
The Gospel According to Kanye
Kanye West performs in Inglewood, Calif., on October 23. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images for ABA)
Chapter and verse on the rapper’s new verses
Kanye West is going to embarrass the Christians who have recklessly embraced him as a mascot. That much seems inevitable. But that’s okay: There are worse things than embarrassment, and Kanye West is an embarrassing guy — needy, arrogant, compulsive. His insecurity is as epic as it is perplexing in a man who by all appearances has everything. He is fabulously rich (though not quite as much so as his wife’s half-sister, Kylie Jenner, a billionaire at 22), and he is married to a woman who is widely considered (de gustibus, etc.) the great sex symbol of her generation. They seem reasonably happy, and they have four children with goofy celebrity names — North, Chicago, Psalm, and Saint. He sells truckloads of expensive sneakers in collaboration with Adidas and has designed clothes for Louis Vuitton. All that and a measure of artistic respect, too — his musicianship and his verse both are deft and accomplished, widely admired even among those of his peers not well disposed to him. And the people line up behind the critics: Kanye has had four No. 1 hits, 17 in the top ten, and 96 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. He is 42 years old.
And he is kind of a mess.
Until West’s recent foray into MAGA politics and evangelism, what people who are, let us say, outside of the rap-music–reality-show–sneakerhead demographic knew him best for was being married to Kim Kardashian and having been rude to Taylor Swift at an award presentation, making “Imma let you finish” a meme and a catchphrase and leading Barack Obama, who apparently had a lot of spare time on his hands as president, to dismiss West as “a jackass.” It was not the first time West had done something like that, in fact. After losing out at an earlier awards ceremony, he threw a fit, concluding: “If I don’t win, the award show loses credibility.” He is not shy about asserting his importance: He titled one album Yeezus (another one, Yandhi, didn’t make it out) and has declared: “I’m unquestionably, undoubtedly, the greatest human artist of all time.” Some readers of this magazine will know him mainly for his having stood next to a very uncomfortable-looking Mike Myers at a fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina and announcing: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Some of that nonsense is self-conscious marketing, a kind of grandly inflated version of the clickbait economy that keeps the gurgle churning, assembling a hectomillionaire’s fortune a fraction of a penny at a time. And that works: Kanye West’s Life of Pablo went platinum in the United States and gold in the United Kingdom on the strength of streaming alone, the first album to do so.
Maybe it is all part of a grand plan. Or maybe he just says the first thing to come into his head — which, lately, has been: “Jesus Is King.”
Jesus Is King, Kanye West’s new Christian album, is a big deal. Within a few minutes of its release, its songs took up nine out of the top ten spots on Apple Music. It was, of course, all over the pop-music press, but it also was the top item on National Review Online and widely remarked upon throughout the conservative and Evangelical media. Writing at NRO, Andrew T. Walker, a senior fellow in Christian ethics at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, asserted: “West has the anthropology of C. S. Lewis, the economics of Wilhelm Röpke, the cultural mood of Wendell Berry, and the defiance of Francis Schaeffer. In Jesus Is King and in interviews, we see a Kanye West upholding what Russell Kirk referred to as the Permanent Things. . . . His religious conversion could spark a revolution in morals, similar to what the conversion of 19th-century abolitionist William Wilberforce helped foster in England.”
Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A.
You’re my No.1, with the lemonade.
Not exactly Augustine. And it would be too easy to simply poke fun. But the song in question, “Closed on Sunday,” is of some interest. It is a meditation on the Sabbath. (Chick-fil-A, a Christian-owned business, is famously closed on Sundays.) In the song, West advises (hectors, really) the listener to set aside social media and other technological distractions for the day and to turn instead to family and prayer. That is not the usual feel-good, milk-and-water, love-songs-to-Jesus style of pop-music Christianity. The Sabbath is about giving things up as well as enjoying them. Sohrab Ahmari, quondam antagonist of “David Frenchism,” has spoken wistfully about the possibility of reviving the so-called blue laws, which forbade certain kinds of commercial activity on Sundays. Taking the Sabbath seriously would represent a genuinely radical development for American Christianity, an assault on sensitive progressive cultural norms that would no doubt prove as controversial as homeschooling and abstinence advocacy. The rest of the album is similarly direct and uncompromising in its conception of Christian life and witness.
Is the album any good? It is the sort of thing you’ll like, if you like that sort of thing.
In any case, West is not soft-pedaling his Christianity. Walker was not wrong to write that “West’s first Christian album is arguably more Christian than what most contemporary Christian artists could similarly muster,” though it should be appreciated that blunt Christianity and strident Christianity are not necessarily “more Christian” than other expressions of Christian belief. You will not find very much Kanye West–style confessional material in the deeply Christian poetry of T. S. Eliot, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or in The Screwtape Letters, and there are many who enjoy the compositions of J. S. Bach without being even quite aware that they are listening to Christian music. What there is in Jesus Is King and in the prefiguring single “Jesus Walks” is a kind of plainspoken charm. Charm with its limits, inevitably.
The way Kathie Lee needed Regis,
That’s the way I need Jesus.