The album is already on track to score the biggest debut of 2021, although Drake’s forthcoming album Certified Lover Boy, due out on September 3, might immediately challenge Kanye’s sales title. When it was finally released early in the morning on August 29, Donda smashed first-day streaming records and claimed the second-biggest Spotify album debut in history, racking up 94 million and 60 million streams on Spotify and Apple Music respectively. (The listening parties quickly became a form of elite cultural currency, with fans who attended treating each concert like a bougie Met Gala you can reportedly buy air from the concerts if you have $60,000 or so.) A string of pre-release listening parties saw thousands of listeners flocking to stadiums in Atlanta and Chicago for dramatic previews of the album. The release delays after an initial July 23 drop date helped give Donda one of the most drawn-out and lucrative hype cycles for a release in recent memory. Reportedly in production for the last 18 months, Donda has had a rocky road to release, as delay upon delay befell the album’s production and Kanye wrestled with a high-profile divorce, mental health battles, and clashes with his album collaborators. These aren’t the typical questions you associate with an album release, but Kanye West isn’t a typical artist, and his new 27-track album, Donda (named after Kanye’s late mother Donda West), isn’t a typical album. This time, Drake rapped, “it’s set in stone.So what’s the deal with Donda? Did Kanye West’s label really release it without his permission? Did Kanye really light himself on fire over it? What about the TikTok panic that he inducted the huge audiences at his listening parties into some dark occult ritual? 3 release date late last month with a lo-fi, guerrilla-looking ad that cut in during an ESPN “SportsCenter” broadcast.Īnd on a Trippie Redd track titled “Betrayal,” the rapper indicated that the hubbub surrounding West’s “Donda” would not affect his final release date. As West toured a still-in-progress “Donda,” Drake appeared to stake a claim to a Sept. 1 single (“What’s Next”).Īfter months of only cryptic updates on the album’s status, a collision course with West began to seem inevitable as the summer wound down and the two A-list rappers resurfaced. But the album never came another holdover, the three-song EP “Scary Hours 2,” followed in March and resulted in another No. He promised a studio album that summer, and the would-be lead single, “Laugh Now Cry Later,” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, with a surprise mixtape, “Dark Lane Demo Tapes,” featuring songs that had leaked online. In the spring of 2020, the rapper followed the single “Toosie Slide,” which reached No. He vowed to stop cursing in his music, a promise he upheld on “Donda,” even censoring his guests.ĭrake, meanwhile, released a steady stream of music even as he made himself more scarce. Trump, embarked on an ill-fated run for president and turned toward gospel, releasing a Christian-themed album, “Jesus Is King,” in October 2019. In the years since, the artists’ paths diverged, even as they occasionally butted heads online and on record. The digs, in song and on social media, continued a pattern of petty slights, direct and indirect, between the two that dates back years, with the relationship having seemingly curdled irrevocably around Drake’s musical beef with Pusha-T, a West affiliate, in 2018. “Give that address to your driver, make it your destination/’Stead of just a post out of desperation,” he raps on the track “ 7am on Bridle Path.” Listeners on Friday were quick to notice Drake’s apparent ripostes to West. Drake seemed to respond with multiple photos of himself laughing.) (West also uploaded a screenshot of what appeared to be Drake’s Toronto address before deleting it. I promise you,” and included an image of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker. (The rappers’ record labels share a parent company in Universal Music Group.)Īfter Drake appeared to poke fun at West’s age on a guest verse for a Trippie Redd track last month - Drake is 34 and West a decade older - West posted a text exchange online in which he wrote, “You will never recover. 50 Cent chart face-off of 2007, fans have been eager to compare the two new works, commercially and artistically, in line with the pair’s latest stoking of their own long-simmering rivalry. 13, precluding a direct repeat of the West vs. And although Drake’s first-week sales will not be finalized until Sept. The cover of Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy.”īased on Drake’s streaming dominance - he was the first artist to hit 50 billion streams on Spotify, by at least one count - “Certified Lover Boy” is all but certain to reign as one of the year’s biggest releases.
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