Kanye West, Donda, and The Art of Perfectionism
Why it’s not a surprise Donda’s delayed…again
Another week and another delay for Kanye’s upcoming album, Donda. Originally scheduled to release July 23rd, it got pushed back to August 6th, with another live-streamed performance and updated songs and features. A couple of days later and Donda is still nowhere to be found. At the time of writing, there still isn’t a clear date as to when the album will be released as of yet.
The wait for Donda has been a long time coming, as the album was initially scheduled to drop last summer. With numerous delays and promises of false hope, personally, I’ve lost slight interest in the album. Do I have hope that we’ll finally get to listen to it at some point? Absolutely. Am I as excited as I once was when Donda was first announced? Not really. That isn’t to say I’ll pass on Donda, as a Kanye fan (or die-hard fan if I’m being honest), I’m always tuning into whatever new music Kanye puts out. Over the past few years, Ye’s music has toed the line between expertly produced albums such as the psychedelic Kid Cudi collab KIDS SEE GHOSTS and janky, unpolished works like the gospel heavy Jesus Is King.
As far as album releases, Kanye is notorious for always missing the deadline, it’s pretty much expected at this point. Dare I say it’s become a part of the experience with every Kanye album. Granted, the delays have usually been one or two days apart but I believe they, as well as this current delay for Donda, all feed into Kanye’s biggest strength/weakness: perfectionism.
It’s no secret that Kanye West is a perfectionist, as a musician he takes everything into consideration to ensure his music meets his high standards. Never was that more apparent during the production of 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. In a cover story for Complex, Kanye was holed up in Hawaii, spending 24 hours in the studio every day with every single recording booth booked up. He’d rarely sleep and paid a lot of attention to each song’s instrumental, bpm and verses. I’d encourage you to read the full story as you’d get a detailed idea of the production process Kanye goes through. He’s almost like a director, pushing his actors (engineers, guest features, etc.) to give the best performance of their lives.
This perfectionist mindset to make sure every single aspect of an album 100% perfect benefitted MBDTF tremendously. However, that isn’t to say being a perfectionist will always be good. As it plagued his 2016 album The Life of Pablo. If you can recall, Kanye hosted a live premiere of TLOP in tandem with his Yeezy fashion show. Throughout the course of the weekend, fans were promised the album but were shocked when it became a Tidal-only exclusive, with availability on other streaming platforms to follow in the future. If you torrented the album at that time, you’d notice it’s significantly different from the current TLOP we have right now. The album sounded somewhat messy and all over the place, like as if everything was put together at the last minute to meet a deadline. Throughout that year, TLOP would take on a life of its own as it would get fixed as months went by.
Changes such as added verses on “Wolves”, more gospel vocals on the hook of “Father Stretch My Hand” and a completely different beat for “Freestyle 4” are just some examples of the drastic changes. TLOP has been considered to be a living project that Kanye tweaked throughout the year until he was finally satisfied, granted it did take some time but once TLOP was finally “finished”, the change was day and night.
So when it comes to Donda, I feel like we’re seeing the same pattern here. Except now that Ye has hosted two live events, he’s letting his fans into the production. Playing unreleased material for a live audience allows an artist like Kanye to gauge with listeners, get an idea of how they respond to instrumentals, features, and more. It’s like a stadium full of A&R reps and exec producers giving Kanye their feedback (and their money too.).
I can’t say how Donda has changed between these past two live streams. So far the only notable difference I could remember were the changes made to “Hurricane”. Originally intended for the cancelled Yandhi, the song now features guest appearances by both Lil Baby and The Weeknd along with added gospel harmonies. Fans are also suggesting this could be the album’s first single but, we’ll have to wait and see.
There are other tracks that I’m looking forward to as well. From what I can remember off the top of my head, there are songs featuring Baby Keem, Don Toliver, Travis Scott, Playboi Carti, and Fivio Foreign. All of which sounded really good. There’s also a Jay-Z feature, whose verse suggests that he and Ye mended matters after so long, which is great news. Overall, everything’s kind of up in the air right now and the most we could do is wait until Kanye is ready to release Donda when he feels it’s met his quota, which who knows when that could be.
I say all this to say that I’m not that surprised Donda’s being delayed again (or indefinitely depending on how you look at it.). Kanye’s perfectionist attitude has been instilled in him for a long time and it’s hard to shake that off. This new album could mean something inherently more to Kanye than most might think, being named after his late mother there could be an incentive for him to make this album as perfect as he can to honor her memory perhaps? Might be a stretch but that could be a solid reason. As for now, we’ll just have to play the waiting game.
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