Would he rather be putting on biblical-themed operas now, producing puffer jackets and geodesic domes?Īt a listening event announced on short notice for Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium in July, West paced the snow-white venue floor in total silence as new music blared. This summer, the rollout for Donda has doubled down on the confusing sprawl and constant tinkering of those frantic weeks when The Life of Pablo seemed to come together hurriedly amid a host of other plans, a time when you started to wonder whether making albums was Kanye’s main objective anymore. It came up in 2018, when West floated the idea of using a picture of Donda’s cosmetic surgeon on the cover of an upcoming album (as an “act of forgiveness”), and again in 2020, when it was revealed that the name of the tenth Kanye album would be Donda. Only One slipped out of the conversation, displaced by a whirlwind of business pursuits and scandals, and later out of production, though the idea of addressing maternal love and loss in his art as directly as he had intended to with Only One kept resurfacing. “The concept is my mom traveling through the gates of heaven,” Ye told the MSG crowd. Soaring in the sky on angel’s wings, Donda raced toward idyllic scenes above the clouds. In 2016, at a combination fashion show and aux-cord spectacle at Madison Square Garden, which unveiled his Yeezy Season 3 clothing line and his seventh album, The Life of Pablo - which, on a larger scale, reimagined the Manhattan party where Yeezus played for famous friends and civilians with good intel - West dropped a trailer for a mobile game called Only One, named after the 2014 single where he pined for a relationship between his daughter North and his late mother. The memory of his mother lives on through Kanye West’s thoughts and creative endeavors. He lost his first supporter and fiercest ally that year, though, when Donda passed after experiencing complications following cosmetic surgery, a loss that shook Kanye up, sometimes in public. “But I guess I did the next best thing - I exposed him to the world.” The rest is modern history: The pride in education, the concern for the Black lower and middle class, and the wide-ranging cultural tastes passed on to him from his mother formed the foundations of Kanye’s inaugural trilogy of classic albums, comprising 2004’s The College Dropout, 2005’s Late Registration, and 2007’s Graduation. “I would give Kanye the world if I could,” Donda wrote. She pitched in most of the money he used to buy his first keyboard, at 14, and she trusted that the lessons she imparted to him, the local and international culture she’d introduced him to, would be of use wherever he landed, in academia or elsewhere. When his interest in schooling took a backseat to music in his first year at CSU, his mother took it hard but rolled with it. Donda stressed the value of education - she once found a porno stashed in teen Kanye’s bedroom and made him write a research paper on what the stuff could do to his developing brain. She noticed her child’s artistic gifts very early on and took advantage of every available resource to help realize his dreams while advancing her own career and training. “I was young, Black, and smart,” she wrote in her 2007 memoir, Raising Kanye: Life Lessons from the Mother of a Hip-Hop Superstar. Donda had just earned a doctorate in English education and wanted to teach at Chicago State University. Donda West, who moved up to the Windy City with a young Kanye in tow in the early ’80s after ending things amicably with ex-husband Ray, a talented photojournalist. Kanye West will have you know he was born in Atlanta and raised in Chicago, cultured and well traveled thanks to the tireless drive and nurturing of his mother, the late Dr. Photo: Jesse Lirola/BFA Courtesy of DONDA/
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