Jesus Is King

Kanye West has always made gospel music. Its underpinnings were subtle in songs like They Say, blatant in Ultralight Beam, and in Jesus Walks - well, you know. But for the better part of his career, that church sound was covered by, let's just say, not quite as church lyrics. This brought about some interesting side effects; this merging of Christian and secular introduced some people to a faith they didn't know they were interested in - a sort of covert Christianity. Now I'm not claiming Kanye's way was the right way to do it - as a matter of fact I'm saying that for pretty much everyone except Kanye it's the wrong way to do it. But was it worth it? Is now better? 

I bring these questions up to throw them away. Most of the controversy you'll hear about this album (and Kanye in general) is about what it means to others, but what makes Kanye so potent is that his products are really his best attempt to explain himself. He is the product. Like Picasso's periods, his albums are unadulterated moments in time - the embodiment of how he feels being alive right then and there. This is why this album is so crucial. Kanye West has said some pretty outlandish things, but they've all served to free him of expectations. Saying he's only making gospel music from now on is the first time I can remember him willingly limiting himself. Further, Kanye's willingness to express, unfiltered, is his meal ticket. For someone who's made a living by taking risks, locking himself into something so specific is quite possibly the biggest risk he's ever taken.

So now that we know our history, let's talk about the present.

Jesus Is King is 1 of 3 parts of what I refer to as the Jesus Is King experience - the other 2 parts being the IMAX and the Zane Lowe interview. I view the roles of these 3 analogously to the Holy Trinity. Please don't misunderstand this - none of Kanye's works are in the Holy Trinity - but how he presents his message in each of the settings serves to explain it from a different perspective, and hopefully, reach different kinds of people in the process. Here’s how that breaks down:

The album is God - it's the final presentation and what the other 2 exist to support. The IMAX is the Holy Spirit - there's much less said, and it serves to express what living in your message looks and feels like. The interview is Jesus - it's where the rubber meets the road less traveled, and where Kanye, by exposing himself to questioning, becomes vulnerable and relatable.

IMAX

I actually saw the film before I heard the album (released on the same day), so I thought it'd be sort of the Runaway counterpart and follow the album tracklist and narrative pretty closely. It does not. Funnily enough, I went around telling people "Kanye finally made an album where he stops talking so much". Oops. Whereas the album structure is standard Kanye, the film features his voice on 2, maybe 3 songs - most of the heavy lifting and emphasis is on the Sunday Service choir (many songs featured in the film are available on their solo album, which, if it were only the first half, would have made 2019's top 10 as well) - a point we'll come back to in a minute.

Spoiler: the film is actually my favorite of the 3 - I won’t say too much, but it opens with the hallelujah chorus of Selah, so the bar is pretty high. Although it’s only a 30 minute film, it doesn’t maintain that level of paralyzing vocality throughout. It keeps your focus mostly through its novelty - there is no storyline - but the content is pure enough that it’s not an inauthentic attention grab. For me, despite its brevity, and although it is strange at times, the feeling it leaves you with justifies its oddity. 

Album

First, some stats. With 11 tracks over a runtime of a whopping 27 minutes, the songs are quite short. The structure is more like an extended Ye than a shortened TLOP. In addition to the myriad featured vocalists and instrumentalists, there were no less than 18 producers. Add in the fact that the recording sessions were done in vastly different settings, and that there was seemingly no mastering, and, discounting the recurrence of the Sunday Service Choir, you're left with a feeling of incohesion. 

Sonic cohesion is important to me - I treat all albums as bodies of work, not collections of songs - but it's secondary to thematic cohesion. Interestingly, after Yeezus, Kanye flipped which one he prioritizes. TLOP, ye, and JIK each paint from palettes with too many neutrals, but upon inspecting the tracklists and lyrical content, the underlying theme among them has been the acknowledgement of uncertainty. That has its caveats, which I won't dive into, but as a rule of thumb, the less Kanye sees himself as the center of the conversation, the less cohesive his music - his most recent works have sounded like an identity crisis. It's strange to claim incohesion as a theme, but giving Kanye the credit he's due, I think the lack of packaging was exactly was he was trying to present. 

So here we are now; Kanye's been given a sense of purpose for why he's being pulled from the center of his universe, and we start to see this simultaneous ending of uncertainty and the beginning of this demotion of ego. In album form, we get a piece of art where Kanye still has some things to say, but where he's able to remove himself from it a bit. He, exclusively, is not the product.

This brings us to lyrical content.

There’s so much to unpack in this section, but this review is long enough as it is, so, for the sake of brevity, I’ll say that how good the lyrical content is depends on how much you trust Kanye West. I can tell you that he certainly got the overtones of the Bible correct, and there are some poignant references, but whether you think every word is a masterpiece or most of it is just his personal feelings that happen to relate to Bible stories is a matter of choice, and I won’t try to sway you either way. For the record, I will say that there were over 30 writers, of varying biblical credibility, so take that as you will.

Last but not least - the actual songs. Frankly, I was hit or miss on the individual tracks. None of them were bad, but some were kinda meh. However, and it's a big however, this album contains some of Kanye’s best work. One of my absolute favorite things about JIK is the amount of raw choir. I didn’t really realize how big a deal it was until I said it out loud, but Kanye is making the music he used to sample. For a genre that gets bashed as "lesser than" for its use of recycled work, conducting a full choir is a huge slap in the face to the short sellers. But again, this meshing of choral and synthesized music isn’t quite up to historical Kanye standards yet; there are songs that sound more like ideas than finished products, and not for irony’s sake, but simply due to inexperience.

This is the point where we need to take a huge step back and bring back up that "limitation" context from earlier. Kanye West made a gospel album, right? I'm not gonna pose the "what makes a genre a genre" question here, but there are expectations. The friction here is that it walks like a duck but it doesn’t talk like one. I mean, does this sound like a gospel album to you? Well if you take the definition of gospel denotatively, Kanye surely made a gospel album. But what does that mean for the future? Here’s the trick (and it’s perfect Kanye and I couldn’t be happier): he’s reclaiming the genre by redefining what it sounds like - he’s giving himself the space to speak freely about God in whatever format he so desires. By "only making gospel albums" he is limiting himself to a subject matter, but he’s freeing the genre for everyone else in the process.

Interview

For those new to Zane Lowe, he’s a producer and host of a radio show on BBC Radio 1. Through his respectful demeanor and thoughtful line of questioning, he’s had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s most prolific musicians, even at times when they specifically weren’t doing interviews, most notably Kanye West in 2013 (ending a multi-year hiatus).

This interview was an odd one; Zane flew out to Kanye's frozen tundra of a ranch in Montana (where they're building the domes) and talked with him for a few hours about how his recent, drastic life changes are embodied in this work. Again, for brevity, I won't recount the interview for you, but if you get nothing else from it, notice how often he turns the focus from his accomplishment to external praise.

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Now, if you've caught on to my bolded words (and you've made it this far), you probably don't need to read my conclusion. It's simple - this album is an inflection point - it marks the moment Kanye started to let go of himself (in a good way). That's a huge deal for him but it's a big deal for us too. Kanye's moves trickle down as potently as anyone alive - in a few years time you'll hear choral ensemble make a mainstream resurgence and brag rap take a swan dive. It won't be met without resistance, but only the real survives.

Personally, as someone who's complained about Christian music since elementary school, I'm ready. I'm not putting the fate of praise in Kanye's hands, but I'm cautiously optimistic about the influence. There now exists an album that encourages me to do things I know I should be doing, that I can listen to with my mom, that I can play for my son, that I honestly like, and that I can tell other people that I like. It’s a very strange feeling indeed, and one that’s long overdue.

Conclusively, Kanye West is redefining what gospel is. He's committed to using music for a specific purpose, not making a specific kind of music. We'll see if it sticks.

Rating: 8

Favorite Song: Every Hour