…Or… if you want to watch, or already did—if you are into that sort of thing—let’s compare notes. The production was fascinating in several ways— especially if you care about the politics of religion in US popular music, or are the sort of person who liked the Broadway-meets-hip-hop extravaganza of Hamilton! But of course fascinating is not the same as exemplary.
Perhaps you are curious about a “prestige" event to discuss with friends who listen to NPR—since it unfolded at Lincoln Center with reviews in the New York Times. And then, of course, according to Kanye he is among the top “genius” artists in all of history—which is absurd, but let’s grant that hip-hop is among the most influential music forms of the past century, and Kanye has been one of its top innovators.
Maybe you even care about Christian Contemporary Music-- here again this might not include liking it-- and wonder if Kanye will be a next step forward for that market niche—a “new Kirk Franklin” to spark up the sound for a new generation.
Perhaps more likely, you are among the group trying to “cancel” Kanye, or at least radically undercut his cultural capital compared to other artists. This is largely the place I live, although I dislike cancel culture. But since I study religion and hip-hop, I need to keep up even if the day's task is hate-listening. Most of my Kanye listening for the past few years has been in that category—for all his past importance and occasional ongoing flashes of brilliance, he has long become notably overrated, with little of interest to say. Lately he's been transitioning toward saying absurdly retrograde things about both Trump and the prosperity gospel.
Are You in Kanye’s Target Demographic?
In any case, let’s see whether you fall in the target demographic for his new “opera” called “Mary." Do you like standard white-bread Christmas pageants—the type that appear in A Charlie Brown Christmas or take place a week before Christmas with kids dressed up in bathrobes as Mary, Joseph, and angels (maybe spiced up with live sheep in downscale churches or a laser light show and camels in megachurches.) Do you like sentimental themes like “Baby Jesus wants you to be nice, not naughty” or triumphal themes like “Baby Jesus will later die for your sins, so all the world must convert to Christianity?”
Would you like this even better with top shelf musicians, cool headpieces that look like halos, ponderous yet not-entirely-boring dancing featuring a lot of walking around in circles, plus a first-class theatrical set with an earth-toned color palette? Would you like new choral arrangements of “O Holy Night” and “Little Drummer Boy” accompanied by an orchestra? Most cities mount at least one such pageant each year with quality choirs, choreography, and musical arrangements. Now Kanye has entered this space.
The main thing “Mary” adds to all this, beyond his other baggage, is an all-black cast.
The Racial Politics of Christmas
This surely holds interest. Further, I note that I have attended many Christmas concerts that lean far less into—or simply leave out—the bloody and political parts of the story about King Herod killing the children. Kanye stages those parts with powerful music and choreography. But by the same token, many pageants lean more into the theme of “no room at the inn” for refugees and homeless people, and into arguably most central theme in the Biblical text that is being dramatized—the hope for “peace on earth” in a context of war and empire. Both of these themes are depoliticized afterthoughts in “Mary.”
Nevertheless, Kanye does broach some of these politically resonant parts, especially regarding Herod. He does so as a prominent artist who has been outspoken about racism and religion—most famously early in his career in “Jesus Walks” which started him off with a sort of open road to the future, one road not taken toward black theology and the road he chose toward prosperity preaching. That’s plenty to make “Mary” more interesting than most pageants. There are still a few embedded resonances with black theology hinted at here, however overshadowed and underdeveloped. Let’s not discount how noticing this part of the Christmas story might be a step forward for some fraction of Kanye’s new Christian listeners.
Still, on balance Kanye largely leaned away from these themes, and certainly did not lean into them consistently. There was little to direct our attention away from his chosen version of religion—the “hard-working-genuises-can-pull-themselves-up-by-their-bootstraps-and-become-billionaires” theology of Joel Osteen. Praise Jesus for blessing rich people with riches! Let’s have lots of nice Christmas gifts to mark the occasion! Since baby Jesus will later die for our sins and save the world, bow to his power (and/or the power of his Republican spokespeople?) Perhaps that was not Kanye’s intended message—but in any case it was the dominant one I heard.
I don’t like this any better with a black cast than a white one.
Notwithstanding its triumphalism and its anti-oppression resonances in the Herod sections, on balance this show is more de-politicized than most Christmas pageants I’ve seen. Its vague political sentiments place it somewhere in the ballpark of Charlie Brown Christmas, or slightly further right. Of course this puts it miles further right from a church that made news by outfitting its nativity scene with Mary, Jesus, and the baby as refugees in cages.
Readers might note—since our mileage may vary—that if you were a fan of Hamilton, you might appreciate “Mary” more than I did. The all-black cast of Hamilton and its foray into hip-hop Broadway made it necessary for me to pay attention to that project, but rarely sufficient to move me beyond hate-listening. Its sounds did not grab me and I wanted a sharper political critique. Of course I prefer Obama to Trump, but the Hamilton hype struck me as complacent about Obama’s defanged multiculturalism. Since Kanye is staking out a stance far to Hamilton’s political right, this is not a formula to win me over.
Still, if you liked heroic US founding fathers as black, rapping passably well, perhaps you would like the shepherds and wise men as black, too, with their pretty good choir.
The Sound of “Mary” and Kanye’s Pose of Sincerity
I agree with my friend Ashon Crawley’s that something essential is missing in the sound of Kanye’s new gospel choir—despite their fully-competent chops and the power they sometimes can generate in their overly-rehearsed way. I will link to Ashon instead of trying to summarize his analysis.
Here I simply add note Kanye and his collaborators strain harder in “Mary” —as compared to their gospel performances—to use a range of sounds including standard classical and/or traditional Christmas styles. The gospel voicings come and go. Hip-hop parts are understated—there are a few riffs from Kanye hits like “Power” and “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” reworked in a stuffier mode, and there is a cool gesture toward FKA Twig’s Magdalene record that may be trying to signal some undercooked feminist resonances. However, much of the performance is straight-ahead choral performance in a classical style. This blend is not uninteresting to consider, but not compelling either, at least to me. Think going downtown to the Episcopal Cathedral to hear the choir on Christmas Eve—which is fine if you like it, and of course Kanye has every right to do it. Still if you don’t like that, you may not like his version either.
Crawley comments on Kanye’s amateurish voice in his new band’s set-up—how he is highly informal and undisciplined compared with the slick choir, and thus paradoxically comes off as ostentatiously self-effacing. This seems to be a gambit for drawing fans into his strategy of projecting sincerity, although still clearly in the service of his celebrity brand.
In the “Mary” operetta, this gambit does not succeed at all as an aesthetic—Kanye reads from the Bible throughout, but only with a level of skill and gravitas that I might expect from a high school student reading in a local church without rehearsing
Kanye Meets Joel Osteen Meets Cartman from South Park
Speaking of not loving music in white establishment churches, I watched Kanye’s concert at Joel Osteen’s megachurch—the one that used to be the Houston Rockets’ basketball arena. If that piques your curiosity you should really thank me for doing that so you didn’t have to!
This performance was markedly more embarrassing than “Mary.” True, much was competent gospel, albeit with the slick hollowness already noted. But have you seen the episode of South Park in which Cartman becomes a Christian rocker and reworks pop tunes like “I love you, baby” into “I love you, Jesus”? I can say, in all seriousness, that Kanye’s new material lives all the way down to the level that South Park presented as savage satire. One example that I much regret having heard (since it is an earworm) is his reworking of Beyonce’s sex song “Say My Name” into “Call His Name.” If you like positive thinking about half-loaves, we can commend Kanye for upping his game for “Mary.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
I try to give Kanye some reasonable benefit of doubt for working in his unfiltered way—I have long thought that we have to take his good with his bad, and that the genius that has often shone through his best music is hard-wired into the same package that gives us “problematic Kanye.”
Still, I feel that his recent embrace of the prosperity gospel is one of his most disturbing moves to date—although the “greed is good and I’ve got mine, Jack” philosophy was not any more satisfying to me in its earlier atheistic forms than in its newly pious ones.
As I finished writing today, I gave a listen to Kanye’s new Jesus Is Born record. It has little to do with themes of “Mary,” and several of the arrangements were in the Osteen show. For example, here’s another earworm (you were warned!) that Cartman could have used. Still, Kanye the world-class beat maker still has a hand in this, and sometimes that cuts through the schlock. For example, listen to how this piece builds near its end; it is Kanye putting his best foot forward with his arranging chops on display. Sadly the overt theology is the same as I complained about before, but the music may have a surplus worth noticing. If Kanye could get back on his meds and achieve this result more often, while reintegrating some of his earlier themes of “Jesus Walking” on an anti-materialistic and antiracist path, he may yet come up with gospel music worth hearing.
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