Keeping Up With Kanye West

Keeping+Up+With+Kanye+West

If you’re keeping up with all the drama associated with Kanye West, you know there’s a lot to unpack. Between late album drops to divorce issues, Kanye has been the hot topic recently. There’s a lot to discuss so let’s go back to late August and talk about one of his latest projects: Donda

Donda is Kanye West’s 10th studio album and it contains 27 tracks, which is quite a long album. Countless different artists are featured throughout the album, from DaBaby to Lil Baby. These features are spread out well and evenly throughout the album, making it easier to listen to the entirety of the album. Many of these features added a great diversity of style of music and made the album very versatile. Some amazing examples of these are in “Off The Grid” featuring Playboi Carti and “Hurricane” with The Weekend featuring Lil Baby, which have very different melodies. If you keep up with the Grammy Nominations, Donda was nominated for Album of the Year and ​​Best Rap Album, and multiple songs off the album are also nominated for other awards. There were many strong opinions on Donda, especially since Drake dropped his album Certified Lover Boy shortly after Kanye dropped Donda. Opinions like “CLB>Donda”, “Donda is Kanye’s best project” and “Both albums are trash” mostly formed on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The controversy of Donda still continues today with more drama to follow. 

From the original Donda, to Donda 2, much drama has arisen between them. Specifically between him and his ex wife, Kim Kardashian. Kim and Kanye had a marriage of 6 years and have four kids: North, Chicago, South, and Psalm. But on February 19, 2021, their marriage came to an end. Kim Kardashian officially filed for divorce from her husband and was seeking joint custody of their four children. Kanye’s fall 2021 proclamations of love turned into a series of allegations about his ex keeping the kids from him by early 2022. With Kim and her hot new love Pete Davidson, Kanye has been only projecting anger and jealousy to the public. Not to mention flexing his new rebound Julia Fox. Mainly using his Instagram platform, Kanye posted non-stop about Kim, Pete Davidson and his kids, but would shortly delete the posts soon after. After all, Kanye can’t let go of his one and only love Kim. He actually really can’t, he bought a house across the street from her. This is way too much to handle I know, so let’s move on to our last topic, DONDA 2

Donda 2 has been a whirlwind ever since it was introduced to the public. With all the commotion that happened with the original Donda and Kim, you would think Kanye would release Donda 2 just like any other album. Wrong. Very wrong. Kanye West announced via Instagram that Donda 2 will only be available on his own platform, the Stem Player. Not on Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, or YouTube. Last year, in collaboration with Kano Computing, the $200 Stem Player was released with the first Donda album, allowing you to modify any music with the touch-sensitive light sliders built in its beige shell. This isn’t Kanye’s first journey into the world of limited music. He released The Life of Pablo exclusively on Tidal in February 2016, claiming that it “shall never never never be on Apple. It will never be put up for sale.” On April 1st of that year, The Life of Pablo became available for streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play. Will Donda 2 release just as The Life of Pablo did? We’ll see! 

This is it guys! What do you think about Donda? Does it deserve any Grammy awards? Have you got the chance to listen to Donda 2? Would you spend $200 to listen to Donda 2? Let me know what you think!

Photo by Vittorio Cioffi on Unsplash