After releasing the Wyoming Sessions albums, in summer 2018 Kanye West flies to Chicago to work on Chance the Rapper's seven-track album. Subsequently, West claims that the sessions with Chance brought him back to the Christian faith. Around this time, West also moved away from hip-hop, going to record music with Lil Pump and other artists close to the emerging SoundCloud rap scene, announcing his definitive return to Chicago and the arrival of the new Chance the Rapper album "Good Ass Job", however, West never returned to Chicago and that project was never released.
Three months after the release of his latest solo effort, Kanye West announces his new studio album, "Yandhi" which is due out in late September 2018. The disc does not come out and in October West flies to Africa to record more material for the album in Uganda, to then release the album the following November, further admitting that he has begun to stop taking medications to treat his bipolar disorder. He stays in Uganda for a week, also the Migos should be in one of the songs recorded for "Yandhi", along with numerous other artists, from Rihanna to Nicki Minaj to longtime collaborator Ant Clemons.
In November 2018, West states that the album is not finished and postpones its release sine die due to frequent leaks and leaks of news. In the following month, Timbaland is enlisted by West to work on the production of the record, contributing to the production of many tracks, while the Chicago rapper and producer continues to claim that he no longer takes his medication for bipolar disorder, in order to record music that is at the same level as that of his most critically and commercially acclaimed albums.
In January 2019, West forms his own gospel group Sunday Service Choir, performing gospel songs and covers of songs from their own discography. In the meantime, West continues to record material for his new album between Los Angeles and Miami, then adopt a "personal shepherd" (whatever that means) and start "studying the bible" (whatever that means), saying he was "radically saved" (whatever that means) by someone or something. There's always a lot of confusion in Kanye West's statements, which is not in full possession of his faculties.
In September 2019, West returns to Wyoming to finish his new album and here reunites the hip-hop group Clipse, putting the brothers Pusha-T and No Malice in the same track after many years. West begins to see rap as "devil's music" (his words), but his personal pastor convinces him to keep rapping to get his earnings even higher than where they usually go, the pastor then becomes one of West's main collaborators for the new album with the intention of including "Christian elements" in the record. Timbaland is excluded from the project and in his place West summons two other producers, Vindver and Lopez: these become virtually two of the album's only three producers when West decides to record between Los Angeles and Wyoming, while before he relied on a number of production team that came to count about thirty elements.
In July 2019, Pi'erre Bourne is also working on West's new record in Japan. Around the same time, some tracks intended for "Yandhi" start leaking online, including "New Body" featuring Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla Sign, "The Storm" featuring XXXTentacion, Ty Dolla Sign and Ant Clemons, "Spread Your Wings", "Alien / SpaceX" and "Law of Attraction", the latter are two demos with Ant Clemons. "Law of Attraction" is later re-recorded and released on the album as "Use This Gospel", while "The Storm" is re-recorded as "Everything We Need". "New Body" is also intended for the new album, but the day before the release of the record, the track is removed from the final tracklist due to creative differences between West and Nicki Minaj.
The album "Yandhi" is re-announced with the new title "Jesus Is King" at the end of September 2019, but to fix the mix the record fails to meet the release date and is postponed for a few days, after which it is not released because, even if the disc is completed, West is dissatisfied with the final product. In order to complete the work, Kanye West trusts the one guy who can improve an already good record, the best producer of his time, Swizz Beatz.
After cutting several tracks from the disc ("New Body", "Up from the Ashes" and "LA Monster"), this is released at the end of October, simultaneously with a self-titled concert film by West including several songs from the record as the film's soundtrack.
The first track is decent, there's a gospel chorus over a simple and essential beat in a cut by Kanye's gospel group Sunday Service Choir: the guy records his own voice from the phone and the mixing is awful, the music isn't good. "Selah" boasts a minimal production where West delivers in spoken word over a gospel beat with a gospel hook, the singers chant "alelluiah" over and over, then West returns to deliver in rap, with a syncopated style, enhanced by a heavy kick in the background. Also in this song the mixing is bad, the lyricism is ridiculous, there's bad content and the hook is terrible and unbearable, seasoned with synths. In this track West bids farewell to "Yandhi". In the third choice there's a very tight looped sample, West delivers worthily biting style to his label mates on tense, up-tempo music.
"Closed on Sunday" is among his worst songs: the author goes into spoken word in front of a gospel choir over a skeletal production that is difficult to perceive, there's a horrible hook and even worse lyrics. "On God" finds West at his worst in career, wacky, lazy, boring and also preachy with one of his worst flows over a skeletal, synthesized, bouncy production, while the lyrics are awful, some of his worst, show that this guy hasn't really learned the real meaning of the word "Christian", of what he's saying, rapping and singing and also of what his personal pastor is suggesting to him, just pretending to be a christian for fun, to make fun of others and to earn a little more money than usual, re-washing his damaged image through evangelical music.
Ty Dolla $ign tries to revive the project alongside Ant Clemons with a worthy chorus in "Everything We Need": the production is minimal, West is poor at rapping with poor style in one of the rare tolerable pieces of his last solo years. XXXTentacion was supposed to be a guest here and luckily that didn't happen. There's a gospel hook and minimal beat even on the wacky "Water", all the tracks look alike: for many this is the worst track on the album, West's rapping is ridiculous even in this passage and the lyrics appear as written by a child in elementary school who has a support teacher. "God Is" boasts a gorgeous soulful chorus from an uncredited girl, light and essential, perfect soulful jazzy rhythm, triumphant soulful gospel choir in the background, West sings. "Hands On" is a mediocre track with West's usual sparse, lazy, monotonous rapping over boring, minimal production, unfortunately in this period West can neither rap nor sing and a horrible song comes out of it.
Clipse guest on "Use This Gospel" with Kenny G: on a light essential and highly annoying beat due to a single piano key, a gospel choir tries to raise the very low level of the track. Pusha T better than his brother No Malice and West, but the musical carpet is bad. This dude puts Kenny G aka the worst jazz musician in history in his LP, that guy is a parody, just like West. Clipse joins in a horrible track among the worst of this joke record and among the worst of West's entire discography, with a criminal mix. The album ends with track number eleven, with West continuing to parody the Catholics in the track titles: the rhythm is minimal, the track is almost non-existent, it's less than a minute, this is a snippet, it's not a finished song, but West puts it in anyway for some reason and it seems like the best track on the record, not even 50 seconds long.
Album number nine for Kanye West, now born-again Christian rapper/producer releasing religious gospel rap record with a Christian concept of gospel inspiration, which is different from his past works, despite some critics wanting you to believe the exact opposite. Originally, this is supposed to be his last album. The author removes profanity, jokes, humor, bullshit and sexual references (also from guest verses), or what had characterized most of his texts in previous albums, which is why lyrically he's left with nothing. The lyricism is cheesy, sad and hurtful, boring and bad, the man isn't saying anything and when he says something he doesn't understand what he's saying, this is because the texts are incomplete in most cases. The lyrics are cumbersome, weak and awful, the verses are awful, this guy complains about foolishness masking it with falsely Christian messages creating awkward, bad, embarrassing tracks, some of his dumbest and most ignorant songs ever. He still goes against emancipation, for some unclear reason, and he maintains lyrics of bragging, wealth and materialism, his usual braggadocio, mixed with more or less confused religious verses and continuous reflections on the conflictual relationship with one's father.
The execution is poor, he records most of the album with his phone, never doing two takes and delivering some of his worst vocal performances ever due to a plaintive forced chant and his worst rapping, tepid, sparse, minimal, while guests just howl randomly around the disk with questionable performances and cheesy choruses, and with the surprising and highly avoidable saxophone solo by Kenny G. The music is minimal, unfinished and fueled almost solely by gospel melodies and trap synthesizers. The rhythms are slow, decent in the best moments, they sound colorless, monotonous, overly flat, skeletal, thin, uninspired and unimaginative, not even the samples help. The mixing is bad and the mastering is never done.
The album is released by GOOD Music and Def Jam, despite West choosing to enter a legal dispute with Def Jam. The cover, minimal like the record, is a blue vinyl, with the album title and author's name written at the top and bottom, respectively. The album gets no promotion and has no singles: two weeks after release, West chooses "Follow God" as his first single and in late November he releases "Closed on Sunday" as the album's second and final single. "Follow God" improves on the commercial achievements of his previous single "Yikes" (2018) and becomes his best solo single in the worldwide charts since "Heartless" (2008), in Canada, Australia and the UK it's West's best solo single since "Stronger" (2007). The second single also gets a comforting response from the audience.
This is West's ninth LP in a row to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, allowing him to break several records and topped the charts in Canada (for the seventh time), Australia (for the third time), New Zealand (for the for the third time), Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Slovakia and between gospel and rnb albums in the UK. It's the first album ever to simultaneously reach number one on the pop, rap, rnb, gospel and christian charts in the United States. It's the best-selling gospel record in the US in 2019 and 2020, and one of the best sellers also in 2021, despite not really being a gospel album.
Critics welcome Kanye West's new effort very badly, no publication hazards a perfect score and many reviewers panned the product, with "Consequence" giving it its lowest rating, "F". Despite this, the record still ends up in the lists of the best hip-hop albums of 2019 for "Rolling Stone" and "Complex" and gets the approval of the recording industry, being awarded Top Christian Album and Top Gospel Album by the Billboard awards (first CD to win both awards), as well as Best Contemporary Christian Music Album at the Grammys 21. The album is followed by a follow-up, "Jesus Is Born", released two months after the release of this project by his gospel group Sunday Service Choir. One of the worst albums of the year in all genres and of the decade in hip-hop, and one of his worst albums, totally forgettable and painfully useless, not cohesive, not coherent, doesn't even seem completed, it should be a concept but it's not.
West remakes "Yandhi", which was never released and leaked in countless versions on the internet, but the end result is a hasty, awful mess that sounds like a Catholic parody album, it sounds like a joke: much of this album comes from "Yandhi", however, those proposed in this half hour are disgusting, unlistenable and bastard versions of those songs, it's the scraps of "Yandhi" and the shoddy tracks that haven't been leaked to the internet, because West's sick logic is that if a song leaks on the internet it's gone and can no longer be part of the original album. Few songs exceed two minutes and even with a duration of less than half an hour, the project seems incredibly long, rigid, plastered, overly serious and disappointing, forgettable. An incomplete, bad, superficial, confused, insubstantial and unconscious record comes out, almost unlistenable due to hasty tracks formed from fragments of incoherent ideas never fully explored.
Kanye West is regressing as an artist with every new album he releases, he loses his charisma, his personality and even his talent for making beats, things that seemed obvious after many years at the top. His skill at producing music made him one of the greats of the 2000s and 2010s, unfortunately this record doesn't even have a rhythm worthy of being remembered. His golden age is over, he opened the decade with a classic album and has been hailed as one of the best rappers and producers ever and he closed out the decade with an album that is pure trash and he's now considered to be an artist in free fall, uninspired, always on the verge of mental breakdown. Records like this give you hope that Kanye West will soon retire from music and start seeking treatment.
This album remains a blot on his discography and it's useless to listen to it except for the most ardent fans of the artist. I don't share the opinion of the harshest critics, but it's difficult, very difficult, not to pity them. This project is a child's doodle done with a dry marker on a placemat at the fast food of service station in a third world country on a rainy day a few minutes after praying on his knees in the mud in a small burned chapel with no ceiling that his mother's companion said was the best church in the world.
Rating: 3/10.
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