Kanye West has always spoken through his guest verses, whether it was the Chicago dues-paying of College Dropout‘s features, Pusha T’s thesis statement on “Runaway,” or the clout-flexing Malice verse on Jesus Is King. But few verses have ever spoken louder than the benediction delivered by Jay-Z at the close of West’s new album Donda, which he premiered at a live listening event in Atlanta’s Mercedes Benz Stadium last night (although at press time, the album is still nowhere to be found on streaming services). Apparently recorded at 4 p.m. yesterday, the brief verse, well, sorta sounds like it was recorded at 4 p.m. yesterday. While Kanye does his best Phil Collins, Hov raps in broad strokes, taking a few bars to play to the album’s dark-night-of-the-soul themes of redemption and exile, before pricking the ears of exhausted news writers internet-wide:
“Donda, I’m with your baby when I touch back road
Told’em stop all of that red cap, we goin’ home
Not me with all of these sins, casting stones
This might be the return of The Throne”
He spends the rest of the verse reiterating the duo’s recoupling, folding in a few references to songs throughout Kanye’s catalog. West previously teased a Throne reunion back in 2018, but that was filed by most listeners alongside the Drake collaborative LP in the encyclopedia of abandoned Kanye projects. Coming from Jay, and in this setting, though, it felt different. At the Donda premiere event, Kanye stood stock-still at the center of his endless pale stage, fist up in the sky, knowing that if any verse could solidify the album’s redemption narrative it was this one: his big brother, (BIG’s brother) putting an arm around him after years of beef. (In that way, the verse feels similar to Jay’s appearance on the “Power” remix—the one where he says “In search of the truth even if it goes through Taylor Swift”. It’s less about bars and wordplay, more a show of public support during a tough time.)
It was twenty years ago this fall when Kanye first emerged with a quartet of productions on Jay-Z’s instant-classic Blueprint. The soulfulness of Ye’s beats on that LP helped inspire what was then Jay’s most introspective album, and the two have propelled each other creatively since. Ye’s production has popped up on pretty much every Jay album this millennium, while Jay regularly puts soul-bearing verses to wax for Kanye records, like his chest-thumping “Love / I don’t get enough of it” verse on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. In 2008, Kanye ended Graduation with a full-track ode to Jay. (West’s fealty extends to the whole family: It was, you will recall, in Beyoncé’s name that Kanye interrupted Taylor Swift in 2009.) By the time the two recorded a collaborative LP in 2011 , they had a decade of creative production behind them.
That all seemed to change in fall 2016, as Kanye aired grievances against Jay during the abortive Saint Pablo tour, criticizing Hov’s response to Kim Kardashian’s robbery: “You wanna know how I’m feeling? Come by the house. Bring the kids by the house, like we’re brothers. Let’s sit down.” At a later show, West got even more pointed: “Jay-Z—call me, bruh … Jay-Z, I know you got killers. Please don’t send them at my head.” It was on one of these runs, shortly before the tour was halted due to Kanye’s hospitalization for exhaustion, that the emcee first declared his support for Donald Trump.
A few months after the Saint Pablo monologues, Jay released 4:44, which wasted no time addressing their falling out in the album intro, and featured more pointed references throughout. In an interview with Rap Radar to promote the album, Jay assured he and Kanye just needed to have a real conversation to straighten their family business out. But the two continued to speak to each other through interviews and bars instead. Kanye claimed that the rift began when Jay and Beyoncé skipped his 2014 wedding—cut to Jay-Z rapping, on a song with Beyoncé, that he “ain’t going to nobody’s nothin if me and my wife beefin,” acknowledging that Kanye and Kim’s wedding came during the fallout of their infamous elevator video.
The two have made a few nods toward each other in recent years: Jay wagged a finger at media and fans pitting them against each other (then uncharacteristically went out of his way on Twitter to clarify that his bar was not a diss) and has continued to refer to Kanye as his “little brother.” Kanye, for his part, posted an Instagram of the Carters captioned “famleeeeee” and they all appeared to reunite for the first time, publicly at least, at Diddy’s 50th birthday party in 2019.
But all that history is why Jay’s slight verse carries so much weight after Kanye’s (let’s say) volatile back half of the ’10s. Donda‘s a heavy tenth LP, in that it’s only meaningful to the listener in relation to how much Kanye’s previous nine LPs meant something to them. The rough-hewn collage of collaborators reflects an artist who, at least on record, is dropping the ugly rhetoric and didactic sermonizing of recent years to ruminate once again on his titanic strengths — and weaknesses. Nobody is better equipped to speak to those on record than Jay-Z.
Just, uh, do not expect Watch The Throne 2 anytime soon. Kanye operates according to his own timeline.