rolling donda thread

Gave a quick glance, against all odds I did enjoy two tracks (“believe what I say” (probably the only song that has single potential) and “moon” (which makes me realize I actually like Kid Cudi more than I thought))

this indeed was enough of a drag to make me sleepy

maybe I'm not clicking on the right tracks but everything on here seems blatantly unfinished, it's full of trainwreck moments and the mastering/production is straight up awful. on the end of "Pure Souls" the organ starts clipping bad, it's like Youtubecore shit. I feel like I'm listening to Viper the Rapper! how is this a finished album?? is it really better than the last two? what are the good bits supposed to be?

it seems like this is front-loaded with the good stuff. the run from Jail through Hurricane is good, in my view.

john berger, in his biography of picasso, said that at a certain point picasso fell in love with the "process" over the product. he felt that he was an artist. whatever he created, even half-assedly, was art. art became a state of being, more than a practice, for picasso. so the discipline that allowed him to make something like "guernica," by the 50s was just not something he was interested in. instead, he made a lot of tossed-off things, often turning out multiple "finished" painting a day. and because he was picasso, selling them for 🤑.

i think kanye in a similar phase of his career. like picasso, he thinks that he is the thing that is important, not the work.

is hurricane the one with the weeknd? that one is indeed good, at least the parts where ye isn’t vocalizing

i tried what y'all are saying are the high points.
Believe What I Say doesn't add much to That Thing and mostly just made me want to listen to that
Moon is uninspired
Hurricane is fucking Weeknd, you could've warned me
Come to Life is a good example of Kanye's fourth-xerox faded reproduction gospel that for some reason people really like but now it has the added benefit of sounding more like coldplay
i'm good thanks

Agree, I ended up listening to That Thing instead.

Apparently he is claiming Universal put it up without his permission and that they blocked “Jail 2”?

uh oh

i assumed he did it himself impulsively -- gave the green light without any album art or anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hTSvEgEdjs

Four times in my life I downloaded leaks of albums and wound up being utterly convinced they were fake. One was Human After All, the other three were Kanye

how does this stack up to the version from the Apple event? Did he make a lot of changes?

my understanding is it's a little different to the most recent event, and there's more significant changes from the earlier events, but i have no interest in digging through all the different versions

i got tired of it 20 tracks in last night and went back to bed so it was a success in that regard

"come to life" is actually decent

"jail pt 2" just being an alternate version of "jail" with dababy & manson instead of jay-z and the exact same kanye verse & beat etc. is so stupid

guessing all the pt 2s are the same deal this is ridiculous

they were indeed all the same deal

overall it's a chaotic bloated mess of an album, a few decent ideas here and there but none really polished effectively. his second worst only ahead of jesus is king.

i like this to a surprising degree but fuck kanye

"jail pt 2" just being an alternate version of "jail" with dababy & manson instead of jay-z and the exact same kanye verse & beat etc. is so stupid

I figured “Jesus Lord Pt. 2” (which could be Ye’s “Junior Dad” if not for the lyrics) wouldn’t include the Larry Hoover Jr. monologue, to stand alone as either a pop or gospel single, but no.

i think jesus is king is underrated

just throwing it out there. this is my view.

I agree. It removed things I like least about his other albums (bottle-service misogyny, big samples).

if you removed all the bloat & cut this down to the best 30-40 minutes it would still only be about his third worst album instead of second worst

he's really stagnated creatively, the last few albums have all just been lesser regurgitations of the sound palette from life of pablo

first listen: not a disaster like his last two albums. kanye's raps are still the weakest.

The last Kanye I heard was Life of Pablo. You're all hypocrites and money changers in need of a good whipping.

if you removed all the bloat & cut this down to the best 30-40 minutes it would still only be about his third worst album instead of second worst

yea I mean there's a decent album in here somewhere but instead this comes off like nearly 2 hours of demos that's still a few months away from being a completed product. the auto tune sounds like shit, Kanye's raps almost never scan properly, there are audio artifacts everywhere, the samples are always awkward, and there's so much compression on everything. it sounds like the shit blasting out of the boom box at the parties I was at 12 years ago, random hip-hop downloaded off Limewire with audio tags everywhere. also I find a lot of the religious/tribute to his mother kinda gross, it reminds me of when R. Kelly dedicated a song to his Mom and then immediately followed it up with "Sex Me".

now having said all that its a bit fascinating, there's some inexplicable, Tommy Wiseau-esque shit on here. but it's more The Neighbors than The Room

this doesn't personally strike me as incredibly unfinished but maybe i have to hear it with headphones

it's better than pablo imo

I don't know anyone can even give him streams or clicks at this point, fuck this guy completely and I'm not desperate enough to hear a terrible album that I want to feed his ego in the least.

(i am personally not streaming this)

yeah i admittedly streamed the first few songs on YouTube but felt too gross (and wasn't good enough tbqh) to continue

there are plenty of people out there with no moral compunctions about giving him their fraction of cents, so i figure my cent fractions are just a drop in the bucket

Soulseek my brothers and sisters

finding a download of this album is already too much effort expended for what i heard

yeah I mean, I'm not casting stones here. it's just the massive whiplash you see online, esp on twitter, with people posting "fuck this guy" for months but suddenly live tweeting the album the second it dropped on streaming services.

the same exact people? or do you mean the general rhetoric as you've seen it

i also feel like a crazy person bc this is the best-sounding kanye record i’ve heard in like a decade

decade plus i mean

Honestly, I have enough music in my life, new and old, that I have no problem ignoring this the same way I've skipped his last few records. Even my teens are like "fuck Kanye."

the same exact people? or do you mean the general rhetoric as you've seen it

Both I guess, but yes sometimes the exact same people. I follow two different people who were absolutely trashing him during the Chicago listening party thing ("fuck this guy", "stop feeding his attention" etc etc), but both of them were live tweeting their reactions Friday morning.

Everyone on that app wants to be part of "the conversation" and "the conversation" is increasingly a toilet

I don't see the lie.

Leaving professional music writing after nearly 20 years is, in many ways, absolutely heartbreaking. But I gotta say, this tirefire dropping on a weekend and I don't have to think about it, have an opinion on it, or even listen to it ... chef's kiss

What makes me sad about this is how much oxygen it sucks away from artists who actually have something interesting to saw and work hard to make the music the best it can be.

Quality/content aside, what if West brought out, say, L’Rain instead of Marilyn effing Manson

Interesting to say

xp to whiney, i was trying to get the head of NPR music out to see a Sun-Ra tribute show that he was really quite excited about and he had to cancel at the last minute because of the britney conservator story. he was not happy.

its kind of understandable though, a decade of unparalleled greatness followed by a dramatic and very public downfall is just a naturally intriguing story. everyone loves a comeback story. its the same reason why sportswriters could not shut the fuck up about Tiger Woods even when he was badly missing the cut by like 10 strokes. I think Tiger's a scumbag but him winning the Masters two years ago was legitimately one of the coolest things to ever happen in sports. and while what he's been doing lately sucks it at least sucks in kind of an interesting way. that said nobody would give a fuck about this album if anyone else had done it which is why I'll probably never listen to it again.

looks like 'donda' is heading towards the biggest album debut of the year so far

.@kanyewest's #DONDA headed for #1 debut on the US albums chart with 300K+ first week, headed for biggest 2021 debut. More updates through the week (via @HITSDD).

— chart data (@chartdata) August 30, 2021

carti sounds so awesome on “off the grid”