Kanye West ‘Donda 2’ Review: Retooled, Remixed, and Redundant

Almost three years after its unique launch on Stem Participant, accompanied by a listening occasion at LoanDepot Park in Miami, Kanye West’s Donda 2 has been unceremoniously dumped on streaming companies, its reappearance marked by a livestream that includes identified misogynist Sneako and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. The distinction between these two moments underscores not solely Kanye’s stark cultural decline lately but additionally how deeply unserious—and more and more chaotic—something music-related from his camp has turn into. [Editor’s Note: As of this writing, the album has been mysteriously removed from Spotify.]

When it was initially launched in 2022, Donda 2 was branded with a “V2.22.22 Miami” tag to counsel that what listeners had been listening to was a piece in progress. However the brand new launch is kind of the identical product, with solely minor tweaks to its sequencing (it nonetheless opens with an excessively emo XXXTentacion look and closes with barely thought-about Soulja Boy bars) and a number of delicate combine changes. There are a handful of latest songs, reminiscent of “Mr. Miyagi” (which options Playboi Carti—one in every of a number of main figures who Kanye has publicly bad-mouthed in current weeks), however their inclusion hardly shifts the album’s general trajectory.

Lots of Donda 2’s tracks nonetheless function a heavy dose of “mumble”—the catch-all time period that followers and critics use to explain Kanye’s placeholder vocals—and carry the unmistakable feeling of being incomplete first drafts. Nonetheless, on condition that the album’s central theme is loss—of the rapper’s marriage, his youngsters, and, on the time, his finest buddy Virgil Abloh—one might generously interpret this lack of ability to articulate coherent ideas as an expression of grief itself. This concept proves extra compelling in principle than in execution, particularly on “Louie Luggage,” the place Jack Harlow effortlessly raps circles round Kanye, who delivers a babbled, repetitive non-verse.

Certainly, Donda 2 principally finds Kanye fully depressing, pouting about every little thing from sharing custody of his youngsters (on “True Love” and the overly aggressive, if exhilarating, “Safety”) to not being praised for his prowess within the bed room (“Preserve the Flowers”) to, most persistently, lamenting that his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, gained’t take him again. This fixation reaches its most melodramatic peak on the dystopian “SciFi,” the place Kanye delivers an absurd ultimatum: “Make a alternative, oxygen or WiFi?” (which continues to be extra tolerable than “Whenever you laid down and I gave you the semen/I swear I heard God, the voice of Morgan Freeman” mere moments later).

Kanye’s musical genius nonetheless often shines by, however there’s just one really nice tune right here: “Joyful,” which performs like a bad-decision anthem for the ages. After a blast of malignant machismo from Future, Ye launches right into a delirious, ticking-time-bomb of a verse about impulsively shopping for Uber, berating followers for asking him “nothin’ you may Google,” and spiraling by unchecked bravado. His uncooked honesty finally cuts by the bluster: the confrontational question that punctuates his manic rant—“Do I look pleased to you?”—lands as a real cry for assist from a person who was already teetering on the sting of dropping every little thing. “Decide me up earlier than I drown,” he begs on “Pablo,” however Donda 2 presents Kanye as a person barely capable of hold his personal head above water.