The song Kanye West regrets making: “I was lost”
Kanye West once revealed a big career regret after announcing he wouldn’t make secular music again. “Don’t call me secular ’cause secular is trying to say that I’ll do anything for anyone other than Christ,” he said at one of his Sunday Services. “That’s where they got it messed up. That’s where they got it twisted.”
Although he’s now making secular music again, Ye went down a different route for his 2019 album Jesus Is King, which carried a Christian theme and was described as “an expression of the gospel.” During an interview with Big Boy in 2019, Kanye cited his Lil Pump collaboration ‘I Love It‘ as a turning point for his religious awakening.
“As you might’ve heard, there was times when I said, ‘I don’t know if God want me to rap,” he said. “I got to a point where I was always letting that Playboy magazine that I found when I was five years old have an effect on my music. It couldn’t never be 100 percent everything it could be because I had to add that in always. And it got to the point where literally, I went from ‘Jesus Walks’ to ‘You’re such a fucking hoe, I love it.’ Oh, I bet you the devil was happy on that day.”
Released in September 2018, ‘I Love It’ premiered at the 2019 Pornhub Awards and peaked at number six on the Hot 100 and number three in the UK Singles Chart. Kanye explained why he recorded the song and how it was proof that he was making “the devil’s music.”
“When that record went straight to number quick, this exactly what we want,” he said. “This fit right in with everything we got that deal with opioids. This fit right in with everything we got that promotes killings so we can have more slaves and mass incarceration. [I made it] because I was [asleep]. Because I was drowned. Because I was lost.”
‘I Love It’ finds West and Pump rapping about their sexual preferences, with the music video starring the pair in rectangular body suits. The visual generated 76 million views in its first week, surpassing Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’ as the biggest opening week on YouTube for a hip-hop video.
Kanye’s pastor, Adam Tyson, once claimed that the rapper almost quit hip-hop altogether until he encouraged him to keep rapping with different content.
“One time, he told me that he wasn’t going to rap,” he told Apologia Studios. “I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘That’s the devil’s music.’ I said, ‘Hey, man. Rap is a genre. You can rap for God.’ I think he was already thinking about it a little bit, but I definitely said, ‘Hey bro, I think you need to use your talents that God’s given you and use that platform for God.’”
He added, “He just wants to make sure that every song points people to the gospel of Jesus Christ. From what I can tell, from listening to it multiple times, I’m really encouraged by it, especially for the first album of a new convert.”