“Jesus Is Born”…In Kanye West
New Year, New Kanye
People love conversion stories. This is a fact that transcends religion and culture. This is especially true when this involves some degree of vindication of the other side’s claims. Whether the claims are of ultimate metaphysical verities, or of mundane subjects like who plays the best round of golf, there is some consolation in having someone come to your side.
We Christians obviously are no different on a human level, although we pray to be purged of egotism. People are not prizes to be conquered or simply beings for argumentation. What should bring us joy above all is seeing more people brought to the “obedience of faith”, and to know the joy, peace and redemption that comes from a living relationship with Jesus Christ. That also means, on our part, as his body, that anyone who claims to be his disciple is our brother or sister.
Kanye West’s conversion to Christ this past year is extremely important, in that he is truly an “influencer”, perhaps even greater than other notable celebrity converts like Cat Stevens or Bob Dylan. Not only is he the husband of the TV celebrity Kim Kardashian, he also has his own product lines and a pervasive influence on a great deal of musical expression in pop and rap. Although he received a reputation from the media after 2016 as a sort of political eccentric, as he broke from expected norms in vocally favoring Donald Trump as president, something deeper was definitely going on in the now 42 year old rapper.
All these forces in his evolution have now burst forth in the past two albums released, “Jesus is King” and “Jesus is Born”. Both albums, released in late 2019, have received much attention from music reporters and cultural commentators. I would like to take a look at these works theologically, and perhaps provide some other commentary along the way. I find most commentators up to the current time are having difficulty listening to what Kanye is actually trying to say in his music, and instead are obsessing either about his political beliefs (because, after all, politics are the only thing that’s real, right?!), or the weirdness of his Christianity. But let’s get that out of the way from the get-go: real Christianity is weird. It’s otherworldly. From the Beatitudes to the Benedicite, it is the story of human wretchedness meeting divine grace. And I am convinced that that is exactly the story Kanye wants to share with ‘the culture’ today.
Jesus is King
Jesus is King, West’s ninth studio album, is a remarkably short one: 27 minutes long. Yet in that 27 minutes, West has five explicitly cited artists who collaborated with him, including the Gospel legend Fred Hammond. All this leaves out production work by seemingly unlikely contributors like Timbaland. Before it was even released, the twitterati were buzzing about the work. Kim Kardashian announced this album, formerly called Yandhi, would now be called by the more in-your-face title Jesus is King. The rumors surrounding its production were, to my ears, pretty entertaining. People Magazine proclaimed with a surprise bordering on stupefaction that West had explicitly asked the collaborators on his album to abstain from fornication, and even encouraged prayer and fasting. This actually ought not to surprise us: several sacred composers throughout history have asked their choirs to go to confession, to pray and to fast. I have to say, I admire West’s courage in confronting the Leviathan of the Sexual Revolution. As an aside, West also strongly condemned pornography and confessed his own struggle in an attempt to encourage young men to give up one of the scourges of our age.
The Kingship of Christ is more than a title for this album: it is truly its overarching theme. Although admittedly, many of these songs are not his most clever lyrically, they get his points across. Closed on Sunday, the fourth track, is an exhortation to Sunday worship, to prayer and to attentiveness to family. Its music video is an explicit affirmation of Christian communion. Kanye and his family, alone in the wilderness, find themselves surrounded by a caravan filled with his fellow Christians. Jesus is Lord, the last track, is simply the praise of the Holy Name of Jesus from St. Paul in the Epistle to the Philippians. He even references, to the chagrin of his cultural opponents, the fast food chain Chick-Fil-A, which is still remarkable for its observance of the Lord’s Day.
The album is full of notes of what I would call ‘holy sedition’, a typical theme found in contemporary Christian songs. That is, the full-throated affirmation of the superiority of Christ and the Gospel over all worldly authorities and concerns. This is found in his dramatic second track, Selah, a word borrowed directly from the Psalms. The selah of a Psalm is widely interpreted as a pause for reflection or perhaps a change in accompanying instrumentation. West places this selah artistically in the beginning of his album to highlight something important, namely that this album represents a true selah, a work of reflection and also a change in his spiritual instrumentation, so to speak. This becomes abundantly clear as the album progresses, and even more in the following album. The penultimate track, Use this Gospel, exhorts the listener with words remarkably like the Roman Catholic Ordination of a Deacon, which is heard upon receiving the instrument of his order, the Evangeliarium, or the Gospel Book for use at Mass. “Use this gospel for protection” he says, “it’s a hard road to heaven”. “In the Father, we put our faith/King of the kingdom/Our demons are tremblin’/Holy angels defendin’/In the Father, we put our faith.” Once again, the language of spiritual warfare, so prevalent in Gospel music and in the New Testament, provides a vocabulary of conflict so familiar to Christians throughout the centuries. Yet, West does not hold himself as smugly superior, and instead encourages Christians to support each other. In the end of the track, he asks, “…hold on to your brother when his faith lost [sic]”. West calls himself “crooked as Vegas”, but yet calls his conversion a “presence…happy belated”.
This album even has sacramentality, which is extremely interesting. The music video for Water is the baptism of Christians in an African American Church. The refrain, sung so soulfully by Ant Clemons, asks Jesus to “clean us like the rain in spring…it’s water, we are water, pure as water, like a newborn daughter.” This is very dense theologically, for a popular song. “It’s water” acknowledges the physical ‘matter’ of water. Then he says “we are water, pure as water”, which acknowledges the reality of grace in the sacrament, which purifies the soul. Then, he acknowledges the divine filiation which takes place as a result of baptism. When we are baptized, we are made children of God. Curiously, the song asks God to “clean us like the rain in spring/take the chlorine out our conversation [sic]”. Here we can perhaps see a nascent understanding that the desire for cleansing, so fundamental to the believer that is conscious of the reality of sin, also requires a washing after baptism. Of course, Apostolic Christians consider that to be bestowed in the Sacrament of Penance.
Of course, the world, in the Biblical sense, is up to its old tricks. One review calls lyrics like “King of Kings, Lord of Lords” “cliché church-isms“, along with other elements of the album. West’s work, it is said, is “Fake Christianity at Its Finest”, and slams West for perceived egocentrism and superficiality. Such criticisms are a dime a dozen, but quite frankly, I can’t see how anyone can get that from the album itself. Critics have their settled ideas about West, and I doubt much will change them.
Jesus is King is remarkable for its density of theological conviction, especially when we consider the recent nature of Kanye West’s conversion. Kanye’s voice in the work, however, is largely muted compared to other works. He appears to want to say his piece about how he found salvation in Jesus, and then he wants to recede into the background. Although I admit the album feels and sounds somewhat unfinished, I have a feeling that West wanted to release as much as he could of his own vocals, which are the most complete parts of the album, because of how much he wanted to showcase his own choir in the next album.
Jesus is Born
Jesus is Born, the sequel album to Jesus is King, released on Christmas Day, 2019, is something I would like to describe as a creative metamorphosis. West applies his considerable talents in reinterpreting stables of Gospel Music, but also, perhaps more poignantly, he even reinterprets himself, such as in his track Ultralight Beam, which is a re-do of a critically acclaimed song of the same name from his 2016 album The Life of Pablo. Yet, whereas in the 2016 version he said, “I’m tryna keep my faith/but I’m looking for more/Somewhere I can feel safe/And end my holy war”, he now says, “We are saved/He is the risen Lord/His love is yours/In the arms of Jesus, saved…This is everything, yes it is, yes it is, this is everything”. I was very impressed by his re-presentation of even 80’s Gospel, like as is found in his Sunshine, a very popular Gospel classic used even by artists popular in Christian Hip Hop and R&B, like Out of Eden’s version in 1996. As someone who is a huge fan of traditional spirituals, having sung many of them in the United Methodist Church in my youth, I was delighted to find the smooth fusion of synths and Gospel voices in Balm in Gilead, a remix which is a joyful and faithful to the spirit of the song, while giving it West’s own spin.
I was thoroughly impressed by West’s complete reinvention of a secular, lovesick and lonely song, So Anxious by Ginuwine, into a triumphant hymn whose lyrics are taken almost completely from Scripture, in Souls Anchored. Even old R&B songs like SMV’s 1997 song Rain and It’s About Time’s Weak return, with a fresh coat of paint in West’s tracks of the same name in Jesus is Born. Like many musically talented Christians have done in the past, love songs in particular are transformed in this album into canticles of divine love. You know the musical ability West demonstrates is truly remarkable when even Billboard’s review declares Jesus is King a continuation of West’s “captivating transformation”.
West channels the full power of Gospel’s spiritual militarism in his Satan, We’re Gonna Tear Your Kingdom Down. It’s hard to outdo the Gospel Diva Shirley Caesar’s version, but it falls perfectly in the album, a direct threat to the powers of darkness. Yet West won’t allow the devil to have all the attention of the end of the album, and so he ends it with a true doxology, Total Praise.
So many classics in the history of Gospel music are reborn in Jesus is King, and even secular melodies are re-purposed for Gospel lyrics and melodies. I cannot recall many instances in ‘Christian music’ that this has been done in recent memory. It appears West has even more such creative works in his repertoire that have yet to be released, as can be heard in his Sunday Service Choir interview for the James Corden Late Show, where they even have managed to adapt Nelly Furtado’s I’m Like a Bird and make it a Gospel song! This can be heard at minute 15:48 after West makes his startling defense for fertility in families.
Apart from its artistic merits, the album has, in my mind, three principal themes: adoration/praise, salvation, and spiritual warfare. Naturally for Gospel music, pure praise for God’s own sake, which we call adoration, is in the forefront. Truly, if someone buys Jesus is Born looking for an album by Kanye West, they are bound to be disappointed. His voice does not uniquely appear in the entire album. Most reviewers are perplexed by this fact, especially if you hold to the narrative that Kanye West is something like a bi-polar narcissist feigning conversion to Christianity as a publicity stunt. I disagree with this assessment, because most people who have no faith do not understand how transformative faith is to one’s mental universe. It is likely that West does not view his newest work solely through the lens of business, although of course he has to make a living. I believe he views his artistic work now as an apostolate, a work of evangelization.
A New Praeparatio Evangelica
I find in West’s two last albums a more clear affirmation of the Kingship of Jesus and his claims on the life of the believer than I have in so much of contemporary Christianity. There is a springtime freshness in his sound, a spiritual joy which is definitely hard to duplicate by artificial means. West describes all the drama and sin of his past, which so many people use to discredit him, as a sort of praeparatio evangelica. He stated in the aforementioned interview with Corden his belief that his suffering and mental anguish was willed by God to prepare him to be able to reach people who yearn for a Savior, as he did.
Kanye as an artist I believe instinctively grasps the concept of praeparatio evangelica. That is the idea that anything that is good, true and beautiful, even from sources which aren’t ‘ideal’ or ‘Christian’, can be re-used and redeemed for Christ and his Kingdom. Christians have always used the culture and experiences of their era to try to bring the Gospel afresh to each generation. If West is unconsciously or consciously engaged in this project, I can only embrace him, call him brother, and hope for more beautiful work from him in the future. 2019 was a turning point for him, and I can only hope he touches more hearts and minds in 2020.
