Jesus is King
This past week one of the most controversial Christian albums dropped. Kanye West, a rapper known almost more for his controversies than his music, has recently became a Christian and released his first Christian album last Saturday. Since then, my Facebook has been filled with people either praising his work, criticizing it heavily, wondering if it will be CCLI compliant so they can use a song on Sunday, the horror of playing his album on Spotify and then it going to his older profanity filled songs, and so on. So last night on my way back from Pensacola I listened to the entire album. These are my thoughts:
First of all, rap is not my preferred genre of music. I was never a Kanye fan to begin with so I can’t compare this album to his previous work, but I was disappointed. From a production side, I was often annoyed with how the songs ended, the mix, song structure, etc. The guy has talent, but it was hard for me to see where he was going musically on a lot of the songs.
But let’s take my bias against rap music out of the equation and focus on the lyrics. Yes, there are some horribly corny lyrics. Probably the worst is from a song called “Closed on Sunday” which says:
Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-Fil-A
You’re my number one, with the lemonade
I wish I was joking. However bad those two lines are, the lines right after are:
Raise our sons, train them in the faith
Through temptations, make sure they’re wide awake
Follow Jesus, listen and obey
No more livin’ for the culture, we nobody’s slave
The two biggest complaints I see are that his lyrics are theologically shallow and that Kanye is just doing this for the money (or in other words he’s not really a Christian but saw an opportunity in the Christian market to make more money). When people talk about the shallow issue, I just have to laugh. No his lyrics aren’t completely accurate or deep, but they are at least on par with the majority of what is on K-Love at the moment and this is coming from a guy who has been a Christian less than a year. Hopefully we hold the long term Christians to the same level of scrutiny, but if we’re being honest we don’t.
On the second issue of if Kanye is really a Christian… How dare we. Besides it probably being a horrible career move into the Christian music industry, what makes any of us think we are in a position to know what his relationship with God is? We rejoice with the person who goes to the altar in our church and gives their life to God, but when a famous person does it we assume the worst. The sad thing is, Kanye knew this would happen. In the song “Hands On” he says:
What have you been hearing from the Christians?
They’ll be the first one to judge me
Make it seem like nobody love me
I’m not tryna lead you to Visas
But if I try to lead you to Jesus
We get called halfway believers
I’m not sure if I’ll ever willingly listen to his album again, like I said, it’s not my preferred music style. I really dislike a lot of what Kanye has done in the past. But this album, this over talked about album, has already brought people to Christ. Maybe instead of tearing each other down, we should rally around new believers, even the ones who haven’t quite figured out all the theology (ok, especially those people), and build them up and show them Christ’s love.