JESUS IS KING - Kanye West: Review
is the legendary Chicago rapper producer responsible for some of the most loved hip hop records of the last 20 years. His transition from a jazz rap pioneer in the 2000's into a creative force of genre crossovers and stylistic transitions in the 2010's. After a number of release dates came and went for his project Yandhi last year Kanye ultimately dropped the project and announced a second record Jesus Is King. Even as two more release dates past Kanye ultimately dropped the record Friday at noon and then updated the tracks with some better production the next day.
Review By Lavender:
No matter what you think about Kanye West as a person or as a cultural figure his music has been massively influential to hip hop culture, yet opinions on it vary greatly. Everyone has wildly different opinions about which Kanye records are deserving of praise for being groundbreaking beacons of creativity and which are misfires of outsider trash. I got a TON of heat last year from Kanye and Kid Cudi stans when I gave the duo's uninspired attempt at being experimental Kids See Ghosts a 5.5/10. Yet just a few weeks earlier I had been standing in the firing line for Ye, Kanye's last solo record which I enjoyed quite a bit, despite some public backlash to Kanye's childish lyrics and low-fi beats. Given the huge variance in personal opinion and the inability to predict how his music will age, dissecting what Kanye music is great and what is terrible is difficult, but it would be a pretty damn hard case to convince anybody that Jesus Is King is great.
Judging this record can be incredibly difficult and gathering my thoughts on the record has been difficult. Parts of this record gorgeously blend the worlds of gospel music and hip hop into shimmering high points and others feature Kanye delivering the tight flows and explosive performances that made him the living legend he is today. But other moments show such a severe lack of oversight in lyricism, sung vocals, and songwriting that I'm surprised some high profile names that pop up in production and features even allowed themselves to be credited on the record.
The album opens up innocently enough with Every Hour a short intro with some very sweet choir vocals that pull straight from the not legendary Sunday Service shows Kanye has been playing across the country. The track does a great job of introducing the records gospel aesthetic and every part of it blends together warmly with a tight mix that many of these other songs desperately need. The next track Selah is one that many Kanye fans have been tracking across the series of leaks and snippets that have served as Kanye's predominant discography for the last year and a half. The track gets off to a pretty great start as Kanye delivers his bars in a Black Skinhead inspired very strong cadence over some booming percussion that makes it all even more intoxicating, unfortunately that is where the tracks good features stop. While the extended series of "Hallelujah" is a little bit on the nose it is nothing compared to the tracks last third which features an absolutely disastrous and disjointed series of woos from Kanye melting in and out of a cacophony seemingly completely unmixed and frequently clipping instrumentation. I was hoping that the re-mixing of the record would fix this issue but it seems untouched in the most recent version of the record and I can't believe that big name producers like Francis Sterlite, Ronny J and Benny Blanco would allow their names on a track so clearly unfinished.
Follow God is next and one of the only songs on the record that is good from start to finish, even though at under two minutes it seems like at some point there may have been some nonsense tacked onto the end of the track that was cut. The track sees Kanye delivering a tight flow over a classic soul song flipped into a great gospel hip hop beat and some excellent vocal samples. While there are some lyrics on the track that make me roll my eyes hard it is one of the most complete songs here. Speaking of eye rolling lyrics the next song is Closed On Sunday which has already established itself as one of the most legendary Kanye lyric flops of all time. I really genuinely hope that this was product placement and that Kanye didn't actually write "Closed on Sunday, you my Chic Fil A" himself. Aside from this, the song is actually decent and gets a lot better in the second half of the song with an ethereal beat that almost makes listening to the songs rough start worth it.
On God has the best conventional hip hop beat on the entire record from none other than Pi'erre Bourne. I love the sliding key lines that back the best parts of Kanye's verses and while more bad lyrics pop up on the track it is easy to ignore them and vibe to the tight instrumental. Everything We Need is a hangover track from the Yandhi era that has since lost its XXXTENTACION feature. You could probably tell this without any prior knowledge too because the track has a DRASTIC difference in fidelity of sound from the rest of the songs here and it is incredibly distracting to have one song so much clearer than anything else here. Aside from this the track has decent passages Ty Dolla $ign is as sharp as ever in his feature and Ant Clemmons does a bearable job of trying to keep up, their harmonizing moments in particular are quite pretty. The track is made up of a bunch of different moments that are all decent to great in their own right, but have absolutely no progression or any semblance of a song.
Water is another woefully incomplete song with a killer instrumental that reminds me of some of the more mellow moments on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly. I think if the beat had been fully fleshed out it could have been amazing. Unfortunately the first half of this track also features some very rough vocals from both Kanye and Ant Clemmons on the harmonizing at the start but once the backing chorus takes over it gets much, much better. I also have to ask what the fuck is going on with the last 30 seconds of this track that serve absolutely no purpose and sound terrible its another one of the moments on this record where you can tell everybody was too nervous to give Kanye any genuine critiques about the bad songwriting all over this record. God Is sounds like a standout from the first moment because Labrinth has a hand in the production and the instrumental is absolutely immaculate with vocal samples that are flat out gorgeous. The songwriting here is actually pretty good too and it's one of the only tracks here that sounds like an actual complete song and doesn't fade out for no reason or have some awful extension at the end of it. All of this good stuff is why I'm really surprised that nobody told Kanye he desperately needed to do a retake of these vocals, because they completely tear down everything good the track had going for it. Not only do they have a constant low pitch rumbling attached to his voice that is a textbook bad production issue, but the singing is not good at all in the first place and especially given that we have heard him sing so much better on Ye and The Life Of Pablo the fact that this made it onto the record completely baffles me.
Some more unfortunate decisions pop up on the next track Hands On with some obnoxious and ugly vocal effects over Fred Hammond's hook which is a shame because I think it could have been really good without them. Kanye approaches this track with a methodical and lowkey demeanor that allows him to hone in on his delivery and execute the track really well. Unfortunately it also shines a magnifying glass on some more disappointing and basic lyrics. Use This Gospel may be the best example here of disjointed and disastrous songwriting ruining good things. Kanye opens up the song with some of his best vocals on the entire album. Probably the single biggest highlight of Jesus Is King for me is the Clipse reunion that takes place on this track, as both Pusha T and No Malice drop excellent features that got better with the mixing adjustment. For some completely fucking asinine reason there is a Kenny G saxophone solo attached to this song and not only is is completely out of place it also plays without the beat for some reason. Both of these completely nonsensical decisions absolutely ruin the second half of the track and drag it on for a brooding extra minute that is so hilariously dumb it almost makes the entire track not worth listening to. Finally the closing song Jesus Is Lord is a very solid closing moment despite being just as long as an interlude it makes the most of its runtime.
Jesus Is King like almost every Kanye release before it features some incredible moments that nobody in rap or all of music could assemble. Unfortunately Kanye seems more unhinged than ever before as not one single song on this entire record escapes without a moment that seems so misconceived its ridiculous. The proof is more obvious than ever that Kanye is not taking any advice from anyone around him as the record makes far too many painfully obvious mistakes that either hold tracks back from greatness or completely ruin them. Even given how poorly a record like Graduation has aged or that records like Kids See Ghosts and Yeezus feature some awful songs of their own I think Jesus Is King may be Kanye's weakest project to date. There are so few songs here I would ever want to listen to in their entirety again and while there are plenty of gorgeous moments on the album, listening to it from start to finish forces you to sit through some of the worst songwriting, weakest lyrics and most painstaking production flops of Kanye's career just to hear any of what is worthwhile. 5/10
