[Review] Donda Listening Party #3
a first-hand account of Kanye West's 8/26/21 Donda listening party
G.O.O.D. evening everyone,
In case you live under a rock, Kanye’s album Donda finally dropped on all streaming platforms this Sunday (albeit the ‘clean’ version). Assuming most of you have listened to it, I figured I’d release a running diary of what happened at the event last week.
I know this is coming a few days after you expected it, but that’s kind of fitting, hey?
RUNNING DIARY: THURSDAY, 8/26/21
7:30 PM CST (90 minutes until the listed 9:00 PM start time)
Throw on my TLOP shirt and meet my friend Ben at the Addison red line stop. I buy two $6 water bottles from the nearby Dunkin and we begin the trek to Soldier Field.
7:40 PM
By the time we’ve reached Fullerton just two stops later, every single person in our train car is also heading to the listening party. Nobody was over the age of 25.
7:43 PM
One of the 2 dudes next to us recognizes me from one of my TikToks. That’s the first time that’s ever happened irl! He said they only purchased their tickets 40 minutes ago on a whim. Our cart chats it up the whole ride there, mostly about the previous listening parties, and whether or not the album will actually drop this weekend.
7:52 PM
A dude with a backpack full of snacks asks us if we think he'll be allowed into the venue with his bag.
8:04 PM
Our train comes to a stop at the Roosevelt station and the dozen or so of us rise with the implied understanding that the moment we step outside, we’ll all pretend like we're not going to the exact same place, and split back into our original parties of 2-4.
For those unfamiliar with the city, the Roosevelt train stop is about a 25 minute walk to Soldier Field, where the Chicago Bears play their home games.
Because of this, hundreds of enterprising locals set up shop on the walkway to the stadium to capitalize on the unsuspecting Yeezy stans from out of town, and sell them everything from Gatorade, to White Claws, to edibles, to shots of Fireball. It feels like walking through a cash-only Duty Free section of the world’s jankiest airport.
To quote Stefon, “this place had everything…”. A few dozen guys are selling the same homemade $20 Donda listening party t-shirts, which were actually pretty fresh.
There was even a fleet of old Italian dudes with light-up bike buggies that costed $1/minute to climb in the rear of and hitch a ride to the entrance.
According to Ben – who was at Soldier Field last weekend to watch the Bears get absolutely waxed by Mitch Trubisky in a preseason game – the bike guys are a staple of Soldier Field. He said they normally blast classic rock on the speakers attached to their bicycles. Tonight, however, they were all playing differing Kanye records.
8:14 PM
The cacophony of Kanye’s discography underscoring the flurry of transactions made for quite the scene: The chorus of “Heartless” whizzes by from a buggy transporting a group of 17 year-olds ripping $12 Fireball shots, while two dudes in Yeezus shirts climb into another to the tune of “Famous”. A man with a cooler of water bottles and Truly’s gleefully barks out, “Hydrate or Intoxicate! Hydrate or Intoxicate!” ad nauseum.
8:25:07 PM
“What if one of the bikers is just casually bumping Donda?”, I joke to Ben.
8:25:17 PM
“Yo, what if one of these biker guys is like, lowkey playing Donda right now?”, I hear a guy in a Ye Wyoming listening party longsleeve say to his friend 10 feet behind me.
This causes me to dissociate for a minute as I wonder if everyone here is just the hypebeast version of the herd of Jerrys at the Jerryboree in Rick & Morty, simultaneously lamenting how the factory tint setting is always too high on the TV.
8:35 PM
After getting through security – who did not allow bags into the venue (pour one out for homeboy from the train) – we walk by a line of at least a thousand people, which Ben guesses is for merch. The apparel and shoe game of the people in the queue is comical.
8:40 PM
I give a big hug to my friend Dakota who I met at the Jesus is King listening party in Chicago two years ago. He confirms that the giant line is for merch. Not only is it cash only, but they haven't even started selling anything yet. Sorry @Zach, I tried.
8:45 PM
We take our seats in the 200-level section of one of the end zones.
The field is completely covered, and all we see are ~30 massive speakers surrounding the perimeter of the field, and a house at midfield - which is reportedly a replica of Kanye’s childhood home (aside from the giant cross above the front door).
8:55 PM
I set an Over/Under start time line in my head of 10:15. I’m leaning under, like 9:40 ish.
9:00 PM
….
9:06 PM
A girl behind me asks her boyfriend what “Donda” stands for.
9:10 PM
Questions Ben and I consider while waiting for this thing to start:
What is the capacity of Soldier Field?1
How frequently are non-football events held at Soldier Field?
Where did they put the field goals? Like, is there a “goal posts guy”?
9:15 PM
It dawns on me that 50% of the 61,500 people here paid upwards of $150 just to be looking at the back of Kanye's house for the next 2-3 hours.
9:27 PM
I realize we could probably get a lot closer to the action, given the complete lack of security / ushers. We surreptitiously leave our section and descend to the 100-level.
9:46 PM
We somehow get to midfield about 15 rows back and chill there for a while.
Some people are inside of the house, but it’s unclear who. No doubt 30+ other Jerry’s in attendance have remarked to their friends that QuestLove is not in the house.
10:00 PM
I buy a drink from one of the actual licensed vendors, who are selling hot dogs, beer, and mixed drinks. Sadly, they do not have any catchy rhymes for this offering.
Everyone is shining their flashlights. Once the whole stadium lit up, there was a giant roar, as if everyone here was trying to will Kanye onto the stage with their energy.
10:10 PM
I take a bathroom break. Two guys wearing masks don't wash their hands after peeing.
10:17 PM
I’m sweating bullets every time someone walks by our row, fearing they're about to kick us out of our new $560 value seats. So far so good.
10:22 PM
I realize that if the album actually drops at 12:00 AM EST, we might hear it on Spotify before we hear it in the stadium.
10:30 PM
Only Kanye Omari West could get 60,000 people to stare at a fucking house for 90 minutes. Even Frank Lloyd Wright’s best work probably tops out at an hour, max.
10:35 PM
Some chants of “Kan-YE! Kan-YE!” and “Yee-ZY! Yee-ZY! are started but fizzle out.
10:39 PM
House lights are flashed, and everything fades to black – aside from the glowing cross.
10:43 PM
Kanye exits the house to thunderous applause. He wears a full face covering, one of the relatively few masks in sight at the (outdoor) event.
There’s two other people with him, who I would learn after the fact were DaBaby (?) and Marilyn Manson (??), both of whom are featured on the first track played (???).
10:45 PM
Showtime. Damn, my ‘under’ bet of 10:15 was a botch and a half.
The word ‘Donda’ repeats over and over again in some sort of guided meditation voice.
Pictures of Donda West, Kanye’s late mother, are flashed at each utterance. Over the course of the track, the portraits are replaced with flashy graphics and clips of Kanye’s controversial past, like his infamous appearance during a Hurricane Katrina telethon.
“Jail”
He opened with a new version of Jail feat. DaBaby in place of the Jay-Z verse that was played at the first two listening parties. Additional vocals were contributed by Marilyn Manson, which I did not notice live but feel out of place on the now-released Jail pt. 2.
Honestly… DaBaby felt like he was on a completely different song. I like the spirit of the Jay-Z verse better, even if some of the lyrics are corny:
"Made in the image of God, that's a selfie" - Hova
Still, it was the right call because it might have the two best lines on the album: “Hova and Yeezus, like Moses and Jesus”, and “This might / be the / return / of the / Throne”.
I still don’t understand the percussion outro, and why it’s not used during the rest of the song, but I could listen to this track on loop for hours. Wouldn’t have made it the opening track though. Feels like a closer.
God Breathed - I would have cut this.
A cavalcade of nice ass cars comes out and slowly drive around the house, which your correspondents interpret as a luxurious caravan mourning the loss of Donda…in style.
Off the Grid
Kanye semi-plagiarizes his own “mm mm MM MM mm” flow from Hurricane on here, but I still like it in spite of the borderline rapademic dishonesty. Also - the BASS!!
I love Carti on this track. Whoever edits his vocals make him sound so slimy, I dig it.
The verse by Fivio Foreign might be the best verse on the album, but sounded terrible live because of the 0.2 second lag between the two sides of stadium speakers.
Call me old-fashioned, but high-quality audio should be a staple of a listening party.
This lag was especially noticeable during the already off-beat chorus. Still, it was pretty funny watching hypebeasts pump their fists and try to vibe to two conflicting streams of audio at the same time, pretending like it didn’t sound objectively bad.
The people watching at home on Apple Music are probably having a better audio experience than most of the people in attendance. And they’re definitely having a better visual experience than the 25K+ people here stuck looking at Kanye’s backyard.
There's a lot to think about there, I think to myself, as I take a sip from my $20 vodka lemonade.
Kanye tacked on a new verse at the end of the song, but the only line I could make out live was “I talk to God every day, that’s my bestie”.
Never change, Kanye.
OK I can feel your attention slipping, so I’ll offer some scattered thoughts on the rest of the spectacle: A chorus of about 100 people appears a few tracks in. They dance, run, and sing around the house, but we can’t really hear their contributions too well.
It feels like every time the chorus adds vocals, they only sing the melody. Why bother having a massive chorus if they aren’t going to harmonize?!
The SUV’s are now shining their lights on a flock of dancers pretending to fight each other and break into the other set of cars. It’s a little hard to focus on the music when the spectacle in front of us seems determined to make tonight a “looking” party.
Ye randomly took off Kid Cudi on Remote Control to play some weird ass outro, which rattled the crowd – particularly the faction who already have the whole album memorized, like the shirtless guy in front of me with KANYE tattooed across his back.
He also took Cudi off Moon, and instead played the version from the first listening party. It still sounds pretty, but is ultimately just a loop of the Don Tolliver melody. It’s dreamy, sure, but doesn’t build anywhere. Maybe the two of them got in a fight again?
The abrupt climax of the night was when he played the beautiful and previously unheard song, Come to Life. It feels like a musical theater number in a good way, and has beautiful piano melodies that perfectly underscore Kanye in peak, "bad singing that still sounds good because it’s so emotionally raw” form. He ends the number by setting the house and himself on fire. After being extinguished, he gets down on one knee and proposes to someone who afterwards was rumored to be Kim Kardashian.
12:45 AM
He closed once more with No Child Left Behind (another one I would’ve cut), only this time without floating into the ether. The house lights came back up a minute or two after the song ended, as if even the stage crew weren’t sure the night was over.
1:00 AM
As we depart, we see the merch shop is closed, which means a thousand people paid $200 to wait in a line for 3 hours to not buy $100 t-shirts, and missed the whole show.
1:07 AM
Some of the enterprising men were back at their posts on our way out. "Truly! Powerade! Water!" shouts one guy as we exit. The $20 Donda shirts are now $50.
2:00 AM
Order some Taco Bell, throw on the second listening party audio, and start making sense of whatever the hell I just witnessed.
Verdict:
Standout tracks are Jail (the Jay-Z version), Moon, Pure Souls, and Come to Life.
I’m a fan of other tracks, like Jonah, 24, and Remote Control, but they feel incomplete.
I would have cut God Breathed, Junya, Donda, Believe What I Say, and Tell The Vision, and all the pt. 2’s, trimming this from a bloated 27 tracks to a more digestible 18.
Other songs have moments, verses, or beats that I like, but the tracks are as a whole too scattered and inconsistent, and wasn’t this supposed to be about his late mother?
Ultimately, I can’t really evaluate this album objectively; I’m an extremely biased party. I’d already heard the whole album go through several iterations over the past year – with and without curse words – before attending the listening party.
If you know who Mike Dean or Justin LaBoy is, then you probably loved this album.
If you’re coming in cold, and waited until the record was officially released to give it a spin, you probably won’t like this album. Clean versions of songs are always worse than the Explicit, and if you wade past the sea of features, Kanye’s bars are straight up BAD at certain points. If a kid performed the opening verse from Jesus Lord at your high school talent show, he would get laughed off stage:
Sittin' by myself, I'm just thinkin' /
about all I've been through, I wish I was dreamin'
Man it's hard to be an angel when you surrounded by demons
I watched so many people leave, I see 'em change by the season
But of course people like me, or Ben, or Dakota, or the people who bought the $50 baskets of chicken nuggets at the Atlanta listening party are going to like it.
Otherwise we’d be forced to come to terms with the fact that a great deal of our headspace, and our nights on July 25th–August 26th, were wasted eagerly refreshing Spotify and /r/Kanye, caught once again in the path of Hurricane Ye.
After all, rarely do adrenaline junkies wait in a three-hour line for a new roller coaster at Six Flags only to sit around afterwards haughtily critiquing the ride’s structure.
Maybe the folks with the proverbial Flash Pass to skip the wait (i.e., those who listened to Donda cold this Sunday), who didn’t experience the months long queue are the ones boarding the roller coaster with their criticism cap on snug, saying things to each other like, “If I were in charge, I would have put the loop-de-loop before the sideways bit”, and, “is it me, or did it get a little repetitive during the ‘going up’ part, I just feel like it didn’t build anywhere…”.
Meanwhile, those of us who had been waiting in line for Donda since last July had our criticism caps blown off our heads during the loop-de-loop part.
We probably won’t even get them back, but we don’t care!
We were upside-down.
And how cool is that?!
Donda sits comfortably next to Yeezus and TLOP. Albums with high highs, and low lows.
It’s unpolished, unfinished, unfocused, and six or seven tracks too long, and I can’t wait to be playing it non-stop for the next 3-6 months.
What about you, dear reader?
What’d you think of the album? Does Soldier Field have a “goal posts guy”? Let me know your thoughts in a reply to this email, or in the comment section below.
-Deezus
Answer: 61,500