If you've read any of the blog previously you might know that basically in the last few months I have been listening to a lot of Kanye, and producing a lot of Kanye content. The last few months have kind of been a long build up to this album dropping. I wanted to get to know all his music in time for this coming out.
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Jesus is King, yeah so even though I've got quite a lot to say about the album, I'm not sure what to really take from it.
I don't follow Kanye much outside of his music, so I don't really see what he's up to. For example, last time I checked he was wearing the Trump hat and stuff. So to see he was now a devout Christian was a bit of a surprise, because as I say, I don't follow what he does outside of his music, so I never saw any progression towards this.
When I say I'm not sure what to take from this album, it's because I'm not too sure what I am meant to have learnt from this album. Similar to Ye really. Apart from a few parallels with himself and Jesus, he never really offered a new perspective on Christianity or a new understanding. In fact, he didn't actually say anything that interesting throughout the whole album.
Lyrically this album was a bit of a backwards step. Some terrible bars on here. Like on Closed on Sunday he says "When you got daughters, always keep them safe", like no shit, this is what I mean when I say he never really offers a new perspective on Christianity or anything, like you don't need to be a Christian to have this opinion, most parents will want to keep their daughters safe, regardless of their religion. And that's all aside from the fact that the bar is really bland and unoriginal.
On Follow God, which was one of the better songs, he adopts a pretty cool flow as he picks a nice, effective rhyme scheme and is consistent with it (same rhyme scheme Aitch used in Straight Rhymes, not really important but was the first thing I noticed). I wish Kanye rapped like this on more songs on Jesus is King. Even with the better flow there was still sub-standard bars though - "I was looking at the 'gram and I don't even like likes".
Water was a nice song. It had a really bland and unoffensive instrumental, but it was fairly catchy and the choir did a really good job as well as the featuring artist Ant Clemons. To be honest the choir always sounded good, but I don't really listen to Gospel so I don't necessarily know what makes a good sounding choir, but they're on Kanye West's album so they're gonna be good.
Probably the best song of the album came right towards the end in Use this Gospel. The humming from Kanye was brilliant, very Cudi like. When I heard the rapping start I was blagged because I was like, I swear that's Pusha T, but I looked at the feature and it said Clipse. Turns out Clipse is just the group name for Pusha and his brother No Malice. Which makes sense because they both sounded very similar. Yeah but both their verses were amazing, good bars, perfect flow and delivery for the instrumental.
To me Jesus is King is kind of an extension from Ye, except this time it's the religious version instead of being about having bipolar disorder. They were both way too short and could have offered more. They both needed more for us to digest and fully work out what was going on I think.
There was some really good music on this album despite some of my criticisms. However, I do think Kanye can set a higher standard for himself in the future. I'd love to see the quality get up to that Life of Pablo and Yeezus level.
For this album I can only really put it above 808s in terms of my rankings, and just behind Late Registration. I am still excited for what is to come from Kanye in the future, as I can tell his skills are still there, but I'm not convinced he's going to harness them in a way that I'd want him to, oh well.
6/10
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