Nowhere to Go But Down: “Donda,” “Certified Lover Boy,” and American Celebrity in 2021

Image courtesy of the author.

It hasn’t been a great couple years for the popular image of celebrities. As inequality in the United States continues to worsen, the relative position of celebrities has seemed increasingly grotesque and their drama more trivial. Remember all those celebrities singing “Imagine” by John Lennon at the start of the pandemic, and how much backlash they got? The scandals of #MeToo, the revelations surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, and more have made a dent in the already-precarious reputation of America’s hyper-elite. In turn, the public has lost some of its interest in traditional celebrity pageantry. Look no further than Oscars ratings to prove my point.

Image courtesy of Statista.

As I said, not great.

Like many of you, I’m not exactly spending all my sympathy on celebrities. But I don’t think that being a celebrity is necessarily all that great. This very magazine published an excellent piece last spring about the voyeuristic ways that the public watched, and precipitated, the downfalls of young women celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton. The amount of attention they receive is not normal. Of course, we should be mindful of the ways that female celebrities are especially victimized.

Today, however, I’m here to discuss two men, two titans of contemporary music, both of whom released albums within a couple days of each other at the beginning of our fall semester. Given the proximity of their releases, the similar stage of their career they are currently in, and the fact that they’re apparently beefing, it’s hard not to look at them in comparison to one another. They are, of course, Drake and Kanye West.

Kanye West – Donda

Album cover for Kanye West’s Donda.

I don’t really know what it’s like to be famous. I haven’t been on their private jets or attended their parties or orgies. But I imagine it’s a lifestyle that can safely be described as, in a word, hedonistic.

The opening refrain of the first song on Kanye West’s 2010 magnum opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF) is, appropriately, “Can we get much higher?” On the second verse: “The plan was to drink until the pain over/but what’s worse? The pain or the hangover?”

The epic highs and low lows of Kanye’s lifestyle are a common theme across his discography. The peaks are as high as advertised; Kanye tries every flavor of drug at some point and has sex with his supermodel wife (among others).

But no Kanye album, especially not MBDTF, fails to address the struggle flowing beneath the surface. Few mainstream artists are as personal as Kanye. His decades-long battle with addiction and mental health are plastered everywhere. Kanye’s openness has gotten him in trouble sometimes but, at the same time, has also produced some of the generation’s most defining music.

Religion, too, has been a steady through line across Kanye’s discography, from The College Dropout’s “Jesus Walks” to MBDTF (“We love Jesus but you done learned a lot from Satan... we ain’t married but tonight I need some consummation”) and up to his most recent before Donda, the critically panned Jesus is King. Although Kanye’s faith in God never seemed inauthentic, religion has often been invoked as a juxtaposition to some “sinning” behavior, as in the above line, rather than as a topic in and of itself. Jesus Is King, by contrast, is loaded with 85 references to the bible and heavy gospel influence, and features no profanity whatsoever. It is “Christian hip hop” in a way that his earlier works never really approached.

Most longtime fans of Kanye were disappointed by his sudden commitment to Christian values. Gone were his outrageous and vulgar one-liners. As he probably intended, listening to Jesus is King felt like attending a sermon. With Donda—named after his late mother—Kanye is clearly a little deeper into his spiritual journey, and the wiser because of it. I’m not sure that Kanye is in a good mental state—in fact, I doubt he is—but this music feels like a better passage in his quest for absolution than Jesus is King. Raw and vulnerable, at once intense and overstretched, it’s everything that Kanye is.

I think a good encapsulation of Donda’s approach to spirituality is that Kanye still doesn’t swear but, unlike JIK, he and his guests are allowed to allude to adult topics but with bad words bleeped out. Whereas JIK felt constrained and one-note, Donda draws on Kanye’s faith to reflect on the hardships he has faced.

Donda opens with Kanye, as he often is, in crisis. Kanye’s voice is distorted when first introduced in “Jail,” as he croons over an equally distorted guitar riff about going, well, to jail. “God gon’ post my bail tonight” concretizes the metaphor. He’s committed some sort of transgression—many, in fact, as he sings about his “priors”—but trusts that faith in God will save him. Then Jay-Z comes in and says, “Made in the image of God, that’s a selfie,” which sounds like something Kanye ghostwrote for him.

Does Kanye, in fact, get saved over the course of the album? I don’t think so, but there are certainly moments of musical catharsis. “Off the Grid” is a braggadocious trap banger, the likes of which Kanye hasn’t produced in at least a few years. Following a steady dose of trap, “Believe What I Say” is a nice oasis, a genuinely pretty love song set over a Lauryn Hill sample. When he sings “Don’t let the lifestyle drag you down,” presumably directed at his equally famous ex-wife Kim Kardashian, it’s the first time that I personally felt like there was something genuine in their relationship, that it wasn’t just a convenient partnership between mega-stars.

Donda’s second half is highlighted in part by the 8-minute-long Jesus Lord. It encompasses everything Donda is—church organ blaring in the background alongside a gospel-inspired refrain, and Kanye rapping as candidly as ever about addiction, mental anguish, and intergenerational trauma. Although Kanye is certainly looking to God for answers, there’s an acknowledgment of the limits of this endeavor. “And if I talk to Christ, can I bring my mother back tonight?/And if I die tonight, will I see her in the afterlife?” Kanye tells the story of a man consumed by grief following his brother’s death and, eventually, decides to seek revenge on his brother’s killer. But killing—or dying—does not bring anyone back to life, and Kanye doesn’t seem fully convinced of life after death. “But back to reality, where everything’s a tragedy”—all that there is to do is cope with things on the mortal plane. Donda is essentially his means of coping.

Then Kanye, in vintage fashion, opens the next track, “New Again,” with the following lines: “If I hit you with a ‘W-Y-D?’/You better not hit me with a ‘H-E-Y’/It better be like ‘Hiii’ with a bunch of I’s/Or ‘Heyyy’ with a bunch of Y’s.” Despite, or rather because of, the jarring juxtaposition, “New Again” is thematically resonant with “Jesus Lord.” Kanye is, at least temporarily, on the other side of an episode, rapping about buying expensive clothes but then about repenting “for everything I’ma do again.” The cycles of inner ups and downs will continue, and Kanye will continue to do morally questionable things. “Make me new again,” the refrain goes, but it’s clearly not the first Kanye has requested this, and is unlikely to be the last.

Donda reaches its musical climax in the formidable “Come to Life,” a grand, organ-driven number expressing Kanye’s love for his family. Kanye repeats the line, “floating on a silver lining”—heaping onto the religious imagery of the album with a message of taking pleasure in the good of life. Unlike earlier in his career, those good things are not the fame or glamour, or the supermodel (now ex-) wife, but his young daughter. It’s the type of song that I hope we see more of from Kanye.

Donda is extremely long, and I skipped over some sluggish bits. There are some bores. There’s a completely out-of-place Pop Smoke song. Kanye does, however, get a lot out of his features. Baby Keem, Roddy Ricch, Jay Electronica—the list goes on of rappers who deliver good features. And as for Mr. West himself, I wouldn’t call it a “return to form,” because that’s not the type of artist Kanye is. Kanye is always changing his sound, his style, his outlook on life. His music has a rawness to it that draws back the curtain on superstar life but never suggests simulation or a carefully manicured image of himself.

When he dropped Jesus is King, the sudden return to his evangelical roots felt like the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction. Whereas the old Kanye presented his life in both its flashiest and its most unsavory ways, the Kanye of JIK felt like he was trying to convince himself through music that reprogramming himself against the grain of celebrity was possible. Yet it was not an artistically fruitful undertaking; Kanye tried to hide that struggle beneath the art instead of through it. Donda, on the other hand, both finds some territory for the several Kanyes to coexist and to put his attempts at coping, renewal, and absolution at the forefront. It’s not his most sonically or lyrically interesting project, but it’s not boring. And after JIK, that’s all I was really hoping for.

Drake – Certified Lover Boy

Label: OVO Sound, Cover Artist: Damien Hirst.

It’s possible that the most listened-to artist in all of human history is one Canadian by the name of Aubrey Drake Graham (There’s a whole raging debate about how to measure this and how to weigh record sales against streams and so forth. Drake leads all of humanity in “certified units,” which is one way of measuring. I’m not going to get into it further).

If you told this fact to an alien and showed them Drake’s music, I don’t think they’d be too surprised in any direction. It’s mostly catchy and pleasant to listen to. It spans a couple styles but doesn’t try anything too daring that might put off mainstream audiences. Alien pop might sound somewhat similar.

Enter Certified Lover Boy. With his seventh album, I was hoping Drake might advance into some new musical and conceptual territory. The guy has sold just about as many records as anyone, so why not experiment a little bit? Those hopes, unfortunately, were largely extinguished with the release of the album’s cover, which may have been bold but not in the direction I was hoping. The cover’s racially diverse cast of pregnant emoji women only signified a doubling down on Drake’s boring, immature, and ultimately unconvincing “Lover Boy” persona.

The most frustrating thing about Drake to me is that the guy could be anything. He could leverage his musical talent to make something better than this, or start a cooking show, or get really into a niche political issue. But it seems to me that Drake is always trying to be what he thinks a celebrity rapper should be, and the yes-men around him only egg him on.

CLB’s third track, “Girls Want Girls,” is a good example of this phenomenon. Drake raps, “Say you a Lesbian, girl me too.” Far from a bold coming out statement, this is a bar which probably should have been left on the drawing board. With “Way 2 Sexy,” Drake, Future, and Young Thug interpolate the camp 1991 Right Said Fred hit, “I’m Too Sexy.” The instrumental, never mind the concept of the song, sounds like it should have been left in the 90s.

The bar about lesbians isn’t the only peculiar one on the album. On “You Only Live Twice”—on which Drake gets shown up by his features, well, twice—Drake raps, “I had to fuck a lot of girls to get a kid like this.” It’s a braggadocious bar gone horribly awry. Drake, at age 34, seems to believe children are some sort of reward for successfully having sex. Between the cover, the aforementioned bar, and some others (“We used to do pornos when you would come over but now you got morals and shit”), there seems to be an emergent theme here. Drake, both musically and lyrically, is stuck in the past, trying to reclaim a young womanizer persona that I’m not sure he ever had (This is a good place to mention Drake’s concerning friendships with underage girls. Even if we read his intentions as charitably as possible, what exactly does he gain from befriending a teenager?).

It’s here where it’s hard not to think of CLB in comparison to Donda. For all of Kanye’s issues, there seems to be a sense of change—hardly linear but change nonetheless. With Drake, it’s just repetition of the old; only, we don’t get the emotional rawness of “Marvin’s Room” or the youthful charisma of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.

Certified Lover Boy is strongest when Drake does do some honest self-reflection, which he is not at all bad at. The opening and closing tracks reflect on aging and struggling to find a soul mate. “Fair Trade” contains the refrain, “I’ve been losing friends and finding peace/honestly that sounds like a fair trade to me,” and is catchy without being too camp or too boring.

All the memes about Drake that sprouted up a few weeks after the album’s release evince the way that the public sees through Drake’s persona(s). He can rap as much as he likes about putting money on his enemies’ heads, and people might like it, but at the end of the day it’s all a facade. Drake, in some ways, is the purest form of a celebrity, an overgrown theater kid who plasticizes himself into whatever he thinks other people want. The public might not be nearly as credulous as he thinks they are, but it works nonetheless. 

The album’s liner notes describe it as “a combination of toxic masculinity and acceptance of truth which is inevitably heartbreaking—Drake” (only Drake would have to specify that he personally wrote something on his own album). After listening, I can only say that I wish it leaned farther towards “acceptance of truth,” and I can’t say I was heartbroken, only underwhelmed.

Closing Notes

For all the effort I’ve made in trying to chart the different paths Drake and Kanye have taken as mid-to-late career megarappers, the two albums they released really do share a lot in common. They’re both unusually long; they both rehash themes already explored in each artist’s discography; both of them rushed to include a bar about Giannis Antetokounmpo after he won the NBA finals. For all their idiosyncrasies, these are two similar people with similar upbringings, lifestyles, and musical influences. To some degree, the output reflects these quirks.

Most notably, Drake and Kanye both inhabit the same milieu of stardom. Celebrities aren’t all necessarily cut from the same cloth at first but they are nevertheless socialized similarly. Drake and Kanye have not existed in real life for a decade and a half at least; both exist in a reality TV-like state where their entire lives are made for the purpose of popular consumption. 

At some point in his career, Drake stopped presenting his best face for the camera and began to entirely live for the camera. Everything he does feels like a carefully scripted performance; his rapper persona bleeds into his life and then back into his art. This cycle of rehashing and regurgitating forecloses on the possibility of anything new or bold.

As for Kanye—and this may be both cause and effect of his mental health issues—there seems to be a certain ambivalence within him regarding his position towards celebrity life. His music, and life, is a constant war between braggadocio and regretfulness, faith and sin, honesty and deceitfulness, fame and hermitude. He is at his best when he reconciles these feelings through music, instead of using it to conceal them. 

I’m not sure which approach is better for the artist, but I have an idea which is better for the art.