Can I hear me a little bit louder?

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

03/09/21 : Donda - Kanye West


Can you believe this will be the EIGHTH Kanye album I'll have written about?!?  He's certainly a man who has talent, but he doesn't half do a great job of hiding it on some albums - I'm just hoping he decides to demonstrate it a bit more on this one than he did on the previous one.  But at least that was short whereas this one is 32 tracks over 130 (ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY!!!) minutes.  Can't wait!  

And the opening "track" involves one person saying the word "Donda" repeatedly for a minute, which isn't the best start ever.  It does get better though (at least for a bit) - although I'm not entirely convinced it ever gets great.  The next ten or so tracks don't have any obvious low spots and all the tracks in isolation sound impressive enough and have a range of interesting sounds on them.  But nothing really stands out and after that it either starts to go downhill or I just lose interest - or both.  Either way, it just goes on for far too long - it was a complete slog to get through the first 90 minutes or so and then I decided life was just too short and I'm afraid I just gave up.  What were they thinking letting him go on so long?!?  If I had to pick a track that stood out I'd go for "Believe What I Say" - but that relies very heavily on a Lauryn Hill sample that I particularly like, so I'm not sure he can take much credit for it.  To balance some (somewhat forced) praise, I'll also say that "24" and "Junya" are particularly terrible.

Some album version weirdness popped up whilst listening to this - various tracks on the deluxe version I was listening to were clean versions, made clean through the use of beeps which really annoys me, so I wondered if there was another version without the beeps.  And there was another version - a mere 27 tracks over 110 minutes - but the beeps were still there.  Nothing particularly weird so far, but - only some tracks on both versions had been cleaned up and the track order was different on the different versions.  Which is all very odd, but probably just Kanye being Kanye,

We're at #1 in the charts this week - it's only week at the top.  It's still hanging around in the lowest reaches (high 80s!) of the charts as I type this but I suspect/hope it will disappear from view forever reasonably soon.  Other new entries in the top 10 this week were Maisie Peters (#2 - a fine effort from the 21 year old), Chvrches (#4 - I wasn't aware this had come out), Halsey (#5 - I liked her previous album, but haven't heard this) and Becky Hill (#7 - gotta love a bit of Becky!) and I would have picked any of these to listen to in preference to Kanye.  So I listened to them all as a reward to myself for putting up with 90 minutes of Kanye - and obviously I had to write about it!

Back to Kanye, Wikipedia has a frankly massive 709 milliPeppers on the album - I can assure you I didn't bother reading it all.  I was amused there was a section on the cover art - but it lists various options they were considering before settling on their amazingly impressive final option.  There's also a section on controversies, which I always enjoy - but in this case, I can't help but feel that the inclusion of DaBaby and Marilyn Manson on the album is just Kanye being controversial for the sake of publicity.  Chris Brown was also due to be featured but his contribution was removed and it seems like the removal has resulted in more controversy than his intended inclusion.  Sigh.  The critical reviews were mixed with some praising Kanye's slightly less bombastic than usual approach but nearly everyone complaining about the length.  The public didn't care though and lapped it up with it getting to #1 in most countries - I really struggle to imagine it having the longevity of some of his other releases though.

"Customers also listened to" the usual lot - I've had enough of this now.  All I can say is that, whatever you do, do not under ANY circumstances even attempt to listen to this album - but if you have to, I will graciously let you listen to the first track because it's a) rubbish and b) only a minute long.  But, for the love of God, no more than that!

03/09/21 - Let's hear it for the girls
10/09/21 - Not my usual cup of tea


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