It may appear disorienting that Kanye West, at age 42, has made a hard turn toward worship music. But West has always been making worship music, both in his literal embrace of religious themes and iconography, and also in his belief that songs should be a vehicle for moral tugs of war, philosophical reckoning and ecstatic praise. The only thing that has changed is the packaging.
“Jesus Is King,” his ninth album, released last week after a string of delays, is very much of the West oeuvre. A more engaged and vivid album than “Ye,” from last year, though nowhere as robust as “The Life of Pablo” from 2016, it is bare-bones and curiously effective, emotionally forceful and structurally scant. It has the scent of haste, and also of urgency — these songs work familiar West turf, but with almost no filigree beyond faith.
Since 2008, when he deconstructed his bluster on “808s & Heartbreak,” but particularly since the tectonic, industrial shift of “Yeezus” in 2013, West has made texture his palette far more than rhyme, subject matter or melody. His verses have gotten terser and snarlier (and he has spoken of not always writing them himself), and his best songs work primarily on visceral, nontextual levels.
The result is “Yeezus” for Jesus, packed with hard sonic jolts. West understands the weapons-grade power of a gospel choir, and deploys it from the album’s opener, “Every Hour” — quite simply, a ringing alarm clock shaking off the fatigue of the last couple of years.
The choir recurs throughout this very brief, 27-minute album — West recently announced that he would release a full album with his Sunday Service choir in December — but it is not the sole motif. “Selah” swells until West cites Bible verses over door-slam percussion, suggesting an explosion of religious awakening. “Use This Gospel” begins with a persistent, needling drone that bespeaks anxiety, disorientation and a pressing need for healing. “Use this gospel for protection/It’s a hard road to heaven,” he sings, with the vulnerability he channeled on “808s & Heartbreak.”
West alternates between singing and rapping — his vocals are tentative and sometimes meek, like a toddler taking first steps. Sometimes his rapping is tart — “Everybody wanted ‘Yandhi’/Then Jesus Christ did the laundry,” he raps on “Selah,” referring to the album he scrapped for this one. On “Hands On,” he raps about redemption with the same fervor he once applied to excess: “Told the devil that I’m going on a strike/Told the devil when I see him, on sight/I’ve been working for you my whole life.”
Elsewhere, his less ambitious rapping is buffeted by transcendent guest singers — Ant Clemons on the sterling “Water,” and Clemons and Ty Dolla Sign on “Everything We Need.” And on “Use This Gospel,” one of the album’s standouts, his own prayerful singing is a setup for back-to-back verses by the Clipse (Pusha-T and No Malice), the brothers who haven’t appeared together on a record in a decade, since Malice found God and changed his name. (Both have writing credits on other songs here: “Selah” and “Closed on Sunday.”) There’s also a beatific saxophone solo by Kenny G, a balm for even the most sinful.
Occasionally, West leans on lumpy metaphor, as in “Closed on Sunday,” with its extended riff on the fast food chain Chick-fil-A. But what’s most notable about the lyrics on “Jesus Is King” is how simpatico they are with prior West projects. Long sections of some of these songs, like “Follow God,” aren’t particularly religious at all. The indignation, the self-critique, the perseverance — they could have come from any of West’s albums. His newly central faith in God isn’t that different from his longstanding faith in himself.
What’s different is the framing, the insistence that this era is a hard pivot more than a gentle evolution. In part, that is a response to the last few years of West’s public life, in which his vocal support of President Trump and his anti-historical comments about slavery have alienated a good deal of his fan base. His awakening to religion has been portrayed skeptically, and in places dismissively, as an attempt at a corrective.
That West is amplifying the intensity of his commitment is suggested by the rest of this rollout — an Imax film also called “Jesus Is King,” released last week, and the past several months of Sunday Service performances, quasi-church services in which West has taken a back seat to his choir, which performs gospel standards alongside pop and R&B hits rebuilt for worship.
“Jesus Is King” the film is slighter than the album, though it functions in similar fashion, privileging texture and grand-scale image over narrative detail. It’s a series of performance vignettes filmed at the Roden Crater, James Turrell’s austere Land Art project in the Arizona desert. In the most potent scene, the camera faces up to the sky from the ground, capturing the choir director as he leads the group in a rendition of “How Excellent.” It’s rumbling and elegiac, and suggests music emanating from the raw belly of the Earth and erupting toward the heavens.
Crucially, the choir is central here; one segment focuses exclusively, and in cherishing fashion, on the face of one female member. When West does appear, it’s in gestures of service — his hand on the piano as he unobtrusively observes the choir; sweeping the floor; singing softly, in extreme contrast to the power of the choir; holding his new baby. There’s no explicit story to the film, but the recurring subtext is West’s subjugation to powers beyond his control.
That West would be capable of that is a subject of much disagreement — there is a fine line between pushing an ego into overdrive, and building something big enough to obscure the ego.
That tension has been most clear in West’s increasing preference for experiential listening events since “The Life of Pablo,” which was introduced with a fashion show at Madison Square Garden. For “Ye,” he convened a listening party on a Wyoming cowboy ranch. In this era, he’s doubled down: He began hosting Sunday Services near his Calabasas home in January, including an Easter Sunday performance at Coachella, and more recently, in cities around the country, and sometimes even in church, as he did at the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral of New York, in Queens, late last month.
In videos from these performances, he’s rarely at the center, though Sunday Service is undeniably his vision. (And presumably his burden — the costs of flying a choir and band around the country are probably astronomical.) In an interview with Beats 1 Radio last week, he rejected the term “entertainer” to describe his current role: “I’m not here for anyone’s entertainment.”
It’s clear that music commands merely a fraction of West’s attention these days — he is married with four children, he runs a successful apparel and footwear company and he’s exploring sustainable housing design — but later in the interview, he described continuing to make music as a cosmic responsibility, a symbol of his faith: “I believe because God has given me a gift that I prayed for and so many people love, that if I stop doing it, he might start to take other things away.”
In other words, music is the anchor. That West’s turn to gospel has been met with skepticism is no different from the doubt he was faced with when he first arrived in hip-hop in the early 2000s. Then, he was a disruptive outlier with charisma and force of will, reluctantly embraced. But over time, his heresy has come to look a lot like faith. Funny how that works.
