On Friday morning, I looked at my phone to see a text waiting for me. It was from my 17-year-old son who is taking a semester abroad, living with several families in Mexico. He was just finishing his first listen through the new album, JESUS IS KING, just dropped by Kanye West. I hadn’t heard anything about it and clicked on Apple Music to download it.
But before I could listen to it, I got a text from my 20-year-old daughter in college. She had been listening to the album and really wanted me to listen to the second song on the album, “Selah.”
I texted my 23-year-old son in Seattle and asked if he’d listened to it. He just had.
Then I got in the car with my 15-year-old son and we listened to the album on the way to dropping him off for a high school football game. He said all the kids at school were buzzing about the album.
I don’t know that there’s anything I could write about Kanye and his album that hasn’t already been written a thousand times by a thousand better writers. But there’s something important about this moment in culture, in the Church, and in Kanye’s life that make this conversation so important. The simple fact that all four of my kids were listening to and talking about him and the album made it personally relevant.
Kanye articulates biblical Christian faith so well.
This was surprising to me. I was worried when I pressed play on the album. I was afraid of bad theology that went off the rails. But no, his lyrics were more spot-on than almost any worship album I’ve ever listened to. In fact, there was far more depth to them than to almost any worship album I’ve ever listened to.
Is he infallible? Not at all. Would I find things I don’t agree with if I combed through his lyrics? Most likely. But after three listens to it, I’m not only satisfied with what he sings and says, I’m touched.
He deals with addiction, with slavery (both literally and metaphorically), with parent-child relationships, with Christian judgmentalism, with sin, with salvation, with love, with eschatology, and on and on. There is a theological robustness here that takes on issues of piety on one hand and issues of justice on the other in ways that is rare among pietistic evangelicals and justice-seeking progressives.
Kanye understands worship.
The album begins with a call to worship and ends with a future-oriented statement of faith. In between, there is the ebb and flow of prayer and Scripture and sermon, woven together so well. It’s obvious he’s learned from his Sunday Service events how to craft a worship experience.
There’s a lot to the sequence and flow of the album that most worship leaders could learn from. Not only is it theologically robust, but it’s compact and precise.
Kanye is never long-winded on the album. He makes bold and simple statements. None of the songs goes on too long, unlike far too many worship sets I’ve sat through. At roughly 27 minutes, the album moves through its 11 songs, never losing focus on Jesus.
Kanye is the musical genius he’s always been.
While the album draws heavily on gospel choirs and music one would expect in churches, Kanye is still Kanye. He raps and drops beats. He samples. He includes a soaring sax solo. He uses vocal manipulation. He provides a musical experience that is more far-reaching than almost any worship album or worship service I’ve experienced.
Because his focus is on Jesus as King and not on Kanye as King, he doesn’t attempt to dazzle with this album. He keeps it simple, because his focus is simple.
Kanye is as crazy and prophetic as Ezekiel.
I wrote my first post on The Gospel according to Kanye in February 2016, a bit after the Pablo album came out. Back then, he was showing signs of what would lead to 2019’s Sunday Services and the JESUS IS KING album. But he was showing other bizarre signs as you can read in the post. And since then, he’s worn his MAGA hat and ranted on Saturday Night Live.
Kanye is far from perfect. He’s a mess and he acknowledges it. But at the same time, he points out the mess that is you, that is me. Just like the biblical prophet Ezekiel laying down on one side and then the other for more than a year and eating bread cooked with fuel made of human feces (see Ezekiel 3:16-4:17). It’s bizarre.
It takes a twisted personality to do things that so completely unmask our pretensions. We like to think of ourselves as smart, as not needing a savior, as in control. And Kanye, along with the biblical prophets, blows that to pieces.
Like Ezekiel, Kanye engages in performance art. He himself is the message. And every time we point a finger at him, we find the finger pointing back at us. And just like the biblical prophets and their odd behaviors, Kanye has his moments of extreme clarity. The oddities become focused and understood by the moments of clarity, not the other way around. And JESUS IS KING is that clarity.
Kanye is necessary.
This was the most needed album of 2019. It may not be the best, but it was the most needed.
Too many evangelicals got snared by Donald Trump. Too many progressives got snared by Donald Trump. Each for different reasons. But they all bit hard. They all swallowed the poison.
Even though Kanye is a Trump supporter, he ditches the President to focus on the King. It’s something every Christian ought to be doing right now.
My political opinions are unimportant. My opinion about Jesus is vastly important. If Jesus is King, then it’s to him and him alone that I pledge allegiance. He is the filter through whom I see myself and everyone else.
Kanye is a sign.
Kanye isn’t the substance of what is going on in the world. But he is a sign pointing to it. And what’s going on is Jesus.
I’ve always been skeptical of celebrity endorsements of Jesus, because there’s often too much of the celebrity and not enough of Jesus in it. And that may be the case here, too, even though Kanye has tried to make this less about himself than about Jesus.
The past few years have seen rap royalty putting out Jesus-centered music. Chance the Rapper. Kendrick Lamar. Snoop Dogg. We even see Justin Bieber praying and giving mini sermons. Again, I don’t lean on celebrities too much. They’re often just a flash in the pan. But each of them is a sign of what is so missing and so needed in our self-righteous American culture. We need Jesus and they’re pointing at him. They’re imperfect and often quite flawed in how they do it, but they do it still.
And as St. Paul told the Philippians, if Christ is pointed to, then forget the critics, because I’m a happy man (Phil. 1:18).