Kanye West Is the Greatest American Artist
This is not a review of Donda.
To be honest, I haven’t even listened to Donda front to back yet. I haven’t had the proper time to digest the album the way I want, taking it on a long drive, letting it burn late at night, cradling and whispering to it in the dark.
But I know every word already. I stayed up to watch all three listening parties. I downloaded the leaks from YouTube and sent them to friends. I checked the r/WestSubEver subreddit 30 times a day.
I’m just like any other fan of Kanye West…but I’ve been fortunate enough to get closer to the story than most. In college, I wrote about smoking weed with Mike Dean at his Manhattan apartment. I interviewed producer & engineer Andrew Dawson, the only other person besides Dean to appear on every Kanye album. I even compiled and ranked all of Kanye’s unreleased albums for DJBooth.
Something that Mike Dean said in one of our interviews didn’t make it into the story, but I remembered it always. I was asking him for his impressions of artists; he’s worked with everyone from Selena to Scarface to Travis Scott. Himself the essence of brevity, he boiled down Kanye’s artistry into one word. “Epic,” he muttered. “Epic, he just goes for the epic, always.”
That’s what I kept thinking as I watched the three listening parties Kanye held to promote his tenth studio album. Upon the blinding, smoky steppes of Chicago’s Soldier Field and Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Ye paraded a menagerie of costumed dancers and celebrities, clearly inspired by his past year dabbling in opera. He levitated into the sky, lit himself on fire, and broke Apple Music records for streaming. As if to remind us—and his wife, who apparently reconciled with him at the conclusion of the last show—“Look what only I can do.”
Those of us who’ve gotten checks to analyze Kanye’s music have settled upon a kind of critical consensus: that each album pulls in an opposite direction than the previous. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a maximalist reply to the minimalism of 808s & Heartbreak. The Life of Pablo was a sprawling rejection of the density of Yeezus. Jesus Is King was the salve for the bipolar degeneracy of Ye.
Donda doesn’t feel like a response to Jesus Is King. It feels like a capstone, a crown, the culmination of all styles used thus far. Kanye has never operated in one genre, instead preferring to find and develop an esoteric or underground style for a wider audience: he harvested industrial music for Yeezus, electronic for Graduation, baroque pop for Late Registration. Ye wasn’t the first person to chop a soul sample, but he made it iconic.
On Donda, Kanye crystallizes the style that’s completely his own. Forget using A-level artists like The Weeknd or Jay-Z as instruments, Kanye paints Donda using his own albums as brushes: striking us with the heavy synths from Ye, the stadium drums from Graduation, the avant-garde interruptions of Yeezus. No other artist has the resources, resume, or Rolodex to create anything in its realm.
In this interpretation of Kanye’s work, each album is not a pendulum swing in the opposite direction, but a new power in his arsenal, be it Auto-Tune, baroque pop, or “stadium status.” Suddenly, Jesus Is King isn’t an aberrant Sunday on Kanye’s timeline, but the supplier to his music of the most important puzzle piece of all: God.
During the Jesus Is King era, Kanye declared he would never make secular music again. He keeps this promise with Donda. Every song on the album praises God. And not with empty platitudes—Kanye sincerely wrestles with ideas of radical forgiveness, love and loss, and how to remain a dreamer in a society built to keep you angry and defeated.
Critically, I’m sure Donda will be picked apart. Fantano will niggle on about the drums or arrangements or whatever. (The technical quality of Donda isn’t what makes Kanye the greatest artist, as I’ll explain below.) This Friday, Drake’s Certified Lover Boy will drop, which I’m sure will do much greater numbers, and the music industry will continue churning out hits about flexing and spending and smoking opps (and I will admittedly listen to all of them).
But will they comfort the grandmother cleaning floors who just lost her job? Can they sustain the dude in the busted pickup who hates his? In the weeks since the listening parties, I’ve personally gone through some dark times. Hearing Kanye earnestly sing “Ever wish you had another life?” followed by “Make it all come to life / Make it all come to life / Prayin' for a change in your life / Well, maybe it's gon' come tonight” followed by soaring piano keys that sound like the end of a Japanese anime isn’t corny, it’s awesome. The message goes beyond music. These are the songs we should play for our children.
That is why Kanye is the greatest American artist. College is over and I will never again be baited into an argument about the role “Le Artist” plays in society, but I will say this, without citation or hesitation: I feel like the greatest art doesn’t exist just “for art’s sake,” but as a kind of message from above, a capturing of the past and present to show us where we are going in the future.
And where we need to go right now—America—is in the direction of God. We have the mightiest military, economy, culture, and technology, but we are completely hollow. Under God, race dissolves, forgiveness is extended even to the most wretched, and we no longer demand a scapegoat to pin society’s woes on, because Christ was the last scapegoat, or was supposed to be, according to Christians (I’m not Christian). In an age of fear and control, when you know God is beside you, there is no reason to be afraid.
This may not be the message you were expecting in a musical review. Maybe you thought I would say Kanye was the greatest because of music or fashion or whatever. That plays a part, he’s arguably still the most talented musician, but he’s the greatest American artist because he’s promoting God.
With all due respect—because Kendrick is on the horizon—I don’t see any other artists doing that. They know God or Jesus are made out to be unpopular. They’d rather feed us Instagram captions describing the status quo, rather than challenging it, as all great artists should do. Nietzsche said “God is dead,” Kanye says “God is still alive.”
The album ends with “No Child Left Behind,” a synth-organ stunner which consists essentially of two phrases: “No child left behind,” which harkens to Bush-era politics and a kind of early liberalism, and “He’s done miracles on me.” Two phrase that neatly summarize Kanye’s compelling vision of America at its holiest: “No child left behind. He’s done miracles on me.” As far as messages, it doesn’t get better than that.
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