In the chorus of “God Is,” Kanye West proclaims: “this is a mission, not a show.” During the first half of 2019, Kanye was hosting performances, gatherings hell-bent on salvation, properly-titled Sunday Services. At these shows, Kanye, along with his choir and other musical collaborators, would perform gospel tunes in private—though miscellaneous photographs and recordings managed to get leaked. At Coachella, Kanye’s Sunday Service performance was live-streamed. With the release of Jesus Is King, Kanye have given us a bookend to the narrative he’s been building since The College Dropout: his path to God that he’s hinted at for nearly two decades. Yet, it is one of the shallowest albums Kanye has ever dropped.
Six years ago, Kanye released Yeezus, dropped the track “I Am a God” in the first half of the album, and even gave God a feature on the song. Even Kanye’s biggest fans have spent the last half-decade calling Yeezus his worst output. I was once of those fans. Yeezus is terrible. But, somehow, Jesus Is King is better and worse than the follow-up to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. At times, Jesus Is King, which only runs twenty-seven minutes in total, can feel like a sprawling sermon that never ends.
Before moving forward, I want to say: the “closed on Sunday / you’re my Chick-Fil-A” line is the absolute worst. Jesus Is King, on the surface, has the look and aesthetic of an album brimming with cringeworthy and downright-awful bars. Yet, the Chick-Fil-A line is just about the only one that left me with one of those what-the-fuck feelings.
I wanted to listen to the album before I read about how it was made. The opening track, “Every Hour,” is gorgeous. In all honesty, I went into the album believing no opening track could save it from my bias—especially after the fallout from his MAGA/Trump alliances. Yet, the Sunday Service Choir electrocutes this track into serotonin from the drop of the first vocal run.
It was after listening that I read into the ringer that Kanye put his collaborators through: He asked members of the choir to abstain from premarital sex, limited himself to cursing twice a day, and even denounced his wife for wearing tight clothing. I have always believed Kanye to be a good father. In his song “Violent Crimes,” on his 2018 release ye, the way he professes a concern for watching his daughter grow up in a world he has helped exploit was one of the most-personal moments in all of Kanye’s discography. It was there that it felt as if all of the masks Kanye has ever worn were off. That he had finally matured and understood how even our most-minimal actions can have repercussions that reverberate into our futures. But, the way Kanye talks about his wife, children, and father on Jesus Is King do not carry nearly as much depth as they did on ye.
The strongest facet of Jesus is King is also its downfall. Kanye is so consistent with the gospel narrative that it is one of his tightest and concisest albums he’s ever produced, but the God narrative is shoved down the listener’s throat. Less than a half-an-hour of Kanye’s dedicated to Christianity, God, and Jesus, but no minute spent reflecting on how he has used—or will use—his own revelations with Christ to better himself, to learn compassion and empathy for those he’s hurt with his words.
Since Kanye’s first pro-MAGA stance in 2018, I’ve found myself unsure of how to listen to his music—much like with how Prince was anti-LGBTQ after converting to Jehovah’s Witnesses. I, too, suffer from clinical depression and anxiety. Some of my closest friends have diagnosed (and undiagnosed) bipolar disorder. I have a tough relationship with Kanye’s music. No matter how often we try to convince ourselves to separate the art from the artist, it is difficult to listen to Kanye without considering all of the ignorant and devastating things he’s said and done.
However, I believe Jesus Is King is an immediate, and often shallow, product of whatever mental illnesses (and recovery) he is enduring right now. A part of me sympathizes with the things he’s creating as a means of coping and healing, despite how hard it is to respect him in any other capacity outside of music. I can see the light, no matter how dim, at the end of the tunnel he is running towards.
There is a moment, while watching the Coachella livestream, where I see Kanye smile while singing an entire song. We are over a year removed from the Jimmy Kimmel interview. We are a few years removed from the creation of Kanye’s billion-dollar clothing line. Everything up to this point has been some sort of entertainment or stunt, and, despite enjoying the image of Kanye happy, it is inevitable to imagine it as a product of marketing. Whether it’s charging someone’s entire wallet to see a Sunday Service gathering or inviting celebrities to Wyoming to listen to the first cut of The Life of Pablo, Kanye is always performing or selling a part of himself for exposure.
Yes, “God Is” is one of Kanye’s most-poignant tracks of the decade. No, it doesn’t absorb the waters he’s crossed to support a leader in-favor of destroying the backbones of America—it just muddies it. No matter how beautiful the instrumentals of Jesus Is King are, they cannot forgive him for saying we should abolish the 13th amendment after arguing that slavery was a “choice.”
I come from a generation that was gifted 808s & Heartbreak and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy back-to-back while we danced in cafeterias and gymnasiums to hits like “Runaway” and “Heartless.” My first dance with someone was to “Runaway,” where, in one of the few moments of my life, I felt weightless. My feet glided across the linoleum of my high school’s lunchroom. Though I am a product of the Kanye West era where he made one of the greatest hip-hop albums ever, I am a young adult living in the thickness of a world where I can watch Kanye do so many terrible things and be sold on the hope that a new album will change how we see him. What a trick that has swallowed us whole: to be birthed into a musical world where Kanye West is so good that you can’t conceive a world where he isn’t.
