After disgraced shock rocker Marilyn Manson appeared at Kanye West‘s Chicago Donda listening event on Thursday night (Aug. 26) at Chicago’s Soldier Field, Billboard has confirmed that the singer’s voice will appear on the as-yet-unscheduled album as well.
“Marilyn Manson’s voice is featured on DONDA, and he will continue to conceptually collaborate with Ye on the DONDA project,” a spokesperson for the rocker told Billboard. Newsweek was first to break the news.
At press time, West’s team had not responded to requests for further details of the unexpected collab on the album, whose release date and feature lineup have been moving targets. ‘Ye invited Manson (born Brian Hugh Warner) to the show in the midst of the shock rocker’s current legal issues, which include lawsuits from four women over accusations of rape and sexual, physical and emotional assault, as well as claims from a number of other women regarding alleged inappropriate, threatening and abusive sexual behavior.
Manson has denied all the charges in the lawsuits, and said in a February Instagram post the allegations against him are “horrible distortions of reality,” saying that his “intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual.”
West has hosted three Donda listening events to date, with each one presenting a slightly different version of his 10th album. Previous versions have contained features from Jay Electronica, Griselda, The Weeknd, Fivio Foreign, Young Thug, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, Playboi Carti, Lil Durk, Pop Smoke, Baby Keem, Roddy Ricch, Lil Baby and Jay-Z; at Thursday night’s event it appeared that Jigga’s verse had been replaced by a new one from DaBaby.
The embattled MC (born Jonathan Lyndale Kirk) is currently under intense scrutiny in the wake of his set at July’s Rolling Loud Miami, where he made a series of hateful homophobic and misogynistic comments about HIV/AIDS that cost him a number of festival gigs and drew widespread condemnation.
West — whose recent career has been filled with confounding provocations including his embrace of former president Donald Trump and his own quixotic, ill-fated run for president in 2020 — has seemingly embraced Manson at a time when the rocker’s career is in free-fall due to the abuse allegations.
In addition to the four lawsuits, Manson was erased from an episode of the rebooted Creepshow series, reportedly dropped by his longtime manager Tony Ciulla, and let go by his label and representation at CAA, while facing calls from Sen. Susan Rubio for an FBI and Department of Justice investigation into the allegations made against the singer.
