Music

Kanye Is Building A Replica Of His Childhood Home Inside A Stadium For His ‘Donda’ Launch

Kanye's gonna Kanye.

by Joseph Earp  25 August 2021
Kanye West rebuilds childhood home in stadium

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Donda, the new record by Kanye West, is so steeped in nostalgia as to feel like an auditory photo album, a series of recollections framed around the rapper’s late mother. So the news that West is re-building his childhood home for the next unveiling of the album makes a lot of sense.

I mean, it makes sense in a Kanye sort of way. It’s still a wild and ambitious undertaking, an example of Kanye’s maximalist mindset. The man has never done anything by halves, after all, and making his look back at his own past and upbringing literal is a kind of epic undertaking you can only mount if you’re one of the biggest popstars in the world.

As noted on Twitter by Pigeons and Planes, Donda purchased the home in the 1980s, and sold it in 2004. In 2020, Kanye bought it back, for something in the vicinity of USD$225,000.

The photographs of the construction of the house are wonderful in themselves, testament to the ambition that defines everything that the rapper does.

Of course, there’s some irony in the fact that the rapper is building a home inside the stadium, given that he’s been literally living there since the last Donda livestream event, setting up shop in the locale while putting the finishing touches on the album.

As cineastes might note, there’s a lot of Synecdoche, New York about this whole set-up. That film, written and directed by Being John Malkovich‘s Charlie Kaufman, is all about a playwright (played with uncanny grace by Philip Seymour Hoffman) who constructs a miniature city inside a magically expanded New York vacant lot, mounting a massive production designed to emulate the rhythms of real life.

And it’s not a coincidence that Kanye is going full Kaufman, either — as user @__seab has pointed out on Twitter, Kanye is an on-the-record fan of Synecdoche, New York.

Surprises on surprises. That’s the Kanye way.