The reason why Kanye West fired his engineer: “Go find God”
Production on Kanye West’s tenth album, Donda, named after his late mother, was a difficult experience for lots of people.
Ye held certain expectations of his contributors, and if they weren’t met, he could be unforgiving, which one of the sound engineers who’d been recruited to work on the project found out the hard way.
After the album was released towards the end of August 2021, streamer DJ Akademiks posted some screenshots online that purported to expose Kanye’s texts to this engineer. They make for uncomfortable reading, with Kanye beginning their exchange by texting this person, “Good morning. Let’s work” at 09:34. However, after two hours had passed without a response from the concerned man, that was quite enough for the rapper, who simply texted him, “You’re fired. Go home”.
Naturally, the alarm bells had rung, and the engineer soon got back to him, deeply apologetic. “I’m really sorry,” he insisted, “I have no excuse. I set an alarm for 7:30 am. And for whatever reason, my phone wasn’t alerting me. I woke up at 11:08 to missed calls and got dressed as fast as I could. Lou was already on his way to get boogz, and they just got here. I didn’t call back right away cause I was in panic trying to find a ride. I know this is unacceptable. I’m sorry.”
Regardless of his detailed and sincere justification, Kanye wasn’t to be swayed by what he considered the guy’s excuses, retorting in response, “Stop texting. Go find God”.
To be fair, of all the genuinely awful things Kanye or rather Ye has done in recent years, this by far is the calmest and most reasonable he’s been. It’s certainly a harsh response, but it does point towards an artist who expects his standards to be respected by those he works with. It’s tough, but the engineer did mess up, even if it was just an accident. Still, he wasn’t the only one to feel the heat of working on Donda, whereby someone as seasoned as producer Mike Dean also struggled at times.
“It was interesting,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “It was gruelling, lots of hours, lots of changes. It came out great though”.
The roster of those who found themselves caught up in the madness is a long one, including a range of artist collaborators, for varied reasons. KayCyy, Big Sean, and Ty Dolla $ign all reportedly contributed to the song ‘Hurricane’, but none of them ultimately made the cut on the finished track. A verse by Chris Brown was dropped from the song ‘New Again’, while Soulja Boy’s original verse for the track ‘Remote Control’ was discarded in place of one recorded by Young Thug.
André 3000 recorded a verse for a song called ‘Life of the Party’, but in that same track, Kanye dissed Drake without telling him, and he was naturally angry about it. The song was only officially released on a deluxe version of the album after Kanye replaced the diss with something else. Even American multi-instrumentalist Todd Rundgren has spoken out about the tough time he had working with Kanye on the album.
The point is, this was not an easy project to work on, and Kanye, regardless of the high esteem in which he holds his work ethic, sometimes tended to be unfair and a hard taskmaster.