2021 has been a beautiful year in terms of hip-hop releases, with the releases of albums such as J-Cole’s The Off-Season, Pi’erre Bourne’s The Life of Pierre 5, Trippie Redd’s Trip at Knight, and the collaborative album between Gunna and Young Thug, Slime Language 2. 

These releases were absolutely outshined by two recent record-breaking releases, though: Kanye West’s Donda and Drake’s Certified Lover Boy (CLB).

The release of these albums has created a split amongst the hip-hop community, where Kanye fans and Drake fans are going neck and neck to see which was the better album. 

Out of both, the better album is easily Kanye West’s Donda.

For starters, Donda has a much more significant meaning than CLB does. Donda is a beautifully produced tribute to Kanye’s late mother, Donda West, that has been anticipated by fans since early 2020. 

On the other hand, Drake’s CLB is yet another reverb-drowned dogpile of the same ballads that might as well be labelled as a lullaby collection for “heartbroken” middle schoolers. 

Cape High School Junior Liam Feahr said, “CLB is just More Life (one of Drake’s previous albums) but with less classics. Yes, Fair Trades and Knife Talk are pretty good, but the features carry the actual artist of the song. I just feel like every Drake album since 2015 is the exact same.” 

Another Cape High junior, Chase Qurollo, said “CLB is just a carbon copy of every pop/rap song with the exception of a couple. CLB is unoriginal and boring.”

These quotes point out CLB’s biggest weakness: the lack of variety with the tracks. With that in mind, Donda doesn’t have this weakness. 

It’s obvious that Donda had a lot of inspiration from the gospel genre, which is one that completely governed Kanye’s last project, Jesus Is King. Despite Kanye having worked with the genre before, he still found a way to make this album stand out from the rest of his discography. 

For example, the track “Jail,” which brought back the legendary duo of Kanye and Jay-Z, had an absolutely powerful and hard-hitting instrumental. In total contrast, there’s also the track “Moon,” featuring Kid Cudi and Don Toliver, which had a very soft and comforting instrumental. Kanye even experimented with a drill type beat in the track “Off the Grid” featuring Playboi Carti and Fivio Foreign. 

As great as Donda was, and definitely better than CLB was, it still had its share of issues.

One big issue was the entire song “Tell the Vision,” featuring Pop Smoke. This song is clear evidence of Universal releasing the album prematurely, which Kanye spoke about on an Instagram post. The song was just a poorly mixed version of a previous posthumous Pop Smoke release.

This song definitely would’ve been a hit like the others on the album had the album been released on Kanye’s terms.

Cape High junior Logan McBride gave his criticism in an interview: “I do have some criticism, I wish I heard more of Kanye. Ye, being one of the greatest to do it, usually delivers with a massive punch, but it was sort of a love tap this time around. He still did well, and way better than Drake.”

It’s still noteworthy how Donda was unfinished and better than CLB, which was finished and released 9 months past its initial announced release date.

Upon asking Cape High student Felix Gurrachaga for his criticism for CLB, he responded with “My criticism for Certified Boy Lover is that Drake needs to start stealing lyrics again because his new ones were dookie.”

This response was likely influenced by Drake’s past stealing of lyrics and flows from artists such as XXXTentacion, The Weeknd, and DJ Khaled.

Logan McBride also gave his criticism for CLB, in which he said “The album is a comfort zone album for Drake, he rarely steps out of it in ways that Kanye does with experimenting with different styles of music. Drake continues to stick to what he does and the album falters after the intro track for me.”

His criticisms summarize the thoughts of a good number of the unfortunate individuals who subjected themselves to the pain of sitting through Drake’s album. 

While it’s understandable for people to have their preferences, quality-wise, Donda definitely took the cake for the best album out of it and Certified Lover Boy.