The other day, YouTube recommended me this mash-up of two songs from The Life of Pablo. It was not very interesting but it did get me thinking about the American musical artist Kanye West, and so here you go:
The release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was maybe the last big collective cultural event I really felt invested in. (Maybe Elden Ring? Even that I felt a little more outside of.) It was a shocking, wonderful album, one of the best I’d ever heard, and I could talk about it at school with everyone, including people I had never once talked about music with. Pitchfork loved it; random kids in homeroom loved it. My best friend would blast the brass line from “All of the Lights” on his French horn during band class warmups so loudly the band director would leave his office to tell him to knock it off. I was in awe of how crazy the snare sound was on “All of the Lights,” how aggressive the mastering was.
To be clear, we all knew West was, minimally, kind of silly. We knew he had a less salutary side. The misogyny was obvious; the strange laziness of his lyrics irritated. But as a kind of ringleader, a mastermind, the blockbuster chaos-wrangling analogue to Tyler, the Creator (Odd Future’s early days, culminating in the Freeing of Earl and the Jimmy Kimmel live performance, constituted the other truly explosive cultural moment of my high school years), it was incredible. Nobody was doing anything like this.
I spent my first two years of college in a pretty remote place with minimal internet access, so streaming didn’t really arrive for me until 2013, after I’d left. I don’t know if people streamed Yeezus or pirated it or what. Anachronistically, we didn’t really have the bandwidth to pirate music, so we all had to wait for Yeezus to physically arrive on CD. I remember we sat in a dark dormitory common room — the same room I saw Breathless in; the same room in which, the night before I graduated, I stayed up until sunrise watching, insanely, the entirety of FLCL with a friend in; the same room in which I read Equus in one sitting; the same room in which I once tried to throw a listening party for Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock that nobody came to and I cried (lol) — we sat in this room and listened to Yeezus front-to-back. It was so brutal. It felt like a fucking brutal thing. We were shocked by it.
But these were the heady days before what I’ve come to think of as Early Woke, when our cultural apprehension of the moral dimension of art would shift in a way I find, in retrospect, dialectically necessary, but sort of energy-sapping to live through. If I’d heard Yeezus for the first time two years later, I may have completely rejected it.
“Blood on the Leaves” in particular felt -- not exactly productively transgressive, but shocking in a way that was, minimally, interesting. If West’s life as a black American was marked by the legacy of racialized chattel slavery -- which it obviously was, given that he, like all of us, exists in history -- doesn’t that mean that even the most frivolous rich asshole suffering he’s experienced is, somehow, in some way, continuous with the experience of lynching? The hyperbole is immoral, even antisocial -- but so was, say, Sylvia Plath’s. Plath‘s intent in comparing her suffering to the Holocaust was, among other things, to stage the argument that the private experience of suffering as it’s actually experienced exists way out past morality and sociality. Couldn’t Kanye have been doing something similar? I don’t know if I bought this reading then -- I definitely don’t buy it now -- but these were the kinds of thoughts West’s work occasioned.
As it was, it felt, to me at least, like West’s obvious immorality, or at least amorality, was something the culture could contain. I’ve basically always had leftist politics in some form or another, but I metabolized the Obama moment’s strange lack of urgency into a kind of sluggish anarchism: the liberal order was predicated on terrible violence, but it was also unhappily resilient; history hadn’t ended, but things in the metropole weren’t particularly close to popping off, either. Malcolm X said of “progress” that you can’t shove the knife in nine inches, pull it out three, then call it progress; but it still felt like broad cultural forces were, at least in terms of domestic social equality, invested in slowly removing the knife.
The provocations of Yeezus, then — the Confederate flags; the undercooked “Strange Fruit” flip — were what I’d come to think of as “edgelord” shit: playing with dangerous signifiers in a way that felt, at worst, masturbatory and ignorant rather than genuinely radioactive. Maybe this was patronizing; maybe I’m being patronizing now. My ultimate read on Kanye West is that he’s neither an idiot lunatic nor a supervillain, but a generationally gifted producer who needed and needs help of a kind he is either constitutionally or situationally incapable of receiving, and who should not be a public figure until such help is received (and probably not after then, either). But /Yeezus/’s transgressiveness felt like something to be indulged, something to be argued over, something probably ultimately to be cast aside as an artifact of the weird dspecificity of talent, the fact that someone incredibly intelligent can also be kind of dumb.
The Life of Pablo was the peak, for me. It took a while for me to get into, but it’s still my favorite Kanye album. I think it’s fucking incredible. His weird cruel streak had obviously gotten worse, but it functioned in full service of the kind of manic depressive circus gestalt the album was channeling. It was really so crazy. The dude was just sticking entire songs he liked in Pro Tools and hanging out on top of them. I found genuine pathos in the album’s oscillation between piety and lust, a pathos diminished by the ongoing revelation that his artistic ambivalence might not be not a representation of actual inner moral tumult and activity, but an attempt to absolve himself to a forgiving public -- a sublimation and displacement of the effort of figuring out how to be a better person rather than a representation of that effort. (The Platonic example of this difference in meaning is, to my mind, Louis C.K., whose work moved me when it seemed to be an effort to earnestly reckon with failure and misdirected desire; now that it’s clear he was not only indulging his antisocial desires, but has begun to traffic in saying they’re fine, the schtick falls flat.)
The central fact of Kanye as a musician is that he was tremendously exciting. His work was rich and weird and unexpected, intensely collective and thoroughly singular, loud and dumb and mean and whiny and like nothing I would ever think to make and so fucking good.
I haven’t listened to a full Kanye album since Life of Pablo. I found all the ways everyone had of talking about him intolerable; bringing Marilyn Manson out on stage was like watching the last smokestack of the Titanic slip from beneath the surface. He said unforgivably evil things; he was obviously, brutally ill; it felt like an act of cruelty and humiliation, to him and to all of us, to give him any kind of microphone.
I’ve heard a few mushy nonsense songs that I can’t remember and made no impact, maybe from the “I love being bipolar I hate it” or whatever record. I’ve heard the “poopity scoop” prank song, which I thought was genuinely kind of funny. And I’ve heard (I can’t believe I’m typing this) “Heil Hitler,” whose chorus and music video are interesting in the way that Kanye was always interesting — immediate, striking, chaotic — but this time around, there’s no redeemable kernel, nothing worth saving. The song would not be thinkable in a healthy culture and demands complete exclusion from ours.
There was a lot of debate about whether or not Kanye’s mental illness made him less culpable for his atrocious political turn. For what it’s worth, I don’t think anyone comes to their ideology purely through some kind of rational-inferential perpetually-priors-revising scientific-method-adjacent cognitive procedure; the people who yammer the most about this type of thing are also the people with some of the dumbest “priors” of all time. I think being a person entails being kind of crazy, and the whole ideas of “organizing society” and “distributing necessary resources,” which I see as the central concerns of politics, are crazy. Believing every human animal is intrinsically worthy of a dignified existence, as I do, is crazy, though not as crazy as believing that some people are worth more than others, I think. The process of coming to first principles is a wild one, having more to do with us as animals than us as ratiocinators.
So he’s as “culpable” for his politics as any of us, but I don’t think the concept of culpability, which American common sense seems basically to copy-paste from our diseased carceral system, makes much sense. The relationship between Kanye’s tragic personal delusions and his noxious public delusions seems obviously causal to me, and we all agree he needs treatment for the former, but I have no idea, really, and it’s not like my stupid take makes a difference anyway. I don’t know what’s at the bottom of Kanye West’s heart, if only because I don’t think that’s how people really work. What I do know is that it is very sad that we live in a world where anyone can wind up the person he is today.