![]() ![]() Jesus Is King nods to a handful of moments from the past 15 years of West’s career. It is a markedly more cohesive and enjoyable album than I believed him capable of creating at this juncture. Some of the hallmarks of 20th-century gospel are evident, and warmly applied: the rise and fall of a formidable choir the velvety growl of a Hammond organ an undulating piano rhythms that stretch through history and geography, all the way back to West Africa. His mythical rap-camp format, popularized with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s Hawaii origin story, unifies the contributions of producers as disparate as Timbaland, Pi’erre Bourne, Boogz, and Evan Mast of Ratatat into 27 minutes of pleasant, if not entirely transgressive, textures. Though Jesus Is King followed what is now a characteristically chaotic album rollout for West, the result is much more focused than his 2018 album ye. (In a recent piece for Vibe, the writer Kiana Fitzgerald, who shares with West a bipolar diagnosis, put forth a moving theory connecting spiritual fervor with the experience of mania.) Consider the power of the evangelical right on the political landscape, into which West has inserted himself in recent years, causing some of the turmoil that presumably sent him seeking refuge in Christ this spring. The religious, meanwhile, identify as more devout. He’s always presented as religious-“ Jesus Walks” imagined the club as a holy temple back in 2004 the Kardashians’ labored, glamorous Easter photos have become something of an annual tradition Pablo was explicitly an album about faith-and yet the timing is notable.īy most accounts, fewer and fewer Americans identify as Christian, and a steadily growing number describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. As West sells it, figuratively and literally, Jesus Is King is a repudiation of his past sin, an absolution, a blank slate from which to spread the word of a very specific God, one whose blessings rain down on a cul-de-sac in Calabasas and a ranch in Jackson Hole. Recorded (and, apparently, re-recorded) in the months after he announced a recommitment to Christianity, the album is West’s first offering in the wake of Sunday Service, the performance series he’s turned into something of a global church brand. “Follow God,” whose title is as literal as gospel can get, is organized around a sample of a burning vocal: “Father I stretch, stretch my hands to you,” goes the singer of an obscure 1974 track, Whole Truth’s “ Can You Lose By Following God.” Three years and a religious rebirth later, the motif returns on West’s ninth album, Jesus Is King. Barrett’s version on 2016’s The Life of Pablo, in a song that opens with a non sequitur about a bleached butthole. It is ostensibly a favorite of Kanye West, who sampled Pastor T.L. “Father I Stretch My Hands To Thee,” an unsmiling Methodist hymn written by Isaac Watts in the early 1700s and turned into a rousing standard by black gospel singers over the next century, has since transcended the church pew. ![]()
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