If you were to read half-a-dozen reviews of Kanye West’s latest album, Donda — and I recommend that you don’t —you would learn chiefly that West is a bad person. He’s a bad person for associating with social undesirables; he’s a bad person for supporting Donald Trump; he’s a bad person for hosting album release parties; he’s a bad person because he’s a navel-gazing egomaniac with suspect spirituality; he’s even a bad person for learning how to value women from his experience of having daughters. When reviewers aren’t telling us things West himself has told us for decades (see the lyrics to Runaway, Everything I Am, and I am a God for three examples picked almost at random), they tend to say that the album is bloated, incoherent, lacking in narrative structure.
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Onsi A. Kamel
Onsi A. Kamel is a PhD student in Philosophy and Religion at Princeton University. His writing has appeared in First Things, Ad Fontes, and Mere Orthodoxy.
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