It’s an album with little interest in refinement, sprinting off with whatever first idea comes to mind.
‘Flowers’ features the worst production of Kanye’s career, marked by a characterless arpeggio melody and a pulseless beat. For instance, a Talking Heads sample repeatedly punctures through ‘Keep It Burning’ with no integration to the rest of the music, as if it was blindly dropped into a DAW and left to fester. Most of the album’s production is anchored by run-of-the-mill trap beats, but there are moments of astounding sloppiness that transcend its general mediocrity.
On ‘Louie Bags’, one of the album’s worst tracks, Kanye stumbles through repetitions of the same hook (“I stopped buying Louie bags after Virgirl died”) over a staid beat with little variation. Donda 2’s lack of variation, however, seems instead a product of artistic bankruptcy. The outros of tracks like ‘God Breathed’ or ‘Pure Souls’ lingered on minimalist loops, sparking emotion through stasis. On the first Donda, moments of repetition often felt hypnotic. Furthermore, the absurdity of an autotuned Kanye belting out “When you lay down and I gave you the semen/ I swear I heard God, the voice of Morgan Freeman” on an otherwise puritanically censored album almost registers as endearing. For instance, his expressive intonation and growling on ‘Security” results in a visceral vocal performance. Admittedly, Kanye’s vocal performance is still occasionally charming. Kanye’s bars, when finished, oscillate between self-pitiful pronouncements, bitterness at Kim Kardashian, and a barrage of fashion designer namedrops. If this sounds like an incoherent soap opera, it’s because that’s precisely what Donda 2’s narrative backbone is. Recently, Kanye condemned Cudi for his friendship with Kanye’s ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s now boyfriend Pete Davidson. The line is a likely jab at Kid Cudi, Kanye’s frequent collaborator. She’s evoked once, and it’s as a declaration of spite “No, you can’t be on my mama album,” Kanye opens with on ‘Security’. Donda West, Kanye’s late mother and the albums’ namesake, is irrelevant to these songs. While Kanye’s inflated ego has long been tied to his greatness, with Donda 2 it seems mostly a hindrance blinding him from any self-awareness of his creative output. It’s a work of artistic apathy: a soulless cashgrab released as a Stem Player exclusive (Kanye’s handheld listening device which sells for an obscene $200 USD). It’s the product of an artist convinced genius is inherent to his biology: that anything he haphazardly tosses together and releases is bound for greatness. Perhaps it’s the fact that Donda 2 released simultaneous to Coodie & Chike’s Jeen-Yuhs documentary, with its extensive footage of Kanye’s painstakingly elaborate creative process on The College Dropout, but this new work feels beyond careless. Donda 2 - the quick turnaround successor to last year’s polarizing Donda - is a slapdash assembly of lazy features, incomplete production, and mumbled verses from an asleep-at-the-wheel Kanye West.
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