To wrap up August, Kim Kardashian took to Instagram to share a video for Kanye West’s Donda highlight “Come To Life,” which featured footage from West’s Chicago listening event at Soldier Field. It seemed at the time that this wasn’t an official video for the song, given that the only place it appeared was Kardashian’s Instagram page. Now, though, the clip actually has been released as the song’s official video.
The video starts with a wide shot of West’s re-creation of his childhood home before transitioning to a shot of him becoming engulfed in flames. Then, for the clip’s latter half, Kardashian meanders around the stage in a wedding dress before coming face-to-face with West. While using live footage for an official video could be perceived as a cop-out, the listening event was cinematic in nature and basically something like a live music video shoot, so it feels appropriate here.
Charlamagne Tha God admitted he thought the record was a bit lackluster, but had thoughts on how to fix it, while his Breakfast Club co-host, DJ Envy, is still caught up on Ye’s past actions. He called Yeezy’s behavior over the last few months and years “clown behavior” and said he thinks the mega rapper’s team is partly to blame for enabling him.
“I called him a clown, and I still stand by that and I still mean that,” Envy began. “So many people called me and asked me why I felt that way, and I explained to them why I felt that way…. they asked me why do you think the people that I named — which was Pusha T, John Monopoly, Free and Boo were like that too — and I said it’s because I feel like you enable him to do it. You don’t stop him from doing the wild out stuff behind-the-scenes that is really disrespectful, and he should be humbled.”
Check out all of this thoughts above — including an admission that despite all that he still likes his Yeezy shoes — and our review of Dondahere.
This week, the music world was eclipsed by a single release: Kanye West finally dropped his much delayed album Donda. But of course, it wouldn’t be a Kanye album rollout without at least a little controversy, which he delivered when he invited accused abuser Marilyn Manson to the stage. That still didn’t stop the rapper’s fans from listening to the album so much that it’s dominating on both Spotify and iTunes. Apparently, Kim Kardashian has also been boosting the album’s streaming count without actually listening to it.
Kim tried to show support for her soon-to-be ex-husband’s new work by promoting it to her over 249 million Instagram followers. She screenshotted a few of his tracks like “Hurricane” and “Lord I Need You” and posted them to her Stories. But one fan pointed out that she had the volume turned all the way down on her phone, meaning she wasn’t really listening to Kanye’s music.
Though Kim might be streaming Donda on mute, there is a lot of evidence that she has actually heard the album at one point or another. She has been spotted at all the Donda listening parties that Kanye hosted, and she recently shared a video for his “Come To Life” track which featured audio from one of the events.
Soulja Boy — who is apparently still ticked off at Kanye West about being left off of Donda‘s final tracklist, despite Kanye’s protests that Def Jam released the unfinished album without his permission — has escalated his trolling campaign against the producer, now resorting to throwing jabs over Kanye’s impending divorce from his wife Kim Kardashian. While Soulja Boy tagged Kardashian in a tweet during yesterday’s tirade against Kanye, today, he’s outright suggesting that, like Ray J, he hit it first. He posted a throwback photo on Twitter posing with Kim from what looks like sometime in the late 2000s, captioning the photo: “I was the first rapper wit @KimKardashian not u.”
Aside from being, well, gross, the post is just the latest from Soulja Boy expressing his anger at being omitted from the Donda release that hit DSPs over the weekend, whether it was by Kanye’s design or not. He previously posted an in-studio video from his and Kanye’s recording session playing back his verse and has been retweeting fans’ posts decrying Kanye for leaving him off the album. In an interview with TMZ, he said that his frustration stems from not being told personally that he wouldn’t be on the album and only finding out when it dropped.
#souljaboy says he is still willing to make music with #kanye but he should have called him personally to let him know he would not be on #donda!
Still, that’s no excuse for the sophomoric stuff he’s doing right now. Women aren’t props for men’s petty grievances, and nobody cares if you hit it or not, dude — except for, probably, Kanye, who is almost certain to never work with Soulja Boy again after this, if his current feud with Drake is a measure of his own vindictiveness.
Kanye West. Just writing his name conjures a chaotic storm of thoughts and emotions. The mercurial producer has meant so many different things to so many people for so long that he’s basically become something of a human Rorschach test. Every listener to his latest project — the oft-delayed and much-hyped Donda — will project something different onto it, reading into it exactly what they see, so it almost feels anticlimactic to type this: My only takeaway from this hefty, exhausting listen (it clocks in at nearly two hours, along with tacked-on, remixed versions of four early records, which are the ones that will likely garner much of the attention) is that it is pretty much exactly what I expected.
What I expected was this: A Picasso napkin doodle. That is, for better or worse, what Kanye delivered. The story, so it goes, is that one night, Picasso is sitting at a cafe (one sign that this tale is likely apocryphal: no one seems to know what he ordered, whom he’s with, or even what cafe this supposedly was) when he’s approached by a fan who asks him for a quick sketch on a paper napkin. He does the sketch, a line drawing of a dove, and requests an exorbitant sum for what is, essentially, a doodle. The fan, taken aback, asks what possible reason he could have for asking for so much for something that took so little apparent effort and time. Picasso replies that it took him 40 years to draw it — the implication being that it was his name and experience that made the drawing valuable, not the drawing itself.
Kanye probably feels great resonance with this story; it’s no coincidence that he first started pulling his current schtick of slapping together a collection of song sketches and calling them albums in 2016 when he released The Life Of Pablo. Perhaps it was then that he realized that, because he’d given the world College Dropout and Late Registration and Graduation, and hell, even 808s And Heartbreak, that he could get away with putting out stuff as garish and grandiose as Yeezus and Ye, that the spectacle would outweigh the underwhelming output, that the name “Kanye West” held more truck with fans than anything he’s actually put out into the world. All that legend building he did early in his career calling himself a genius and a visionary and a god had finally paid off.
It’s on the backs of those boundary-pushing, genre-stretching works that he crafted the myth of Kanye the perfectionist, who once tweaked the mix on “Stronger” well over 70 times with the help of eighteen different engineers before employing Timbaland to get the sound just right. If you played any of those 75 other versions of the mix for a fan, I doubt they’d hear much difference or be able to articulate it if they could hear it. But it’s the story — which, when you think about it, could be just as apocryphal as Picasso’s napkin — that sells the image of the Kanye who could get away with hosting three different listening sessions for Donda, each time playing a slightly different version of the album, and each time pushing back the release date just another week, another few days, perhaps never even intending to put anything out at all, as his temper tantrum toward Universal for apparently dropping it without his permission suggests.
And as for the version of the album that did hit DSPs, it’s as I expected, somehow both half-baked and overwrought, a bundle of contradictions and experiments and unearned group assignment B pluses that both perfectly sums up who Kanye is now without telling us very much about him at all. To judge from the title, you might have thought this album would finally find Kanye coming to terms with his anguish and ennui at the loss of his doting mother in 2007. There is some of that here, yes, such as the primal scream therapy of “Come To Life” and on the introspective first half of his verse on “Jesus Lord” which features a more expansive contribution from Jay Electronica. Kanye wrestles with the public dissolution of his relationship with Kim Kardashian on “Lord I Need You” and nods to his faith on “Heaven And Hell.”
But even from the opening track, the much-vaunted and twice-updated “Jail” featuring Kanye’s highly anticipated reunion with Jay-Z, the album comes across unfocused, unmoored, diffuse, and to be honest, kind of boring. There are long swaths of synth choir noodling that feel like they’re meant to sound moody and intense and deep, and it just comes across as pretentious and shallow like that clove-smoking jerk Kyle in Lady Bird, trying to project an image of mysterious cool because he doesn’t actually have anything interesting to talk about. Whenever Kanye’s production swivels into anything resembling novel territory or evokes the past excitement he used to stir up with his bold, broad splashes of inspiration from outside hip-hop and R&B, he immediately throws away that goodwill with a disorienting, unnerving left turn into more maudlin muck.
Most of the album’s truly exciting moments come from outside artists; the moments when the production perks up are marred by the memories of someone else doing it first and better. Take the sample of a cover of gospel singer Tonex’s “Make Me Over” sung by Briana Babineaux. It’s a gorgeous rendition and clever use of the sample — that Westside Boogie already did on his own song called “Make Me Over” from the 2015 mixtape The Reach. On “Believe What I Say,” a flip of Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” sounds suspiciously like rival rapper Drake’s own use on the 2014 “Draft Day” freestyle that he re-released on 2019’s Care Package. Kanye doesn’t even rap on “Moon” with Don Toliver and Travis Scott, letting them do the heavy lifting. In fact, most of the bright spots on the album come from its guests: Lil Baby on “Hurricane,” Lil Durk and Vory on “Jonah,” Roddy Ricch on “Pure Souls.”
Even then, these moments stick out like sore thumbs as they guide the direction of their individual collaborations, unglued from any overarching theme or thesis. Kanye simply invites them to come to do what they normally do, which doesn’t tie into anything he’s trying to say — and it seems like he wants to say so many things, but the message becomes so muddled it’s hard to say what. The one thing that’s clear is that he wants absolution, which may be the hardest pill to swallow. He seems to think he’s the incorrigible lead from some 1970s-era family sitcom; deliberate missteps like cavorting with accused abusers such as Marilyn Manson and the disgraced but unrepentant DaBaby should be viewed as standard, episode-of-the-week hijinks from a charming troublemaker. They’re not. He still hasn’t quite apologized for whatever damage his association with Donald Trump did over the past five years, nor for his ill-advised (and likely Trump-sponsored) Presidential run in 2020. If this project is a tribute to his mother, it’s a poor one if he thinks these are the people she’d most want to hear him supported by and supporting.
But it’s all more myth-making to him. The spectacle, again, is all. He can make the claim that Def Jam took the album without his permission and that’s why it sounds so incomplete and he can say that it sounds that way because he’s a real artist and if you don’t get it that’s on you. He’s a leader and a genius and a victim and a lost little boy who just misses his mom. He’s Kanye West; he can be whatever he wants to be and whatever you want him to be at the same time. Except that’s not how it works. Nobody gets to have it both ways — not even Kanye West.
Kanye West put on quite the show with his pre-release Donda listening events. That’s especially true of the Chicago show, which featured a life-size re-creation of his childhood house. It turns out, though, that West apparently wanted to move the actual building in which he grew up to Soldier Field for the event.
A report from the Chicago Sun-Times (as Complex notes) says that West was denied permission to move the house. The city’s Buildings Department explained, “Moving a home in Chicago is a very technical process that requires structural engineer reports and multiple city permits. The request to move the house at 7815 S. South Shore Dr. was denied last week because no permit application had been received to excavate and move the vacant property which is also in Demolition Court.”
So, it was this denial that led to a reconstruction of the building being made instead.
West purchased the building last year for about $225,000 and apparently had plans to renovate it, but it’s unclear how the home ended up in demolition court. Of Chicago’s demolition court, Justia notes, “Illinois statute 65 ILCS 5/11-31-1 sets out various options for local governments that wish to abate the problems created by ‘dangerous and unsafe buildings’ and abandoned buildings. Under 5/11-31-1(a), the government may apply to the local circuit court for an order authorizing it to demolish, repair, or board up a building, or requiring the building’s owners to do any of those things, if the owners have not taken sufficient action within 15 days after being sent notice of the problems. The mechanism for taking advantage of this provision in the City of Chicago is bringing an action in a court referred to as the ‘Demolition Court.’ This court is designed to provide an expedited process for hearing cases involving buildings that, in the City’s opinion, require demolition.”
Questlove is one of the most respected music historians and scholars for a reason — he knows that perspective is essential for analysis. And that is exactly what he’s encouraging diehard Kanye fans to employ as they embrace the seething mass that is this final version of Donda. After a couple of years wandering the desert, producing severe missteps like Ye and Jesus Is King, the stans are thrilled that Kanye seems to have put something out that’s back on a Pablo level, and some have even gone so far as to dub it an instant classic.
Quest, and plenty of the rest of us, are not so sure. “Classics can’t be claimed 24 hours after some product comes out,” Quest wrote as part of a lengthy Twitter thread on the album today. “I’ve seen it backfire both ways. It’s like the timeline is tryna grab the rebound w :10 secs left in the game & y’all all hoping it’s your tweet that goes viral in declaring how amazing it is (or isn’t) time will tell.”
He also brings up how some early reviews led him astray with other albums, as part of his larger point that giving a record some room to breathe only helps improve the overall impression it leaves. Check out his thoughts below.
Man. This album Is 27 songs long. I lost steam after 8 but I am giving it a 1ce thru (the target demo for this album 14-26) but y’all gotta chill on this need to “DECLARE FIRST!”—-classics can’t be claimed 24 hours after some product comes out. I’ve seen it backfire both ways
It’s like the timeline is tryna grab the rebound w :10 secs left in the game & y’all all hoping it’s your tweet that goes viral in declaring how amazing it is (or isn’t) time will tell (my new book explores history being 20+ years while journalism is under 20 years meaning…)
Back in 90 I let Rolling Stone burn me w a well written 1/2 review of Graffiti Bridge which put me in the mind frame that “they are saying this matches “Dirty Mind” & surpasses “Purple Rain”/“Controversy” (s when first reviewed)—-welp a month later listening?
All I’m saying is this album is damn near The Clash Sandinista length so I know unless you sat there an absorbed it 10 times in a row—-there is no way y’all can start the positioning of the cannon on an lp not even 24 hrs old.
Now that Kanye West’s Donda is finally released — whether he approved the final version or not — the armchair critics are emerging with their hot takes in hand. Whether it’s to declare the record awful, worship at the altar of Ye, or refuse to engage with the text, a whole spectrum of responses has emerged, as usual, to the latest Yeezy project. But one thoughtful, long-time Kanye fan has a fairly measured response, and ideas for how to make the record better.
On this morning’s episode of The Breakfast Club, DJ Envy noted that he won’t be listening to the album at all because of Ye’s recent flirtation with supporting the MAGA among us, but Charlamagne Tha God came through with some pretty good, honest insight. “Upon first listen, it was lackluster for me,” he said Charlamagne. “I like the joint with Westwide and Kanye, I like ‘Jesus Lord’ with the LOX and Jay Electronica…. I think if he just scaled the project down, to like 12-13 records, it could be a great album.”
The idea of scaling the project down is likely something plenty of people at the label had in mind, too, and would likely do a lot for its reception. The sheer volume is a dealbreaker, as Charlamagne notes: “But it’s an hour and 48 minutes long, so like Kanye West it can be very exhausting,” he said, noting the music itself sounds older, too. “28 songs with all the part twos, an hour and 48 minutes, it’s too long and it drags to me. And the music sounds kinda dated, man.”
So maybe, Kanye, release an edited version to win fans like Charlamagne back? Check out the full discussion above.
Kim Kardashian showed up to all three of Kanye West’sDonda listening parties, but she played an especially large role in the recent Chicago event, where she took the stage in a wedding dress. Now that Donda is actually out, Kardashian shared a video for “Come To Life,” which features footage of her on-stage wedding dress moment, as well as of West on fire.
This doesn’t seem to be an official video for the song, as it only appears on Kardashian’s page. Rather, it appears to be something she made or had somebody make, to capture a moment of which she’s fond.
She also took to her Instagram Story to share what seem to be some of her favorite Donda moments, which include the title track, “Come To Life,” “Lord I Need You,” “Hurricane,” and “Ok Ok Pt. 2.”
As for Kardashian and West, there have been reports in recent days that the two are apparently working on repairing their relationship. This comes after a June Keeping Up With The Kardashians reunion special in which she said of the cause behind their relationship issues, “I honestly don’t think I would even say it here on TV, but it was not one specific thing that happened on either part. I think it was just a general difference of opinions on a few things that led to this decision.”
In the lengthy saga that has been the rollout for Kanye’s latest album, Donda, plenty of artists have been involved — in good ways and bad. While controversial features like Marilyn Manson and DaBaby have been the subject of much discussion, Ariana Grande fans were a little surprised to hear what sounded a lot like her vocals on the album’s title track when it finally dropped today.
But if you listen closely, you’ll hear slight differences that indicate it’s likely not Ari herself. First of all, she rarely AutoTuned and filters her voice to the point the female vocals on “Donda” have been altered — mostly because she simply doesn’t need to. It just hasn’t been her style in the past. And though there’s never been any public beef between Ari and Ye, they’ve never collaborated before or really been in the same realm, musically. Of course, they share a friend in Scooter Braun, but that’s about it.
All this to say, those vocals aren’t Ariana — and she confirmed as much on her Instagram Stories today, praising the actual featured artist, The Stalone, like the class act she is.
Instagram
“You sound beautiful @thestalone,” Ari wrote, putting the subject to bed once and for all. She’s too busy being a blissful newlywed to work on a Kanye timeline, anyway. Check out the song in question above if you haven’t heard it yet.
