The Inevitable

A Kanye post...because, of course.

I got off the Kanye West High Speed Train (on which I had a first class sleeper suite) after the "Trump is my homeboy" stuff and the antisemitism; I just couldn't rock with him anymore. In hindsight, it’s kind of embarrassing that the Confederate flag merch wasn’t the last straw.

What he do that for? 🤦🏿‍♀️

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[Full Ye conversation starts at 44:15]

On last week’s Popcast Deluxe, New York Times pop music critic and venerable Kanye Historian Jon Caramanica brilliantly breaks down Kanye’s trajectory in pop culture throughout the years [48:15]. It really feels like there’s a division between two distinct generations of Kanye fans: The OGs— people who, like myself, started listening to him in the beginning of his career, during The College Dropout, when he had a backpack and a bear costume. On some level, many of us probably saw ourselves in him: Aspirational, with big dreams of changing the world. We rocked with him through the shutter shades and Murakami era, and many of us felt even more inspired to speak truth to power after seeing this iconic moment unfold before our eyes:

The other segment of Kanye’s fans are much younger, many of whom weren’t even alive on that fateful night. To them, Kanye is the rap superstar with insanely creative stage setups, who also made Yeezys. They are used to the Rick and Morty fan Ye; they know he used to be married to Kim Kardashian and that he has a penchant for provocation.

Kanye is a pure internet troll now, somebody who starts shit just for the sake of it. The other day I saw a long caption he wrote on Instagram that included this line:

He done lost his damn mind again

I had to roll my eyes because why is he invoking America’s #1 White Girl in a desperate attempt to get press?! You don’t want smoke from them Swifties!!! 🙅🏿‍♀️

To one set of fans, those kinds of antics are just annoying and detract from his artistry. I suspect that to the other group, the trollish persona is the entire appeal. But, as Caramanica posits, hasn’t this been Kanye’s thing all along? He’s always been the guy who pokes the sleeping bear; the difference to me this time around is that there’s no illusion that he’s doing it all for some greater purpose. “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” may be indeed be cut from the same instigating cloth as “Trump is my homeboy,” but the Bush criticism was one infused with righteous rage in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. Ye was right to call out the disparate media coverage of people in New Orleans; in fact, 2005 was probably the first time that particular critique went mainstream, partially because of Kanye’s speech. We thought he was the truth-teller we all needed. Wow, what a different time.

Before Trump was his homeboy, though, there was his infamous interruption at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. At the time, I felt like people were overreacting— I mean, they had our first Black President even had to denouncing him like he denounced Rev. Jeremiah Wright! It was all very crazy to see unfold. It almost felt like all the Kanye rage was being used as a cultural pressure release valve for said President’s election.

The gag is— he wasn’t wrong! He shouldn’t have gone up and interrupted the woman, that was obviously wrong. But…I mean, 15 years later, chances are that you still remember the “Single Ladies” video, or at least have seen one of its many parodies. I dare you to conjure up a single frame of “You Belong With Me” from memory! But I digress. The point is, even that flashpoint in his public persona was easy for many early Kanye fans to shrug off; Jay-Z basically got on stage at the Grammys this year and chastised people for not giving Beyonce an award and everybody agreed. We saw it as the passionate outburst of an artistic genius and went on with our lives. However, we miiiiight have created a monster by letting that behavior slide.

Damn. My bad.

Exactly one Kardashian marriage later, we met a new iteration of Kanye. In 2013, he started toying with commercializing the Confederate flag, under the guise of some warped logic of “reclaiming” it. There goes Kanye again, surely doing some sort of high concept performance art. But a couple of years later when he started cozying up to then-Presidential nominee Donald Trump and getting progressively red hat-pilled, a lot of us couldn’t take it anymore. The Kanye who had at one time provoked searing social commentary about racial dynamics in America was now BFF with that guy?! In many ways, Kanye’s career trajectory aligned with the country’s rapidly changing collective disposition: He really went from ushering in the kind of hope and change that was palpable in the early 2000s with his first few albums, contrasted with the music he’s released lately, marked by cynicism, resentment and dick jokes.

The quality of his art used to be able to overshadow his antics, but for the past few years, it just hasn’t been hitting the same. I kind of saw the vision with 2018’s Ye, but after that album and the subsequent antisemitic musings, I couldn’t take it anymore. Although I can generally separate the art from the artist, Kanye’s music had meant so much to me in the past that his newfound penchant for stoking hatred felt like a betrayal. I couldn’t even listen to my favorite album of all time, his 2010 magnum opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, without feeling extremely ashamed and disappointed that someone that I had once regarded as a singular genius had taken this turn for the worse. A lot of people say that Chance the Rapper actually turned out to be who we thought Kanye was going to be— namely, a champion for Black Chicago— and I think that’s pretty accurate.

I miss the old Kanye, I really do. I used to hold out hope that he would one day re-emerge, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that like so many American men, he’s gone down an incel-adjacent rabbit hole, seemingly radicalized by being way too online. But we’ll always have his first few albums to look back on as a reminder of a time when we had more capacity to hope, to dream, and to create.