Photo: Tidal
A week after it’s scheduled drop date, Kanye West’s gospel album Jesus is King had its less-than impactful birth into the world. The descendant 2004’s Jesus Walks, lacks all the conviction and soul that West had 15 years ago. The album is different for West because of one main reason: it’s forgettable. Despite his controversial public persona, hip-hop fans have almost always been able to come together over West’s musical genius. This time is different. The reactions to Jesus is King and Kanye’s Sunday Service have been strange, to say the least. Critics labelled the album ‘undercooked’ , while black twitter memed the project to hell and back. Some are starting to view his Sunday Service as a cult. At the same time, West’s dedicated fans streamed the album into the top of the charts, and his musical ministry fetches thousands of retweets and praise from celebrities, right-leaning public figures and his fans. It’s an awkward place for the once universally celebrated West to be. Where he was once controversial and enigmatic, much of his behaviour is now at best laughable and at worst concerning and problematic. The crux of what makes this new album so strange to listen to is its commitment to a faith that feels still incredibly unstable and untrustworthy. More than that, West’s new brand of Christianity pushes him further into the good-books of the alt-right, and further away from the communities that prop him up.
“West’s new brand of Christianity pushes him further into the good-books of the alt-right, and further away from the communities that prop him up.”
The way capital has been expressed in popular culture has made a significant shift over the last few years. The domination of hot girl/city girl music on the charts, has seen artists like Megan thee Stallion and the City Girls dominate pop culture with a brand that explicitly speaks on using men as a steppingstone to financial success. While morally debatable, this music is evidence of black women understanding the barriers against them being successful in the capitalist job market and re-framing their labour in order to gain what they can under racial capitalism. While the City Girl’s reframe women’s work, student culture is beginning to reframe a younger generations idea of iconography. About few months ago, a video of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos entering a predominantly black high school classroom made the rounds on twitter. Bezos enters the room expecting to be applauded and instead is received with eye rolling and general disinterest. Young people are both the market and the currency. In what seems like both the biggest and most fleeting meme moment of the year, Kylie Jenners ‘rise and shine’ video fell as quickly as it rose. Once Jenner herself acknowledged the meme and then began selling merch, all the comedy of the meme gave way to a collective groan and sigh.
This generation of consumers seem to be unimpressed with the culture that exploits and disenfranchises the many so that a few can stay on top. In so many ways, young people are demonstrating an acute awareness of the fallacies of the system they are forced to participate in. Kanye West, or the version we’ve had of him for the last few years, is a symbol and proponent of the kind of culture that youth are increasingly skeptical of.
In the span of his decades long career, Kanye West went from being the peoples champ of Chicago to being the Louis Vuitton Don. The shift in West’s public persona and his identity can be marked through the music. While rap has always lent itself to braggadocio (and Kanye has always taken Chicago with him), West’s development through the years has seen him wrestle with an identity that feels more egotistical than most. It’s that egoism (amongst the multiple other events in his life) that marks the space between The College Dropout and Ye. In the space between those two projects, he became the leader of the Yeezy Mafia, while seeming increasingly out of touch with the reality of his everyday fans. The shift in West’s public persona leading up to his current era, has left many fans with an off-taste for him in their mouths, making his music harder to swallow with every drop.
The build-up to Jesus is King saw West dabble in what can only be described as commercial Christianity. Following his controversial TMZ take that slavery was a choice, his outspoken support for Donald Trump and his dystopian Ye album, West seems to have found God. Through his weekly, Instagram-ready Sunday Service performances: West got thousands of fans hyped up about the aesthetic of Christianity. During the ‘musical ministry’ (which can be seen almost every Sunday on Kim Kardashians insta story), dozens of choir singers dressed in monochrome Yeezy sing in chorus around West (and occasionally his daughter North) as he waxes about his inspiring Christian re-birth. At Coachella, West performed negro-spirtual-esque hymns to a mostly white audience who could attend the festival for the small price of $492. Outside the festival itself, West sold Jesus sweatshirts for upwards of $160 inside of a stall set up to look like an edgy swap-meet. No mention was made of donating proceeds back into any black churches or Christian arts initiatives. The Sunday Service Program is an an engaging visual/sonic experience that puts some of the scariest aspects of society in 2019 on display. In a world where so much of black culture is fetishized and exploited, it feels wrong to many to see West utilize gospel in the way that he’s doing. The black church is one of the longstanding beacons of black American life, and its survival has long been because of its deep-rooted communal connections. In a lot of ways, the discomfort around the Sunday Service is a discomfort with white-gazing and capitalist onlooking that it encourages. West’s musical ministry feels a lot like an alternative black Church tour.
Jesus is King is an extension of the awkwardness that is Sunday Service, on steroids. The album lacks the charisma and wit that has made West an invaluable part of popular culture, which you can still see/feel from watching those Sunday Service clips. On this project, we get a West that loves God, but only so much as God can serve him. On tracks like the meme-able Closed On Sunday (where he compares his love for Jesus to his love for chick fil-a) and Hands On (where he claims that Christians have never shown him love), Ye finds a way to make himself the centrepiece of every song about the Lord. It’s possibly the least humble offering ever made. It’s a kind of leap into faith that feels shallow and self-serving, as he continues to ask “what can god do for me?” rather than “what can I do for God?”.
The drop of Jesus is King, was, to put it kindly: forgettable. Despite the numbers it did on the charts, it it feels nowhere near as impactful as an album like 808s and Heartbreaks or Life of Pablo. The follow-up to the album release is an IMAX movie and a potential second-coming of the album with Dr. Dre on production. His strangest endeavour yet is his opera Nebuchadnezzar, named for the King of Babylon. The opera features Sheck Wes (now famous for allegedly abusing singer Justine Skye) as the King of Babylon, and the score includes Mo Bamba, Wolves from Life of Pablo and Say You Will from 808s and Heartbreaks. West has said that the story of Nebuchadnezzar reminds of him of himself: a befallen king coming back to his graces, looking at everything he has done.
While the opera itself seems as though it has the potential to be inspiring, the pillars of the project make the whole thing feel of. Apart from the interesting casting of Sheck Wes, the shows director Vanessa Beecroft, has a history of problematic statements. Speaking with The Cut, Beecroft said “there is Vanessa Beecroft as a white European female and there is Vanessa Beecroft as Kanye, an African American male….when I work with Africans of African Americans, I feel that I am autobiographical”. Beecroft has also expressed an affinity for the aesthetic of developing-world poverty and refers to her Hollywood home as ‘the favela’. The biggest problem with West’s creative outputs is that they can’t disentangle themselves from the problematic input he receives, and the ways in which he has aligned himself with characters (including his family) that put black identities at risk.
When the doors to the studio and the opera house close, the impact of West’s creative decisions reverberate in the real world. His vocal support of President Donald Trump has set the precedent for West to become a black token for Trumps base, as well as right-leaning Christian talking heads. The Hill called West’s new endeavours a ‘welcome disruptive voice’. The writer, Bob Woodson, said “his message is a powerful antidote to the debilitating drumbeat of victimhood and demands that have bamboozled blacks”, and congratulated West for pushing back at an academic narrative that frames black disenfranchisement is an external phenomenon. What Woodson has interpreted as a narrative of black survival, is nothing more than the ‘pull up your bootstraps’ mentality that forces black people to look inwards at some mythical internal wrong instead of turning their attention towards wider systems of oppression. West valorizing young black people engage in his plan of ‘self-work through God’ in the face of rampant capitalism, anti-black racism and climate change rapidly affecting poor black communities is dangerous and ill-informed. It comes from the same vein as his “slavery was a choice” comment, which only serves to harm black people and give a firm handshake to the right-wing.
A few years back, when celebrity in its most traditional sense was applauded, this brand of self- indulgence might have reached the top of the charts based on Ye’s name alone. However, celebrity culture as it stood a decade ago is vastly shifting in an era defined by authenticity and availability. People are less enamoured by grandiose displays of wealth and ego than they have been in the past. Those who have been able to cultivate a celebrity status around themselves in this new era (like, say, Cardi B) have done so on the basis of ‘baring all’. West, though he seems to be tapping into an authentic part of himself, misses the mark on Jesus is King because it doesn’t seem to be rooted in anything bigger than him. The brand of slightly self-indulgent religiosity that West endows is more indicative of a kind of Hollywood Christianity that feels inauthentic in 2019. This new album will easily be played in the lobby at celeb-powered, Instagram ready churches like Hillsong and City Church, where Jesus is made instagrammable and his followers wear Alexander Wang. At its core, religion is meant to be accessible to all and this particular genre of worship is deeply removed from the people it claims to want to reach. More than that, the wider culture the music engages in is one that feels dangerous and harmful, to the community it came from, while seeming uplifting to those who continue to oppress black communities.
In the era where celebrity is nearing it’s death, people aren’t blindly buying what West is trying to sell. The film that separates the audience from the star is thinner than ever, and fans are no longer solely impressed by the veneer of fame. The journey to healing through God, for most, is an incredibly personal and often long and confusing journey. There is no linear path, which might mean we should all reserve our judgement. With or without the support of critics, Yeezus will continue to move deeper into his Christian re-birth through music, moving like the pied-piper of new-age gospel. As he does so, we must wonder if this movement is to connect his fans to God or to connect the fans he’s scared to lose back to himself.
