Yeah, this is set to have a huge debut. It’s astounding that he really doesn’t seem to have lost his base on streaming.
I might have said "Yeezus" was his pinnacle a few years ago because of how sonically forward-thinking it felt at the time it was released, but listening back through last night I can't say it's held up very well. The more distance I get from TNGHT's production schtick being hot/relevant the harder it gets to excuse that he turned "Strange Fruit" into another navel-gazing/self-pitying track about celebrity. Getting Arca/Gesaffelstin/Daft Punk/Evian Christ all touching the same productions is cool to see on the liner notes but did little to imbue the album with the things that make those artists exciting on their own. Most of it just sounds undercooked.
The huge numbers are extra depressing because it's validation for his continued descent into full-on stunt queen territory. It's never gonna end.
We’ll have to see how the rest of the week pans out. It’ll be interesting to see if @VicePresidentJocasta’s prediction about the album’s longevity will come true or not. He’s a big enough name that traditional promo won’t really be needed for this to have longevity if it remains visible on streaming playlists and is well received by his fans/the GP.
If you’re referencing people who are upset that others within this thread seem to be not only listening, but praising the work of a man who is platforming sexual abusers and homophobics then ‘not defending his antics’ doesn’t really wash, to be honest - I’ll keep my pearls clutched.
I ended up cutting about 10 songs from my donda playlist, but once you trim it up you have a beautifully sparse record.
It is interesting to see how the reception to this is panning out. There's always been conversations about how to deal with problematic artists/actors, can you separate the art from the artist, etc, but Kanye seems like the biggest artist in recent memory with both the most problematic recent antics and the most dedicated fans.
I can’t believe people are streaming (with those numbers!) this pile of shit. I couldn’t even make it past the first three tracks.
A 6 from Pitchfork https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kanye-west-donda/ It’s currently 53 on Metacritic.
The Pitchfork review is excellent (if inevitably a little fence-sitting coming from them) and more or less where I'm at with this album. "Market-testing disguised as performance art" / "adrift in a confusing sea of post-marital anxiety and surface-level religious ideation" / "a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling" all put it really well.
I can't believe how huge he is still. Not just because of his fuckery but also because I thought that the cultural obsession with him had cooled considerably, he wasn't the zeitgeist anymore. I guess I was wrong.
