Donda's my least favourite solo Ye LP

I have always been bothered by people claiming Donda to be "perfect" or even their "favorite Ye album". Sure, it's good and I will never forget that rollout, but I have rarely gotten the feeling of listening to that album again since.

I can understand it with projects like MBDTF or Yeezus, even though I myself am also not as huge a fan of them as many others, but the sudden Donda glazing as of recently has been weirding me out and now I know why.

I recently decided to relisten to his solo discography and rank it one more time, that I came to a kind of shocking conclusion: Donda was at the bottom. Yes, it was ranked even lower than JESUS IS KING for me.

I think I can break it down into two main factors: Bloat and minimalism. The minimalism by itself is not a problem (I enjoy albums like ye and JIK which are also minimalist) but when combined with the sheer length and ammount of tracks, it then becomes a big problem.

The problem is not even that it should be cut down. I have tried to make my own Donda tracklist, and it had a pretty similar ammount of tracks and runtime. The problem is the versions and tracks that didn't make the standard cut. The fact that a song as emotionally potent as Never Abandon Your Family was left for the deluxe meanwhile something like Ok Ok was kept on the standard edition honestly kind of baffles me to this day.

This album also definitely should have taken a more maximalist scale if it was going to be of such a length. Tracks like Praise God and 24 just feel too empty, and their original versions just sound way more lively and energetic. Also he totally could've gone all in with the features on Off The Grid, putting Pusha T, Baby Keem, and whatever other verses ended up being scrapped.

One other small little pet peeve that I rarely see people talk about is how the "Pt 2"s are included in the main tracklist. No Child Left Behind is a perfect closer, but they instead put some okay remixes in the backend instead of leaving them for the deluxe. The album still has some highlights, but as it stands, it's a 6.8/10 imo.