But it is ultimately a gambit of frustrating cynicism and too little forethought by an artist who has burned much of his goodwill through increasingly crass, diminishing-returns versions of arguments he made with some authority a decade ago.
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If this can be read as the latest fit of marketing hubris in a long series of them, it can also be understood as West’s final, full retreat from radio and the pop charts, which began after the commercial high watermark that was 2007’s Graduation. It’s the final-to-this-point draft of a record he’s packaging inside a $200 piece of consumer hardware. Of course, this is not a surreptitious peek into the rapper’s vaults. Here, the brevity helps West - one of the most overexposed men in the world, someone who has at least intermittently marketed every last shred of his private life - pull an incredible trick, making the listener feel like a voyeur who has pried open a hard drive to stare into an abyss.
The lone exception in the latter regard is the second XXXTentacion collaboration, “Selfish,” a song where West snaps “Don’t look at me like I need medicine” before once again ending the track after a single verse. Its half-done form also loses most of its potency. This is followed by the acapella “Get Lost,” where West’s heavily processed vocals finish on an unresolved and unresolvable “Do I still cross your mind?/If not, then never mind/If not, then never mind,” and “Too Easy,” whose hook pleads, over and over: “ I need you to love me.” The album mostly disintegrates from here, seldom communicating the same despair or desperation. See “True Love,” the opener where West raps around a hook from the late XXXTentacion: He imagines his kids burrowing beneath Calabasas from his ex-wife’s home to his, only to pick them up for his above-ground visitation and “feel like they’re borrowed.” The open space on the back half of that song, presumably reserved for a second verse that was never written, communicates more weariness than any new vocal could in the lone, ten-bar verse from the following song, West wonders “What if the surgeon really the serpent?,” which is either a rote joke about the vanity of botox or a rebuke of the doctor who oversaw his mother’s botched, fatal cosmetic surgery 15 years ago. At its best, Donda 2 is eerily wrenching its early suite of songs about divorce and coming unmoored from family life are among the most compelling things Kanye West has recorded in the past eight years.
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