Kanye West pops prevailing folk hero returns with Donda spectacle

It’s a certain kind of superstar who can hire out Atlanta’s Mercedes Benz Stadium, home of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons which seats over 70,000, and attract millions more on an Apple Music livestream for a mere album listening session. But well, Kanye West is that kind.

Following a hastily announced release this week, the rapper on Friday hosted a preview of his tenth studio album Donda, an album named for his late mother and delayed since last year. If there was any concern that the heart-on-sleeve antics that had forced him to briefly step away from the public spotlight (the sort of missteps that urged his ex-wife to ask the world to give him a break) may have dented his following, the intense enthusiasm around the preview would’ve quelled that.

For an artist who famously insisted we should be “honoured” by his lateness, it was perhaps to be expected the event started over 90 minutes after its advertised time. Echoing the endless tinkering that met 2016’s The Life of Pablo even weeks after its release, images shared on social media showed West hunched over his laptop behind the scenes at the stadium, tweaking a tracklist just hours ahead of its debut. (Showing his up-to-the-second approach one track name-dropped Wednesday’s NBA Finals, Ye name-checking Giannis Antetokounmpo and boasting that he’s “rolling with the Bucks”).

Kanye West and his mother Donda, pictured in February 2006.Credit:AP

When he finally appeared in the stadium, it was almost superfluous. Dressed in a red leather suit, like Eddie Murphy in Raw, he simply stalked alone up and down the field, mouthing his own lyrics here and there and occasionally dropping to his knees in demonstrative prayer when one of the songs got a bit church-y - which, considering West’s last album was his Grammy-winning born-again pivot Jesus Is King, was thankfully not as often as may have been expected.

In a pop culture landscape so attuned to historical narratives, the tragedy of West’s mother’s death - she died in November 2007 at 58 from complications following cosmetic surgery - has long been seen as a defining point in his pop persona, the hero’s sacrifice or, to put it even more crassly, a cosmic Faustian pay-off of sorts, her death coming just as his superstar breakthrough Graduation was rewriting pop’s trajectory.

An early teaser of new track No Child Left Behind in a Beats By Dre ad featuring sprinter Sha’carri Richardson, who was banned from the Olympics last month after testing positive to marijuana use following the death of her mother, plus news that the album featured a pleading song about West’s divorce from Kim Kardashian, seemed to promise an emotional album exploring the loss of matrilineal bonds.

But, as usual - and let’s be honest, to West’s ever-existing benefit - the album appears more complicated. It’s typically all over the place, both emotionally and sonically, another showcase of the eccentricities and contradictions that make him such an interesting artist and the cracked humanity that makes him a folk hero to most.

The headlines that promised that song about Kim - who, along with their kids, attended the stadium session - were accurate. After a sample of his mother addressing the lessons of her own father (“Never abandon your family”), the song finds West wailing “I’m losing my family” over stark synths. “Come back tonight darling, please. Darling, how could you leave? Oh darling, you’re so mean. I wish I’d never screamed,” he pleads.

Its rawness is touching, but a few songs later his mood’s improved to the point he’s telling us “single life ain’t so bad”. “Guess who’s going to jail tonight? God gone post my bail tonight,” he raps jauntily.

Other songs bitterly decry the dent to his public status, the lingering mockery that greeted his dalliance with Trump’s MAGA hat. The sparse second track saw him reflecting on his fall from grace (“Was a hero after Katrina but the levy run dry”), while another line (“Everyone got jokes, 44 telling me I’m still not folks”) took an apparent shot at Barack Obama who famously called Kanye a “jackass” following his Taylor Swift moment.

Kim and Kanye in happier times.Credit:AP

After a string of dark, penitent albums, it’s nice to hear at least glimpses of funny, unapologetic Kanye again. A line like “I don’t wanna be so judgemental, everybody Hertz but I don’t judge rentals” is some classic goofy wordplay, while another song humbly suggests even his newfound Christianity’s brittle: “I repent for everything I’mma do again!” he yells over a chopped-up vocal sample. “Last night don’t count! This morning don’t count!”

Best of all, the album closes on some earned positivity, with Kanye reuniting with his brother Jay-Z after their notorious public falling out. “I told him to stop all that red cap, we going home,” goes Jay’s verse, reportedly recorded just several hours before its debut. “This might be the return of the Throne; Hova and Yeezus, like Moses and Jesus.”

How the previewed songs will compare with the finished album when (if) it debuts overnight is anyone’s guess. But when the audio faded and the lights returned, West stood silently in front of his crowd for a few minutes, warmly accepting their applause, a virtual caress after a few troubled years. Without Donda and without Kim, but always with the people.

Robert Moran is a culture reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age

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