cursing for the sake of cursing and nothing more, and you aren’t wrong, but that was literally my first thought when I saw that this track runs for nearly nine fucking goddamned minutes. The weird thing is, nearly every minute of the audio track is actually justified here. Over a solid, dramatic, organ-looped instrumental that sounds like the music a prestige HBO drama would use to segue into its end credits, one credited to our host and Swizz Beatz (who thankfully has zero ad-libs here) with an assist from French producer Gesaffelstein, Kanye West unleashes a decent hook about people needing to seek their redemption from Jesus Christ, which isn’t the most relatable content to a good chunk of the world, but he then launches into an another extra-lengthy Cappadonna “Winter Warz”-esque entry that touches on, well, God and the Devil, obviously, because Ye, but also depression, suicide, what life was like growing up in the streets of a violent Chicago, his mother, and then he gets into some rather vivid storytelling for the final third of his performance (kudos to whoever wrote this shit for him, it’s pretty solid). Kanye sounded engaged and fucking good here, which was a pleasant surprise, as he doesn’t even resort to his typical boasts-n-bullshit rhetoric. Guest Jay Electronica, whose contribution is much lesser, both in quality and quantity, sucks the life out of the track with his myopic view of religion, and also his boasts about his own rap prowess, which seem to come entirely out of left field (“I shake the tectonic plates of the game if I lay one vocal” – okay, calm down, you’ve managed to release a grand total of one real album in the fourteen years you’ve been active in the game, and even that was long after people stopped giving a shit). Although he certainly could have sounded much worse, he wasn’t exactly the best candidate for collaborator on here. Not convinced Ye even really needed one for “Jesus Lord”, however – he does just fine all by himself, and besides, the entire song is merely a setup for an outro featuring Larry Hoover, Jr. speaking on behalf of his incarcerated father, which, while overlong, fits the solemn mood. Chopping Electronica would have also saved on the running time, too, but when has Kanye West ever been known for the economy of his work? Ah well, I still enjoyed this one. (It helps that it’s sort-of amusing to hear our host ask the listener, “Tell me if you know someone that needs [Jesus]”, while imagining him as a part of that Spider-Man pointing meme.)
18. NEW AGAIN (FEAT. CH*IS BR*WN)
Yet another Kanye West song where the hook doesn’t correspond with the actual lyrical content, although to be fair, he spends a lot of time repenting on “New Again”, which would likely erase the line “you’d never live up to my ex, though” and the asinine song opener, “If I hit you with a ‘W-Y-D’ / You better not hit me with a ‘H-E-Y’” from his past. Also, he just used the phrase “hit you” on a song featuring Chr*s Br*wn, which can’t be a good look even in God’s eyes. (The guest was removed from subsequent versions of Donda, marking one of the only times in history where an artist that actually made the final cut of a project was still upset about their limited contribution, which triggered Ye to… simply remove him altogether. While he never should have been included in the first fucking place, I respect the petty, that shit is just fucking funny.) “New Again” spills over with its talk of repentance as a sort-of Wite-Out for your morality, scrubbing the ho shit you got into last night just so your Lord can look you in the eye in the morning. Or something. The messages aren’t mixed here, but they do kinda-sorta embrace a false ideal of most organized religion – that one can act like an asshole up until their very last breath, and if they turn to God at that moment, all of the bad shit they did prior will be nullified. Luckily, “New Again”, whether including the unrepentant woman-beating dancer or not, is too bland by our host’s own standards for you to spend much time giving a shit about it anyway, so.
19. TELL THE VISION (FEAT. POP SMOKE)
The fuck was this shit? “Tell The Vision”, a song from the late Pop Smoke that Ye gave him for his posthumous Faith, is remixed, sort of, for Donda, Smoke’s (censored) vocals lifted from the original and filtered heavily so that it sounds like he’s performing this track from the afterlife. Or maybe that’s just my twisted way of thinking, and Kanye West meant for it to sound like his vocals were recorded directly into an oscillating fan placed aboard a submarine? Doesn’t matter, this is a very stupid inclusion, as it derails any sense of momentum Donda had been trying to build while shifting the focus to a different deceased person than the one the album is supposedly dedicated to. On top of everything else, Pusha T’s verse from the Faith track was supposed to appear on here as well, but was trimmed off at the last minute, which, coupled with his cut cameo from the title track, means the so-called president of G.O.O.D. Music doesn’t appear on Donda at all. This “Tell The Vision” is just a waste of an interlude that fails to pay tribute to Pop Smoke and his unintelligible lyrics (which is likely just due to the studio trickery Ye has provided here, since I don’t really follow Smoke like that to comment on his flow). And I just now at this very moment of my research discovered that there’s a different version of this song featuring 2 Chainz and Conway the Machine, and Kanye chose not to release that? What the fuck is wrong with you, Ye?
20. LORD I NEED YOU
On which Ye comes to terms with the end of his marriage to Kim Kardashian, who isn’t mentioned by name but come on now. Musically, this was pretty ass (in editing this paragraph I realize now that there may have been a subconscious reason for me to use the word “ass” in a sentence that was immediately preceded by a mention of Ye’s ex, which was not intentional but I’m just going to leave it in, fuck it), and the presence of a producer’s tag during the final third (popping up twice, twice!) disrupts the flow entirely, but lyrically this does at least play like the Kanye West of maybe 2016-2017, with his sarcastic comments and matter-of-fact statements of material wealth and sexual fulfillment, although obviously this has been cleaned up for the flock. “Man, I don’t know what I’d do without me” is peak Ye, let’s be honest. “Lord I Need You” ends with a sample of a chorus from a completely different song, as Ye interjects to make the request all about him because of course he would.
21. PURE SOULS (FEAT. RODDY RICCH & SHENSEEA)
A collaboration between Ye and Roddy Ricch that at least feels like an equal partnership at last, and not just because our host’s vocals pup up during Ricch’s verse like errant ad-libs he forgot to delete. “Pure Souls”, a song whose title feels especially shoehorned into the conversation more so than usual, lives on far past its expiration fate thanks to Shenseea’s closing crooning, which lasts fucking forever, but at least the rapped verses sounded decent enough. Ricch has been on a tear as of late, his verse debating the pros and cons of gaining a significant amount of fame very quickly, while Ye reminisces about being broke, believing that prepared him to appreciate his current billionaire status. Our host says some crazy sus shit on “Pure Souls”, promoting his gang ties and claiming that he “can give a dollar to every person on Earth” before justifying his reasons for not having already done just that with, “Man, it’s gotta be God’s plan”, trotting out an old Christian excuse for him to not help anyone with his riches while also not-so-subtly attacking Aubrey yet again, a dude who famously spent the entirely of his “God’s Plan” music video giving away the label’s budgeted amount for the clip to people in need. Ricch acquits himself nicely over the West and BoogzDaBeast production, but Kanye’s actual words took me out of the entire experience. Kind of like most preachers tend to do for me, honestly. And musically, this is an enthusiastic skip.
22. COME TO LIFE
Have we reached the sad bastard portion of Donda? Because Kanye sure does seem to be focusing a lot on Kim, first on “Pure Souls” and now “Come to Life”. (Even though the album was ostensibly supposed to be about his mother, but that’s a Freudian discussion we’re not ready to have today, trust me.) I’m personally fine with our host trying to work through his issues via song – I just wish the song were written better, as all of Ye’s God talk clashes with his relationship woes in an unnatural manner. The actual music for “Come to Life” was pretty decent, the piano work from Mark Williams standing out especially for me, and I did like how our host seemed to realize during his performance that not everything as to be about him, the first step for recovery for narcissists such as him. But nothing on “Come to Life” matches the image of Ye setting himself on fire in a replica of his childhood home, which is exactly how he ended the track during the final listening party. That at least made for some provocative photos, even if the song itself fails to meet his need for a cleansing and a rebirth.
23. NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND (FEAT. VORY)
Really just an interlude that sounds like a proper ending for the album (for a very good reason, as it turns out, just look at the remaining tracks), “No Child Left Behind” is an organ-driven excise for Vory to return once again to Donda and say not much of anything, while our host repeats a single line six times: “He’s done miracles on me.” Sure, okay, if that’s what you want to believe, I’m all for it, but like most hymns and psalms, it’s the lack of specificity that kills the mood for me – if everything is a miracle, then nothing is a miracle. I quite liked the underlying music, though. That doesn’t mask the fact that this is barely a fucking song. And this was somehow used for Beats commercials promoting Donda’s release? How?
24. JAIL PT. 2 (FEAT. DABABY & M*R*LYN M*NS*N)
We’ve now entered into extra innings on Donda, where the clear end point on the previous audio track has since been surpassed with four alternate takes of previously-played songs that imply that Kanye West has a serious problem with editing his work. “Jail Pt. 2”, the first of these variants, is horrible, both in execution and in concept. The instrumental (credited to West, 88-Keys, and Mike Dean, among many others) remains the same, but now instead of some sort of half-assed reunion of Ye and Jay-Z, Hov’s been replaced by DaBaby, who was fresh off of an extremely homophobic rant at the time and uses the entirety of his lengthy verse to chastise those who would date use his own words against him, like a true asshole would. “That food that y’all took off my table / You know that feed my daughters, huh?”, he says, referencing all of the opportunities he lost when that rant went viral but also refusing to accept any responsibility for the consequences of his own goddamned actions. It’s not surprising, but it is disappointing that Kanye West apparently co-signed this behavior – even if it was merely a way for him to quickly gin up publicity for Donda and not an implicit endorsement, it’s still horrific optics for both the general public and this God he keeps rapping about. Somehow even worse than that is the inclusion of M*ri*yn fucking M*ns*n, seemingly involved here specifically because he’s facing multiple accusations of sexual assault (I’m supposed to add the word “alleged” here, but screw that, he definitely did that shit) and Kanye was overly concerned with the effect of “cancel culture” in society even though:
(1) “cancel culture” doesn’t actually exist;
(2) if it did exist, Ye himself would have had all his wealth and success stripped from him for his jackass slavery comments during Tr*mp’s term (and also because he was buddy-buddy with an orange racist); and
(3) “cancel culture” doesn’t apply when someone fucking rapes women. Those are just called “consequences for your actions”.
For an on-brand God-fearing Christian, Kanye West sure has no problem throwing women under the bus in service of his fellow males. Remember when Ye claimed that Bill Cosby was innocent? Everything about “Jail Pt. 2” is so fucking disgusting and abhorrent that even his own performance, largely the same as it was on the original, sounds worse by association. If there ever were a song that deserved to be scrubbed from existence… well, there are plenty of other contenders that would take precedence, but “Jail Pt. 2” should still be treated like people coughing in public in 2021: avoided.
25. OK OK PT. 2 (FEAT. ROOGA & SHENSEEA)
Far less malevolently mischievous on Kanye’s part (and that description is me being generous, I know he did that shit on purpose) is “OK OK Pt. 2”, which is essentially the exact same song as before, except Lil Boat’s verse has been swapped out for one from a returning Shenseea, who throws some Jamaican dancehall flavor into this stew. The song itself remains not great, but the alterations do some good: Shenseea sounded pretty decent here, and her verse is a much better contrast to both Ye and Rooga’s performances than Yachty’s, as his delivery blended in with those of the other contributors. Given the fact that everything else about “OK OK Pt. 2” is the same, from the beat to the other verses, it begs the question: Why did this need to exist? Kanye, just pick a version and fucking stick with it. You didn’t have to use every goddamned verse you could find on your hard drive.
26. JUNYA PT. 2 (FEAT. PLAYBOI CARTI & TY DOLLA SIGN)
As a music nerd, a description that likely also fits most of you two reading these very words, the concept of alternate takes of songs excites me, I can’t lie. The endorphin rush I feel when a song I’m otherwise familiar with drifts into an entirely different direction cannot be duplicated without the assistance of some high-grade substances. I even felt a tinge when Playboi Carti’s verse on “Junya Pt. 2” went beyond what I sort-of remembered from what seems like just an hour and a half ago, and I don’t even like Playboi Cartu. That’s how ingrained this trait is with me. “Junya Pt. 2” begins its life cycle as the exact same fucking song as before, but steps outside of the lines during Carti’s verse, which starts off the same, but features newer material that extends his performance to twice its original length. Guest Ty Dolla Sign then pops in with a verse of his own, keeping the overall vibe established by Ye’s earlier chanting intact throughout his stanza, and it is underwhelming as all get out, although I suppose it could have been much worse. The original “Junya” renders the excess presented on this “sequel” entirely unnecessary, but not offensively so.
27. JESUS LORD PT. 2 (FEAT. JAY ELECTRONICA, THE LOX, & LARRY HOOVER, JR.)
Once again, that was nearly my very expression, as I realized that Kanye West took the longest song on Donda and made it even fucking longer. Thankfully “Jesus Lord” is the best song on Donda by quite a large margin, and knowing well enough to not mess with a sure thing, “Jesus Lord Pt. 2” is the exact same track, complete with the Jay Electronica feature and the lengthy outro from Hoover, except our host has forced three additional verses into the mix right after Elechanukkah, one from each member of rap trio The Lox. The Yonkers natives recorded their contributions on the fly almost immediately after their definitive Verzuz victory over Dipset earlier this year (okay, Jadakiss was the real winner that night, I think we can all agree – the other two were simply on the right side of history), and, in the case of Sheek Louch and Kiss, they sound rushed, as though Ye had given them twenty minutes combined to write and spit their verses before the plane took off. (Styles P’s verse was decent, if more melancholy than usual, given his opening line and the documented personal challenges he’s suffered as of late.) I still believe that West has the best verse on the track, and the instrumental is the finest Donda has to offer, so even though everything else on “Jesus Lord Pt. 2” is just noise (seriously, why have this song end with the exact same outro as before? Don’t you think that would dilute its effectiveness?), the good shit here overrides all of the iffy stuff. And with that, I’m taking a fucking nap. Be back in a bit.
THE LAST WORD: Donda is a self-indulgent nightmare that listeners who dare to press ‘play’ on will have no hope of ever escaping. There is no reason Donda needs to exist in its current form – all it proves is that Kanye West needs to employ a goddamned editor, someone who isn’t afraid to tell him to his face to stop fucking around and just let a song end already. (The fact that many of these songs all sound alike anyway also doesn’t help the cause.) Approximately nine percent of Donda has anything even to do with West’s late mother – the rest of this is mostly (censored) boasts-n-bullshit from a man who may or may not have issues with his mental health (that’s tricky territory to navigate, I’m not going to blindly speculate here), a man who never had an opportunity to properly grieve his loss, a man who was (and still is, apparently) undergoing a lengthy divorce proceeding involving four children and billions of dollars, a man who, for the very first time since The College Dropout, seems unsure of his place within the sphere of our chosen genre, trying to force the completion of a brand new lane instead of, again, working on tweaking what he already has.
Given the ridiculous number of guests that appear on here, Donda oftentimes plays as a compilation album (one absent of any actual G.O.O.D. Music artists, interestingly), with circus ringmaster Ye briefly ceding the spotlight for one of his star attractions-slash-invited collaborators to spit some gibberish that has nothing to do with Donda, God, or whatever the fuck our host himself may have just said. But make no mistake, this is Kanye’s self-immolation: the project lives and dies by his hand. There are actually some songs on here that could be considered worthy additions to your West playlists – since our host has never made his relationship with his God a secret (see: “Jesus Walks”), some of these songs do slide seamlessly in between some of his other, better hits. But make no mistake: the vast majority of Donda sounds like one lengthy, unfocused rant taking place over background music that only slightly evolves throughout.
Kanye West certainly has the right to record whatever the fuck he wants, but I find it very difficult to believe that Donda is the result of his tireless need to honor his late mother. Dr. Donda West was a celebrated educator who passed under tragic circumstances, but aside from a couple of tossed-off mentions that literally could have been added in post, you won’t discover much about her on the album that bears her name, as this plays more like an aimless final project pulled together mere hours before its due date, one holding itself together with a combination of lack of sleep and sheer willpower. Literally the only artist that pays any sort of homage to the titular subject had his verse (and song) cut from the final product – the cognitive dissonance Kanye must have been experiencing during the truncated recording sessions is mind-boggling. (And yes, I know, I’m fully aware, but that track isn’t on this version of Donda, so.) How anybody can listen to Donda and believe it to be a masterpiece is baffling to me. I know that people respond to music in different ways, but there aren’t many messages to glom on to on Donda, whether you consider yourself spiritual or not. This is just a dumpster fire with a toddler’s handful of decent songs that I still can’t truly recommend as must-listens.
At least we still have Kanye West’s older albums to enjoy. The guy currently wearing the Ye mask isn’t doing much to keep the spirit alive here. I do hope his mother is at peace, though.
-Max
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