The 2020s File Feature
24
24: Kanye West's Tribute to DMX and the Donda Album's Posthumous Resonance "24" was released as part of Kanye West's tenth studio album Donda , which arrived…
01 The Story
24: Kanye West's Tribute to DMX and the Donda Album's Posthumous Resonance
"24" was released as part of Kanye West's tenth studio album Donda, which arrived on August 29, 2021, after a protracted and often chaotic rollout that included multiple listening events, shifting release dates, and public speculation about the album's final form. The song's title refers to the 24 hours in a day, but its primary emotional referent is the memory of the late rapper DMX, who passed away on April 9, 2021, and to whom the track was dedicated. The song arrived at a moment of profound grief in the hip-hop community, and its gospel-influenced structure gave that grief a formal container.
The production on "24" was credited to Kanye West along with collaborators who had worked closely with him through the Donda sessions. The track's architecture was built around a looped and pitched sample of the gospel recording "Faithful" by Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, creating a choral atmosphere that situated the song within Kanye's longstanding engagement with gospel music, a thread that had run through his work since The College Dropout in 2004 and had become the dominant register of his 2019 project Jesus Is King, which won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album.
Donda debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, accumulating the equivalent of 309,000 album units in its first week, with the vast majority of those units derived from streaming activity. The album was one of the most commercially anticipated releases of 2021, and its chaotic rollout, which included three public listening events held at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, had generated enormous press coverage and public discussion in the months preceding its release. By the time the album was actually available for purchase and streaming, it had accumulated months of anticipatory attention that translated into massive first-week numbers.
"24" was not released as a standalone single but functioned as a significant moment within the album's larger arc, which was organized around the memory of Kanye's late mother, Donda West, who passed away in 2007 following complications from cosmetic surgery. The album's emotional scope was enormous, touching on faith, grief, marriage, legacy, and mortality, and "24" crystallized several of those themes through its gospel framework and its explicit invocation of DMX.
The song entered the Billboard Hot 100 as part of the mass chart impact that Donda's release generated, with multiple tracks from the album appearing simultaneously on the chart upon release. This phenomenon, in which album tracks mass-chart upon the release of a major project, had become a regular feature of the streaming era, and Kanye's release strategy, which included long periods of album-only streaming exclusivity, was calibrated to maximize this effect.
DMX's own legacy, invoked by the song's dedication and emotional register, was deeply rooted in gospel-inflected rap. His albums frequently included prayer interludes and spiritual reckonings alongside his more aggressive material, and his faith was a genuine and well-documented aspect of his public identity. The connection between DMX's spiritual life and the gospel framework of "24" was therefore not incidental but deeply intentional, a tribute that spoke to the shared tradition both artists had drawn from across their careers.
Critical reception to Donda was mixed, with many reviewers acknowledging the album's ambition and its moments of genuine beauty while noting that its length, at over two hours, made it difficult to assess as a unified work. "24" was frequently cited among the album's highlights, praised for its emotional clarity and the sincerity of its gospel architecture in a project that sometimes felt more monumental than focused.
Within the broader context of Kanye's career in 2021, Donda arrived during a period of personal and professional turbulence that included his divorce from Kim Kardashian and ongoing discussions about his mental health and public behavior. The album's devotional quality, its insistence on framing personal pain within a framework of faith and divine purpose, reflected the religious commitment that had become increasingly central to his public identity in the years following his 2019 Sunday Service project and Jesus Is King.
02 Song Meaning
Every Hour Consecrated: The Spiritual Reckoning in Kanye West's "24"
"24" is built around a single governing conviction: that each hour of existence carries weight that demands to be taken seriously, not as a self-help proposition but as a theological one. The song situates human time within a divine framework, in which every hour is an opportunity for worship, for gratitude, and for alignment with something larger than personal ambition. Kanye West draws on his well-documented conversion to Christian faith, expressed most fully through his 2019 Sunday Service concerts and the Jesus Is King album, to frame this meditation on time and mortality within a specifically gospel register.
The dedication to DMX, who died in April 2021 after a heart attack, adds a layer of elegiac intensity to the song that transforms its meditation on time from abstract to painfully concrete. DMX's death was a shock to the hip-hop community, felt deeply by artists and fans who had grown up with his music and who recognized in his spiritual struggles and faith commitments a life lived at an extreme register. For Kanye to dedicate a gospel song to DMX was to acknowledge a kinship between their approaches to faith, both artists whose religious belief was genuine, complicated, and publicly performed in ways that invited both reverence and skepticism.
The choral sample that anchors the production gives the song an architectural quality, as if the track is a space designed for communal mourning and communal gratitude simultaneously. Gospel music has always served this dual function within Black American religious tradition, containing grief within a framework of hope and structuring personal pain within the larger narrative of divine purpose. "24" inhabits this tradition consciously, placing individual loss within the context of eternal continuity, the kind of consolation that gospel has offered for generations to people confronting death.
The track also participates in the larger emotional project of Donda, which was organized around the memory of Kanye's mother and the experience of loss that her death in 2007 inaugurated in his creative and personal life. The album frames grief as a spiritual condition rather than a psychological one, something to be addressed through faith and ritual rather than through therapy or conventional emotional processing. "24" fits within this framework by insisting that time itself, the basic medium in which grief is experienced, is sacred rather than merely sequential.
There is also a quality of confession in the emotional register of the song. The speaker acknowledges human inadequacy in the face of divine expectation, the gap between what each hour could be and what it often is. This kind of spiritual reckoning has been a constant in gospel and in gospel-influenced pop, from the old spirituals through contemporary Christian music, and Kanye's engagement with it is clearly sincere even when the execution is sometimes more gestural than fully worked out. The song's commitment to its emotional premise, grief, gratitude, and the consecration of time, is genuine and that sincerity is what gives it its particular power within the crowded and sometimes overwhelming context of Donda.
For listeners who encountered the song as a tribute to DMX specifically, "24" offered something that conventional rap tributes rarely manage: a formal structure equal to the weight of the loss being acknowledged. By framing the tribute within gospel rather than within the conventions of hip-hop eulogy, Kanye honored DMX's own spiritual life and his own tradition of faith-inflected music, creating an elegy that felt commensurate with both the man and the legacy.
→ More from Kanye West
View all Kanye West hits →
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging