There’s a gaping hole at the center of DJ Khaled’s 13th studio album—one that no amount of high-profile guest artists, expensive beats, or forced adlibs-turned-catchphrases could ever hope to fill. God Did lacks an organized artistic vision, or at least a sense of purpose beyond engaging in purely attention-grabbing theatrics.
Khaled’s star-studded collaborations here come off as either cloyingly artificial—Future and SZA add little passion to the frigid “Beautiful”—or outright perfunctory, like Latto and City Girls on “Bills Paid,” with each playing up their respected personas for the millionth time to diminishing results. The midtempo, brass-heavy production of the jubilant “Fam Good, We Good” is practically tailor-made for Gunna and Roddy Ricch, but the duo put out the far more exhilarating “Too Easy” just a few months back, making this crossover feel redundant.
Even when Khaled secures a genuinely exciting combo, like Kanye West and Eminem on Dr. Dre’s remix of “Use This Gospel,” from West’s Jesus Is King, he fails to push them out of their comfort zones. Instead, Khaled seems content to let Dr. Dre slap on an outdated dubstep outro to the track while Eminem spits his usual agro-robotic flow. Elsewhere, the small team of Jamaican dancehall legends assembled for “These Streets Know My Name”—Skillibeng, Buju Banton, Capleton, Bounty Killer, and Sizzla—are so poorly mixed that their individual contributions hardly register among the track’s blaring horns and sound effects.
This maximalist approach has, more or less, been Khaled’s guiding principle for the past few years. But never has this rung truer than on “God Did,” where a spry Jay-Z delivering a mellifluous four-minute verse apparently isn’t enough for Khaled. He also tacks on Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, and John Legend, which bloats the track beyond its breaking point, as you feel every last second of its laborious eight-minute-length drag by.
On occasion, Khaled can still facilitate something that resembles a natural synthesis of budding talent, exemplified in the fervid chemistry between Kodak Black and Nardo Wick on the menacing “It Ain’t Safe” and the way Travis Scott and Don Toliver’s reverb-heavy vocals smoothly cohere around the chorus of “Let’s Pray.” Both tracks prove to be some of the album’s more rousing cuts due to their clear sense of immediacy; they’re also, unsurprisingly, the few cuts on God Did where Khaled’s histrionics are momentarily sidelined. But considering the way their brevity and comparative simplicity border on formulaic, their inclusions further reinforce how plainly hollow Khaled’s methodology will always be.
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