On the surface, Kanye West’s new song “Wash Us in the Blood”  does not appear to be his best work. Its chaotic beat, sleek production, and auto-tuned background vocals from Travis Scott recall the glory days of West’s 2013 masterpiece Yeezus, but instead of expressing the rapper’s deeply alienated personal life, it acts as a sort of prescriptive political statement on south side Chicago violence. “Wash us in the blood / Whole life bein’ thugs,” West’s chorus goes. “No choice, sellin’ drugs / Southside, what it does?” The chorus is good, but West seems to waste his actual bars going on about reactions to his TMZ rants and social media backfires of yesteryear: ”They don’t want me to be Kanye/ They don’t want Kanye to be Kanye,” he raps. It feels like we’ve heard this before. But with the refrain, “Holy Spirit, come down,” a call for God to intervene in the brutal lives of Chicago citizens, West’s song becomes particular to his new musical paradigm and comes to make sense as a follow-up to the Christian turn of 2019’s Jesus Is King. With this context in mind, the song takes on a deeper and more profound meaning. 

What’s true in West’s reading of the violence in Chicago is his implicit recognition that activism, the call for social reform, remains circumscribed by the capitalist system of social domination. The ultimate thesis of “Wash Us in the Blood” is that real change requires divine intervention. West’’s appeal to religion points to the need for something beyond activism, a broader emancipation from the capitalist institutions and modes of social relation that exist today; the “radical” aspect of his assessment of what needs to happen — a deus ex machina that will “wash us in the blood” of Christ — is his recognition of the poverty of protest politics to effect meaningful and lasting transformation. Whereas in Jesus is King, West found a musical way forward by abandoning his “sinful” life and doubling down on Christianity, he strives for a revolutionary solution in “Wash Us in the Blood.” 

This single is intended to be part of an upcoming album called God’s Country. If that album’s potential title and this song’s truth content are any indication, we might expect music that further points toward the impossibility of activism and the Democratic Party (and the Republican Party as well, for the record) to achieve the social changes they claim to desire. Such an album would arrive much to the chagrin of Pitchfork, who disliked West’s new music, saying that, “the already overloaded song becomes parodic; they surely can’t be proposing that the prayers of two musicians would provide balm in this time of uprising?” But should music’s goal be to provide balm? It wasn’t in West’s widely-acknowledged Obama-era masterwork My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which highlighted the failures and the despair of an epoch that many now look back on as a golden age, and it certainly wasn’t in Yeezus or The Life of Pablo, which gave an intimate, dissonant look at the artist’s turbulent bourgeois experience. If West’s works are ever “soothing,” it’s precisely because they do often succeed in revealing something true about the world, something we can relate to as listeners. If critics feel that “Wash Us in the Blood” fails to hit the mark, then, it must be for a different reason. //