That turn from Jay, on “Jail,” is atrociously written (“Made in the image of God - that’s a selfie”) but is worse for its delivery. These come often from West, but also from those who are unaccustomed to the process: The excellent, aforementioned opening run ends abruptly with one of the worst Jay-Z verses that has ever been released.

At its worst, this means the album is stopped dead by room-clearing vocals. Donda, which was preceded by three live listening events - none of which featured a finished version of the album, if we can call the version we have now “finished” - is marked in many places by haphazard execution that is only occasionally affecting. But for every instance like his 2013 masterpiece, Yeezus, where most of the vocals were recorded at the 11th hour and nearly every guest spot is a revelation, there is an album like 2018’s Y e, so sloppy and unformed as to be insulting. It also has the potential to coax surprising things out of his collaborators. This makes the hand of the author, which is erased, or at least abstracted in Dre’s music, unavoidable in West’s. By contrast, West’s records seem to come together in mad dashes toward self-imposed deadlines, the seams showing and kinks being ironed out even after they’ve hit streaming services. The Compton native works meticulously, in geological time the overwhelming majority of these songs never reach listeners’ ears. But Dre is infamous for his grueling, marathon studio sessions with collaborators, which have increasingly yielded songs that stamp out tics and idiosyncrasies - songs that are technically precise but roboticized to the point of sterility. The voice comes from editing, refinement, reimagination. Dre’s in that the headlining rapper-producer is often not the one who wrote the raps or made the beats, at least in their original form. West’s albums, especially in the latter part of his career, are sort of like Dr. While this argument is almost never persuasive in absolute terms (though one spoken interlude from a guest makes a compelling case), Donda is more considered and musically coherent than anything West has made in the past half-decade, and perhaps longer. Donda, West’s 10th album, argues not that the artist can be redeemed by God or his ancestors, but that his life’s project has always been about growing closer to them: that every trip to Sway or to the TMZ offices has been a step toward heaven, a stripping away of whatever is dishonest or artificial in his life. (That apology tour worked: Dark Fantasy made him a demigod to many critics.) This is not that. He has referred more than once to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, his overstuffed opus from 2010, as a mea culpa for the interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMAs the year before. In the past, West has copped to making records as apologies. It is not lost on him that his public behavior - his meetings with Donald Trump, his comments in tabloid and radio interviews, his divorce - has alienated large swaths of his audience at the same time that it has kept him relevant. West remains one of the world’s most famous musicians, though his music, per se, has not really driven this fame for at least five years. It also baits the listener to step outside of the text itself.

Taken together, this first three-and-a-half minute stretch of Donda is the kind of tonally complex, musically adventurous suite that made West one of the most adored artists of this century. Kanye West’s new album opens with an extended chant of his dead mother’s name, which gives way to an exuberant, drumless track with lyrics about being arrested and taken to jail.

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