Verse to Verse: Kanye West
Verse to Verse walks you through the Biblical verse and imagery referenced over the course of one artist’s career. First up, Kanye West
I guess we’ll start with Jesus Walks. The College Dropout standout and his “first hit single,” it’s no surprise that a song name-dropping Jesus makes some references to scripture. Here’s how Yeezy interpolates Psalm 23:
“I walked through the valley of the Chi where death is”
and here’s how it appears in The Bible:
“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”
The Psalm is probably better known for Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise (and for Michelle Pfeiffer looking cool in its video), but Kanye’s take here is clever and makes mention of the crime rate in Chicago—a popular theme in Ye’s work.
The very next track on Collo Drollo, Never Let Me Down drops an image reminiscent of Matthew 27:24,
see Ye do it:
With Graduation, Kanye continued to reference The Bible on his radio singles, going back to the Book of Matthew. In Stronger, his lines “Bow in the presence of greatness/ ‘Cause right now thou hast forsaken us” are nearly verbatim with that of Matthew 27:46, “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
And with that, the word “hast” was spun through Top 40 rotation for the first and last time.
Can’t Tell Me Nothing’s, “To whom much is given/ much is tested,” is a line adapted from Luke 12:48, “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required”
808s & Heartbreak eschewed Biblical references and rapping altogether. While My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy took an allegorical approach to the good book. So you had songs with titles like Devil In A New Dress and Hell Of A Life that dealt with dichotomies like good and evil or piety and bad religion, but didn’t quote directly from scripture. You can see this back-and-forth at work on Lost In The World:
Whatever religious ambiguities Kanye was working out on Dark Twisted Fantasy, he seems to have figured them out by the time Watch The Throne and Cruel Summer came around. That’d explain lines like, “I made Jesus Walks, so I’m never going to Hell.” This may be because neither Watch The Throne or Cruel Summer were solo projects, but Yeezy’s tone isn’t as dark or twisted; instead, it’s defiant. Don’t you know he made Jesus Walks? Did Moses not part the water with the cane?
Along with that reference to Exodus 14:21, there’s a bunch of mentions to the crucifixion—a subject that isn’t foreign to the man who donned the thorn-crown on the cover of Rolling Stone. Hov and Ye' form like Voltron to paraphrase Luke 24:34 at the tail-end of Why I Love You, Jesus' request while on the cross, “Please Lord (forgive him) for these niggas (not know) what they do.”
The biggest revelation of late was Kanye’s signing Pusha T, who has since dropped tracks titled Exodus 23:1, guested on a track called New God Flow, and named his mixtape Wrath of Caine, while on the G.O.O.D Music imprint. And with lines like “This shit sound like God, don’t it?”, Pusha just might have the biggest God complex in the rap game. But that’s a discussion for a different Verse to Verse.
