Kanye West's “Donda” and How a Secular Jew Deals with Gospel Music

The week before Kanye West finally released Donda, an album centering around his Christian faith, I went to see “Respect”, the J-Hud-starring biopic about The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. Like most music biopics, it was a perfectly charming if super predictable movie. Like most music biopics, I left this one feeling embarrassed by how much I learned from a film that barely even scratched the surface. A great example of this was during the final scene, in which Aretha sings “Amazing Grace” in front of the friends and family that helped shape her throughout the film. The scene comes after Franklin resolves to make a live gospel album as a means of pulling herself out of a mire of depression and alcohol abuse. As she sings, text appears on the side of the screen noting that Amazing Grace - the resulting project - went on to become the highest-selling album of Aretha Franklin’s career.

Does that surprise you? Because it surprised me. Surely, when listing Franklin’s most influential music, most people would rattle off songs like “Respect” and “Chain of Fools” long before naming anything overtly Christian. As someone who’s rocked his fair share of karaoke bars with “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, I couldn’t help but wonder how it was possible that Aretha’s best-selling album was one that excluded people who didn’t subscribe to Christianity. It was as I was listening to Kanye West’s new album that it occurred to me: maybe it didn’t.

It’s on “Praise God”, track 6 of Donda, where we finally hear from the album’s namesake, Donda West, Kanye’s mother who passed away in 2007. “Even if you are not ready for the day,” she recites at the top of the song, “it cannot always be night.” Fans of Kanye understand how important Donda was in his life. Her death was partly what inspired 808’s and Heartbreak, an album in which Kanye discusses the many tragedies that led to his depression and reclusion. Hearing Donda’s voice leading her son out of “the night” and into a song of praise is one of the many peaks (among the many valleys) of this album. Despite playing the age-old trick of conjuring the spirit of a noted dead person (a trick this album plays multiple times), this clip, as well as the album title, is a reminder that faith isn’t defined just by what you believe in, but how you came to believe in it. This is why, despite being a secular Jew, I still find myself moved by gospel music, not because it brings me closer to some higher power, but because by witnessing someone engage in prayer, one can catch glimpses of their life story - the joys and sorrows that led them to that moment. (If you don’t believe me, watch Questlove’s extraordinary film, “Summer Of Soul“, in which Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples sing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”, a scene that proves gospel music is inextricably linked to the joys and sorrows of the black experience.) This is what excites me the most about listening to new music: the chance to feel like I’m getting to know the person who made it. The moments where Donda works best are the moments where, by telling us what he’s learned from God, Kanye is really telling us what he’s learned from his mother. 

If Donda has a focal point, it’s “Jesus Lord”, a 9-minute-long track about the struggles that can lead people to Jesus. Halfway through his verse, Kanye asks “...if I talk to Christ, can I bring my mother back to life?” It’s an honest admission that his faith can sometimes take the form of something much more selfish - and much more human - than a love for Jesus. 

When Kanye released his (arguably) first Christian album, 2019’s JESUS IS KING, he was met with several layers of resentment. For one, people resented the idea that Kanye - a man who had spent the last few years exploiting his celebrity to do things like promote Donald Trump and say “slavery was a choice” - was trying to hit the PR reset button by musically giving himself to Jesus. This is still one of the most valid criticisms of the artistic direction Kanye has taken over the past several years. However, a different layer of resentment came from the idea that by making an album about praising Jesus, he was shunning his fans who had no interest in doing the same. I was one of the people engaging in that resentment and, in retrospect, it was incredibly narrow-minded.

Saying that albums like JESUS IS KING exclude non-Christian listeners is like saying that the final scene of “Respect” - in which Aretha Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” sounds like the beginning stages of a fireworks display - shuts out viewers who weren’t raised in a church. We just spent the last two hours learning about her family, her heartbreaks, her rock-bottoms, her music, and her faith, all of which culminated in a touching testament to spiritual resilience in front of the people and places that raised her... and you’re annoyed she’s praising Jesus? You’ve missed the point. By 2019, we had spent 15 years obsessing over the journey that made Kanye the genius so many professed him as being. We find out that journey included prayer and we lose interest? We’ve missed the point.

To be fair, JESUS IS KING, in comparison to its successor, does a piss-poor job of teaching us anything about Kanye’s journey. I mean, what are we supposed to glean from the line “Closed on Sunday/You my Chik-Fil-A”? Although the album was sonically more compelling than initially given credit for, Kanye had exhibited far too much buffoonery at that point to be taken seriously as a spiritual leader. In the context in which the album was released, he comes off as a man quickly taking cover behind religion as a way to explain away all the insanely destructive behavior he’d been engaging in. 

However, if JESUS IS KING presents prayer as a shortcut to righteousness, Donda presents prayer as an admission of falling short. This is what makes its highlights so compelling. After all, the reason “Amazing Grace” is a song that Christians all over the world return to time and time again is not because it’s about someone who is “found”, but because it’s about someone who “once was lost”.

A common theme throughout Donda is the idea that your sins do not make you less worthy. This is best exemplified early on during the song “Jail”. “I’m pulled over, and I got priors,” Kanye admits, before chanting with ironic and contagious glee: “Guess who’s going to jail tonight!”. The song is meant to suggest that God loves you for all the things you do, even if those things can land you in “jail”. The invocation of being pulled over by the cops is a timely metaphor given how the American justice system can so often convince black people that they’re lesser-than. Perhaps they need a reason to celebrate the way Kanye does in this song. Sonically and lyrically, “Jail” is one of Kanye’s most effective attempts at doing what gospel music does best: acknowledge people at their lowest moments and try to lift them up.

The theory driving “Jail” - that our mistakes don’t define us - would be a nice one if Kanye didn’t insist on pushing it too far. He seems to do this on purpose on “Jail pt 2”, a remake featuring two artists who have recently been under scrutiny for their mistakes: Marilyn Manson, who has been accused multiple times of physical and sexual abuse, and DaBaby, who has spent the last few weeks doubling down on deeply homophobic comments he made at Rolling Loud Miami. Despite what Kanye may have been trying to accomplish, this move doesn’t make me think twice about condemning artists who have hurt people, it only proves that Kanye's version of religion is one where no action is evil so long as you pray on it. This isn’t even the worst example of his blasé attitude toward wrongdoing. On “New Again”, Chris Brown - an artist whose horrifying history of sexual and physical violence towards women proves that “cancel culture” isn’t a real thing - sings the line “I repent for everything I’ma do again”, marking the first time a song has ever made me involuntarily shout “FOR FUCK’S SAKE” at my computer.

Like many of the other guest moments on Donda - including the Jay Z verse on “Jail” - these features are little more than ornamental statement pieces, meant mostly to either inflame or flex rather than to add anything to the music. The features that are actually effective on this album are the ones where the guests enter Kanye’s house of prayer on their own terms. Shout out to Brooklyn drill artist Fivio Foreign, who steps up to the plate with what could be a career-defining verse on “Off The Grid”: “Who let the monster loose?/They call me a product of my environment/I tell them, ‘Nah, I'm what God produced’”. On the song “Jonah”, singer-songwriter Vory sings a stirring hook that deals with loss, both of friends and of faith: “Like who's here when I need a shoulder to lean on?/I hope you're here when I need the demons to be gone/And it's not fair that I had to fight 'em all on my own”.

However, the feature that best frames Kanye’s evolution as a Christian artist is on track 1 of the album: “Donda Chant”. In the opening moments of the album, we hear the voice of Syleena Johnson chanting the word “Donda” over and over again. At first, it’s urgent like an accelerated heartbeat; then it’s with the pace of meditative breath; then sweetly like a doting mother; then fully determined, before transitioning into “Jail”. It’s an opener that might confuse you until you realize what Johnson is doing: she’s praying; praying for Donda in the afterlife, for Kanye in his mourning, and for all of us as we continue to experience the album. With this opening track, Kanye might offer his most inclusive definition of prayer: a moment to be grateful for what life has given you, and a moment to push through what it has taken away. It’s a version of prayer that tries to bring Kanye’s fans closer to him, regardless of who they pray to, if to anyone at all.

At its worst moments, Donda has a lot in common with Kanye’s religious ideology: it’s incomplete, hypocritical, and self-important. However, it’s worth acknowledging that these have always been features of Kanye’s worst moments, long before Christianity was at the forefront of his albums. Throughout his career, Kanye West has given us plenty of reasons to tune him out - his politics, his abrasive behavior, his selfish interpretation of “free thought”, etc. However, if you got off the ride once Jesus became involved, that might be a reflex worth examining. I completely understand why, when artists like Kanye West, Chance The Rapper, or Aretha Franklin engage in gospel music, some people feel abandoned. For obvious reasons, non-Christians like me can sometimes define Christianity by who it excludes, and the ways in which it excludes them. But maybe it’s time we reconsider how we process gospel music. Maybe we shouldn’t see it as a way to connect with Jesus, but as a way to connect with the singer. The love we have for our favorite artists often comes from a fascination with the way they see the world. If their faith has helped shape that perspective, then gospel music isn’t a way of excluding us, it’s a way of letting us further in. I may not like what I learn about Kanye, but the fact that after all these years I’m still learning things about him proves that there’s some inherent good in gospel music.