West detailed the first decade of their saga together on his song “Big Brother,” in which he reckoned with trying to step out from Jay-Z’s shadow. The pop-rap star Roddy Ricch-who had a minor spat with West when Ricch criticized West for urinating on West’s Grammy last year-croons about that awards show, while Conway the Machine and Westside Gunn, two members of the cult favorite Buffalo rap group Griselda, contribute classicist street talk.īut perhaps the most notable feature is Jay-Z, the rap legend with whom West has had a tumultuous two decade-plus relationship. Playboi Carti delivers his signature Atlanta absurdism Fivio Foreign and the late Pop Smoke amp up the project’s energy with Brooklyn drill. The album also bridges generational, regional and stylistic divides, with West embracing some of rap’s brightest present and future stars from across the country. Another interlude consists solely of a female voice repeating the word “Donda” dozens of times. In one interlude, he wields her voice as a sample–not unlike his use of Afromerica in his 2010 film “Runaway”–while agonizing in autotune about losing his own family, Kim Kardashian-West and their children.
“Mama, you was the life of the party… When you lost your life, it took the life out the party,” he raps on one song. Not just from the wombs of our mothers and the seeds of our fathers, but from a long line of generations who came before us.” Donda’s presence weighs heavily throughout the album. In 2014, West released one of his most wrenching songs, “Only One,” from his mother’s perspective in heaven.Īnd Thursday evening’s version of Donda kicked off with audio of one of her speeches, in which she joked about being her “son’s mother” and stressed the importance of their ancestors: “As one writer said, we came from somewhere.
But two years later, she died from complications related to plastic surgery, sending West into a tailspin he said he blamed himself for her death. Her voice is included on his debut album The College Dropout he dedicated a whole Oprah performance to her in 2005, singing “Hey Mama” as she sat beaming in the front row. Kanye West has never been shy about being a mama’s boy. The album heavily features his mother, Donda West