Word: jesus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...College Dropout was 76 minutes of someone cramming every thought he'd ever had about himself into rhyme. It was immaculately produced, but what made it compelling was the contradictions. The song Jesus Walks mixed spirituality with skepticism and rap with gospel. All Falls Down slammed the "single black female addicted to retail" but concluded with West admitting, "I wanna act ballerific, like it's all terrific/ I got a couple past due bills, I won't get specific/ I got a problem with spending before I get it/ We all self-conscious, I'm just the first to admit...
...women. That's fine if you're in a club, but from 9 a.m. till I went to bed at night, the music had nothing to say to me. So I listened to classic rock." What brought McDaniels back from his diet of John Mellencamp and Bob Seger was Jesus Walks. "When I heard it, I just stopped in my tracks," says McDaniels. "I thought, 'This song is about everything! This feels alive...
...Jesus Walks is one of those miraculous songs that you hear for the first time and immediately look forward to hearing on a semiregular basis for the next 30 or 40 years. It's built on a booming gospel sample from the Arc Choir and one of West's typical contradictions, his admission that he's not particularly religious and his anger that songs with Jesus in the title don't get played on the radio. Che Smith, a friend of West's from Chicago who raps as Rhymefest, gave West the sample, wrote some of the first verse...
...Diamonds from Sierra Leone about his rise to fame: "'Life movin' too fast, I need to slow down/ Girl ain't give me no ass, she need to go down.' All right, that's really crass, right? Really bogus. So what comes next? 'My father been said I need Jesus/ So he took me to church, let the water wash over my Caesar' [haircut]. I go back and forth all the time...
...Many of the young people echoed an appreciation for the clarity and candidness of Benedict's sermons. His explanation Sunday for how the Eucharist was born in the death of Jesus is both plain and poignant. "What is happening? How can Jesus distribute his Body and his Blood? By making the bread into his Body and the wine into his Blood, he anticipates his death, he accepts it in his heart and he transforms it into an action of love. What on the outside is simply brutal violence, from within becomes an act of total self-giving love." Still, however...