Culture Crash: Is the “Donda” Hype Real?

Kanye West may be, pound for pound, my favorite musician of all time. His run of releasing 808s and Heartbreak, followed by My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and then Yeezus is, to me, an almost untouchable run of masterpieces, and his incredible first three albums are in my constant rotation, too, along with Watch the Throne and Kids See Ghosts.

Amid all of Kanye West’s turbulent public life, all of his tone-deaf comments, controversial actions and ill-advised tweets, I’ve always been one to maintain that in the recording booth, he’s one of the greats if you can tune out all the rest.

But that’s a line that has been harder and harder to hold of late, in part because his musical output hasn’t been up to the insanely high standards he set for himself. His latest release, Donda, is ostensibly a tribute to his late mother. The album’s rollout was long and arduous, as it included three separate listening parties held at either Atlanta’s Mercedes Benz Stadium or Chicago’s Soldier Field.

The end result was an equally arduous 27-track album that runs 1 hour and 48 minutes. Some of it is very good, maybe even great, and other sections of it are forgettable. His production value is sublime, but his lyrics are a mixed bag, and his insistence on including alternate tracks of songs at the end of the album, including “Jail 2,” a downgrade from the song “Jail” and one that baffling includes DaBaby, who is suffering the blowback of his own homophobic comments, and Marilyn Manson, who stands accused of sexual, emotional and physical violence by multiple women, makes it all the worse. Kanye’s controversial tendencies are directly present on Donda in a way that his best albums avoided.

At his best, Kanye West is a creative genius. The man who swerved whenever the industry doubted him, the one who released an autotune-heavy track during a period of heavy autotune backlash, the man who went industrial on Yeezus, he was truly a Steve Jobs-like creative master: He told audiences what they would like before we even realized it ourselves.

But his newer trend of hosting listening parties and tinkering with his albums ad nauseum strikes me as the opposite of that creative genius, it seems more like a creative mind unsure of what even he wants.

It’s inevitable that the artists we love cannot pump out only masterpieces, and at its best, Donda can be very good: “Heaven and Hell,” “Jail,” “Hurricane,” “Moon,” and “Jonah” jump out to me as tracks worth delving into. The best hour of the album is a very good album, but it’s still a below-par Kanye West album, as it pales in comparison to the old Kanye, the one who was always in full control.