Since the excellent Yeezus, the albums have come out messy and bloated, like 2016's The Life Of Pablo, or slight and half-finished, like ye and Jesus Is King. He works in big bursts of creativity, makes calls to Rick Rubin at the eleventh hour, has fans worried he's not letting Mike Dean sleep. He scraps whole albums and then churns out new ones in a couple weeks. He seems to draft songs around shifting album release dates instead of fully-realized artistic visions. The issue with his recent music is that of late, Kanye's process has stymied his biggest ideas. Price of admission for listening to the record: nearly two hours of your time. And then, maybe, you gave his new album a spin. You saw Dababy and Marilyn Manson, fresh off homophobic comments and abuse allegations, respectively, emerge from a recreation of Kanye's childhood home. If you tuned in to the livestreams, you heard scratch vocal takes, you heard verses added and dropped, mixes fine-tuned, tracks moved around the sequencing - Did he really replace Kid Cudi with Globglogabgalab? You saw Kanye West ascend like an angel, light himself on fire, do pushups, dance in a spiky suit. Three stadium listening parties – two at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, one at Soldier Field – brought millions of viewers into his process. As with his last several records, his hulking new album arrived in fits and starts, like a lawnmower revving up for three weeks. While recording Donda, Kanye West paid $1 million per day to live in the belly of Mercedes Benz Stadium, in a stuffy room that resembled a jail cell. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Universal Music Kanye West is seen at a Donda listening event at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Jin Atlanta, Georgia.
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