I miss the old Kanye
On our spiny aversion to nobility
November 4, 2018
Auteur, entrepreneur, provocateur.
Kanye West is many things, chief among them a petulant narcissist and my favorite artist.
He contributes something so refreshing to celebrity culture. An air of self-interested incredulity, reminiscent of the camera gaze near-patented by The Office.
“Are you seeing this?” becomes a motto, a fish in a grotto.
Kanye West represents the repressed nature of our better angels, his outbursts an affront to the status quo we dare not disturb. Our corresponding outrage therefore entails Kantian introspection into the social norms that rein behavior. How dare someone call out our systemic discrimination? The color-goggles through which we perceive the world; disaster relief, award consideration. Racism, sexism, cultural elitism. He breaks down walls we’d rather not see, that’s what the goggles are for.
“You can’t explain love. My cousin is locked up for murder and I love him… he did a bad thing but I still love him.”
Kanye West sees the world with the same wide-eyed innocence of a child old enough to understand its woes, yet young enough to still open his heart. To be receptive rather than protective. To try and understand rather than combat. His demeanor is abrasive precisely because of the artistic insecurity that stems from living amongst wolves.
He spent a year and a half in a
Sanatorium
Soul-searching, soul-baring
Healing the bareback battlescars of living
Healing, treating, more like concealing, here’s some opioids for your opioids
Fix your image problem, here’s an addiction problem
They’ll put him in a hearse and call it the Kardashian curse
This is a family We love to hate.
Understanding the deeply humanist motives behind Kanye West’s antics makes him endearing in a Matt Groening anti-hero sort of way. He’s neo-Wagnerian, erudition without the diction. A romanticist for the new age, and yet an apparent contradiction.
Culminating in his now-infamous interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Kanye has persistently chosen to defend a president whose policies have torn families apart, whose actions have denigrated an entire gender, and whose very existence is polemical. What Kanye sees in Donald Trump, however, is a compeer. Brothers in arms, figures brazenly standing in a river of disdain, martyrs against the current.
To this headscratcher of an analogue, Kimmel responds with rational objection, and yet misses Kanye’s entire point, goal, and love connection. He counters Kanye’s points on their superficial meaning, coffeecup debaters drinking from wholly different carafes. He contrasts words of today with words of yesterday, Gregorian context rather than Westian context; no empathy, no insight.
Kimmel fails to acknowledge the fact that words can come from very different places in one’s own heart.
By no means do I profess to understand the mindworks of Mr. West, but his cognitive dissonance rings dead. A resonator of the heart, not the head. I have decried Donald Trump’s policies numerous times, putting views in writing with the same fervent emotion bellowed by John Proctor in his third act. Donald Trump, however, has transcended the literary and the literally; personification into ideification. The cultural shifts experienced in the wake of this administration have reflected how poorly our society faces adversity, how we respond to change. Kanye empathizes with Mr. Trump, but he doesn’t defend his actions. He simply purses his lips with all the internal turmoil of a boy whose cousin gets locked up for murder.
“Why not try love?”
“Open up a dialogue, not a diatribe.”
If you feel threatened by Republican reform, by a perceived sense of class warfare, then don’t fire back, stand up with love.
If you feel a need for compassion in our world, become its purveyor.
If you feel caught in a vacuum of leadership, become that leader.
The left is yet to provide a suitable answer to hardline conservatism, Ocasio-Cortez and Cory Booker no more ready to steer this ship than Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. The media has no more bias than money’s magnetism, pulling the compass needles that guide our news. There is no deep-state, no secret agenda, Murdoch and Turner supply the content we demand.
Media darlings, dime a dozen, Barbie and Ken dolls at the Mattel factory in my hometown.
Silent laborers, girls named Maria packaging toys for girls named Mary.
Disposable icons: re-dressed, re-hashed, and re-fried into our public consciousness.
At one point Kanye shares a heartwarming story about his relationship with his daughter. How he shares his lifelong passion for design by allowing her to create her own dresses, taking her to his office and treating her with the dignity of an equal, a soul to hold, something so often lost to the fires of condescension.
In this moment, Kanye throws cold water on a festering stew of monotony, a moment so emotionally charged it belongs in a novel. Rather than respond with the empathy necessary to bookend that moment of humanity, to turn that certain feng shui green, positive and good, Kimmel responds with a one-liner. Banality Absurd. Defusing your emotional insecurity with some lame pre-approved joke brought to you by corporate America.
This is the type of human interaction that society should foster, that which spurs introspection and growth: soul serenity. Without positive reinforcement, we learn to rather hide these parts of our lives from the rest of the world. We’re conditioned to believe them too sacred to share. Ye’s expression says it all. Pause the video at 12:48 to see the look of a man who dared speak Truth to power only to step on the rake of our spiny aversion to nobility.
Kanye West is our societal punching bag, Tintin on crusade. Rin Tin Tin, wholly optimistic yet wholly belittled by a press that loves its perception of the star yet ignores the essence of its cosmic raison d’etre. It’s far easier to dehumanize than to empathize.
“You forget that this is a son or a daughter, a mom or a dad”.
En garde, Kimmel.
