DONDA
“Donda… DONDA… … … donda… DONDA… DoooooNNNNda”
The intro of Kanye West’s album Donda seems to leave little ambiguity. The opening fifty or so words are just “Donda” (his mother’s name) repeated at various tempos and inflections. The album is about his mother. Or, at least, inspired by his mother.
There are numerous moments on the album where he samples spoken word audio of his mother (she was a distinguished professor of English at Chicago State University and also political activist). She has a strong and convictive voice. Sometimes, while listening to those audio clips, I realize that I’m not evening hearing the words, I’m just soaking in the intensity of the sound of the words.
Weirdly enough, I always felt that way when my own mother spoke intensely to me. I was so intimidated by her voice that it didn’t matter what she way saying, I knew to fall in line.
Kanye's life-defining relationship with his mother has me thinking more about my own life and my understanding of motherhood, both as a son and now as a new parent. Though I will examine the album from a musical standpoint, I also aim to explore my personal connection to Kanye as one of my favorite musical artists.
I always revered my mother more than my father. It was never a matter of respect: I always respected (and disrespected) them both equally. But there’s something about a mother’s understanding of the world that I found almost mystical.
I find it today when I watch my fiancée nurse and calm our newborn daughter. There’s something that, even as a loving father, I can’t quite replicate. I’ve always found it interesting that, in many established religions, the god-figure is known as “He” or “The Father,” yet we refer to our physical world as “Mother Nature.”
In the timeless debate between Nature vs. Nurture, mothers are both. And Kanye seems to understand that.
Even before Donda’s passing in 2007, Kanye had made it clear in his music and interviews that his mother has always been his biggest inspiration. My mother despised Kanye until I played her the song “Hey Mama” (Kanye’s infamous Late Registration tribute to Professor West). She cried, and I said, “I told you Kanye was awesome!”
Ye had offered glimpses of his wild personality before his mother’s death (most notably when he deadpan-proclaimed, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” during a Hurricane Katrina television benefit.
(Note: I view that impromptu statement, which left Chris Rock and Mike Myers looking visibly stunned, the funniest unscripted thing any celebrity has ever said.)
After his mother’s death, however, he began to wear his heart firmly on his sleeve. 808s and Heartbreak, which also followed the dissolution of his long-term relationship with Amber Rose, showed Kanye at his most vulnerable yet. He chose to forgo rapping for auto-tuned singing and created the interesting contrast of painful vocals transformed by this new-sounding music technology.
The auto-tune and vocoder create a barrier between Kanye’s imperfect voice (which can still be heard beneath the studio trickery) and the listener, very much the way someone with depression feels completely disconnected from everyone and everything around them.
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Brief-ish recap of the years between then and now:
Mr. West interupts and belittles young Country Pop star Taylor Swift at the VMAs. He acknowledges his hubris and insensitive behavior and redeems himself with the critically and commercially loved, other-worldly album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Then, Kanye makes a move that only He can get away with: he titles his following album Yeezus (yes, a combination of his pseudonym “Yeezy” and Jesus Christ). His hubris (and mental health) has once again gone unchecked. But at that same time, he’s also happily married to famous reality star Kim Kardashian, and the arc of the Yeezus album suggests that he had been working on his tumultuous personality and its inherent contradictions.
The Life of Pablo further explored these themes. Yeezus was different from his past work, sure, but it felt cohesive. Aside from the closing track “Bound 2,” the album retains the same industrial, bleak, futuristic sound throughout. Pablo does the opposite. It is lengthy, manic, and the sounds and vibes of the album shift drastically, often from one song to the next. Think gospel directly into trap, then into gospel-reggae, then into abrasive mechanical synths, then into dream-pop, into bleak Weeknd-assisted R&B, then into four-to-the-floor dance, then… et cetera. It was the first outright example of Ye addressing his mental health. Before, many of the problems he talked about were more specific or circumstantial: social awareness, newfound fame, breakups, loss of loved ones. Now he was talking about a more longstanding unsettledness; existential concerns average people can relate to, but within the context of his largely unrelatable life.
Then there’s the Trump thing. I’ll avoid delving too much into this (especially because it is suspected that much of Kanye’s adoration for Trump was simply a ploy to get the President on his good side). In 2018, Kim used her celebrity and influence to help a handful of nonviolent drug offenders become pardoned due to their unfairly long sentences. It is believed that Kanye’s rapport with Trump helped grease the wheels for these pardons, most of which were issued by Republican governors.
But either way, Trump was an enormously divisive figure and Kanye’s alignment with him caused controversy.
Then things spiraled further. He said some wild shit on TMZ, broke down in interviews, and generally caused people to become upset with him or concerned for him. This lasted for years.
He did manage to release two albums during this chaos. His collaboration with Kid Cudi (Kids See Ghosts) helped me recover from a dark period of my life that was marked by drug abuse.
Then, in what is probably the life-change he is most known for in the past few years, he became a Christian again. And like most reborns, he wasn’t shy about it. He started performing pop-up gospel performances (backed by a choir and band numbering in the dozens) on Sundays in various cities across the world. Naturally, many people were fed up with his antics by this point, so his lifestyle pivot was met skeptically by the public.
That’s dumb to me, however. His early stardom-securing hit was “Jesus Walks” after all. And though he did claim to be an atheist at one time, his back-and-forth relationship with religion and God has always been present in his music.
Shortly after, he released his worst album. Jesus Is King. It’s not just me that thinks it’s his worst, it’s most people. Fans, myself included, began to worry that he was on his artistic decline. I think most of us were okay with that given he’d released like ten great albums, many of which will certainly go down in history. But still, it was sad to think that one of our favorite artists may never release something magical again.
Why did I recount all of that? Like I said before, Kanye’s personal and public life seemed to spin more and more out of control after the death of his mother, and he’s even admitted that he’s never recovered from it.
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Donda.
Sometime over a year ago, West started teasing an album titled Donda. Even despite his history of album delays and reworkings, and also the disappointment of Jesus Is King, a new Kanye album is still something to look forward to. Even more so considering that he decided to name it after the most significant person in his life, aside, now, from maybe his kids.
I've had plenty of time to absorb this new project, and the performative absurdity of its preceding listening parties. Part 2 of this Olney contribution will be out later this week.
