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Positivity and jesus talk might turn off some, but to suggest that anyone who dislikes the album is coming from that space is way reaching, especially on a music board with a lot of folks that are capable of at separating content and art (to the extent that they can be, which, of course, has limits).
A more thorough (but concise) version of my argument/perspective is: Over the last decade, Kanye's rhymes have generally gotten lazier and lazier (regardless of subject matter), but his production has remained at the very least interesting and often still exceptional. On JIK, however, the rhymes are as lazy as they get and the content is one-dimensional (you can do jesus and/or positivity and still give your words plenty of depth). As someone who grew up in the church and still listens to gospel on the regular, I find the number of religious cliches that are jammed into each track here simply artless, and the actual rhyme schemes and delivery are relentlessly repetitive and uninteresting. The real problem, for me, is that the music is seriously lacking --- even the best production feels like demos or throwaways. It's sad that the most interesting musical moment is probably the album intro, and that virtually every guest verse is more interesting than anything Ye himself utters here. So where music saved past albums, it fails here.
I will say that Kanye's absurdity as a character - his ego and delusions of grandeur, his self-conscious attempts to style himself as a cultural revolutionary/visionary, which he won't let up on even on his "gospel" album! - make it harder than with others to take the lyrics of Jesus is King seriously. Chance's sincerity always feels, well, sincere, and that goes along way toward making even his cheesiest musical and lyrical moments at least interesting. His record was less marred by utter flatness than by overthinking: it was bloated, a lot of the tracks were way overproduced (that's how you get a totally unnecessary Randy Newman cameo, even if I love Randy Newman), and it didn't help that a good number of the rhymes felt phoned in or formulaic - it just wasn't a very good performance, especially coming off an exceptional run. At the end of the day, some editing could easily have taken Big Day from middling (at best) to pretty good (at worst). JIK couldn't be saved by an editor... there's nothing to save.
Also, if you're gonna have a fred hammond feature --- have a real fred hammond feature!!! That probably would have raised the whole album a star, at least - who doesn't like fred hammond? Instead we get a Kenny G feature that surprisingly isn't all that bad but doesn't help the general feeling that we're being trolled hard... (although I'll take the Kenny G feature over just about any of the verses Kanye himself put down here...)
-thebigfunk
~ i could still snort you under the table ~
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