Kanye West: A Mirror

I’d like to start off by saying the obvious. How Kanye West has been behaving and has behaved for the better part of 10 years is largely indefensible. It seems every so often he’ll wake up, probably in the throes of whatever might be ailing him mentally, and send off some of the worst tweets that anybody has ever sent off, or go on a string of interviews espousing some of the most abhorrent things that have ever been said. And as with people my age, the relationship we have with Kanye and the man that he’s become has been complicated by the fact that for a large part of our lives, he was the standard in terms of creativity and innovation in music.

Anybody who has ever aspired to be an artist, a creator, somebody who wants to make something lasting, could at least reference Kanye as a direct inspiration. And that relationship, even if you don’t want it to, does inform how you feel about the things he is currently engaged in. I remember the first time he had one of these moments that we now can call frequent. That moment is when he said, “Slavery was a choice.” And at that time, my idea of Kanye and my admiration for him was probably at an all-time high. It was so devastating that for weeks I found myself trying to defend him, and then I realized I don’t have to defend him. I don’t know him as a person, I really have no clue who he is outside of his public persona. But nonetheless, it was still devastating.

It was almost like the first time you start to recognize that your parent is not just your parent, but a human being who is fallible and makes mistakes just like yourself. And then, as time went on, and these instances became more frequent and frequent, I started to become an ardent Kanye West critic, because everything he was espousing was a personal affront to somebody like myself, who has taken time to be a student of history and understand the power of words, and how if ideas like this are not challenged, they could permeate the culture writ large. So, whenever he would have these moments, I would find myself arguing with people who still wanted to defend him, still wanted to make excuses for what he was doing, or those who would hit you with a tried and true line of, “Oh, he’s a genius, you wouldn’t understand it,” because for me, it was rather simple. What he’s saying is crude and corrosive, and it should be combated because I’m of the opinion that destructive ideas need to be destroyed.

Even as I am writing this now, I feel as though the person who I was that fell in love with Kanye is in constant conflict with the idea that I have of him now. And that creates feelings that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to reconcile.

Largely, I’ve come to ignore Kanye and his seemingly mentally induced crash-outs. It’s almost like, how many times can you watch a train crash before it becomes redundant? And at times, I genuinely feel bad for what he’s doing to himself, his legacy, and the people who have come to hold him in such high regard. He’s said so many abhorrent things that maybe the best strategy is to ignore him completely.

But there lies another problem—he’s almost impossible to ignore. He’s reached such a pinnacle that cancellation is all but impossible. And his undeniable talent and the evermore influence that he has make it so. Even as I’m fighting myself, he still captures my attention.

I posit that if he wasn’t such a groundbreaking artist, and I say this without a hint of a doubt, a pioneering figure in what we call culture, it wouldn’t take us anything to banish him to the realm of the unspoken. But unfortunately, he is somebody we will have to reckon with for the rest of his life, like a malignant tumor which spouts unimaginable lunacy yet sprinkles in moments of lucid clarity.

We can all agree that his most recent outbreaks seem to be the most poisonous. He has seemingly aligned himself with a universal evil—Nazis. And the defenses of Kanye have been reduced to an excuse of his behavior because he is seemingly unwell. It’s the best anybody can do to explain why he is doing what he’s doing.

Be that as it may, I found myself listening to a live stream of somebody interviewing him. And forgive me, but there is an objective hilarity in a Black man wearing an all-leather KKK garb. The hilarity is found in the extreme contradiction of such an outfit. It’s all the credit to the interviewer, by the name of DJ Akademiks, for not just laughing in front of Kanye’s face.

But I digress. I found myself earnestly trying to listen to what he was saying. In my own life, I work with people who are clinically depressed, schizophrenic, suicidal—and not saying Kanye is of that ilk—but the best practice, at least in my opinion, is to let them speak, uninterrupted, and if you can glean something from the grab bag of things they share, then at least you can come to some understanding, regardless of how small it might be.

From what I heard, this is a man who, by his own admission, is in deep pain. He feels scorned, he feels betrayed, and he is lashing out at anybody who he perceives to have slighted him—methods notwithstanding. He feels aggrieved by the mother of his children, the artists he’s worked with, the record labels, those who own the record labels, and so on and so forth. This is chiefly what I got from that interview.

But this wouldn’t be enough for me to write the increasingly panned think piece about Kanye West. It would have to be something more insightful that I got from what he was saying, from what he was doing for me to be moved enough to sit here and write this. And I think through all the madness, what I found important enough to write about was how differently we view the pain of different people.

If my memory serves me correctly, he said something along the lines of, “These record labels profit off of our pain.” And it’s not something that hasn’t been said before, but I don’t think we ever take time to sit with that claim. As we know, since the genesis of hip-hop and most creative endeavors in these United States, Black people have been the movers, yet Black people are often not the beneficiaries of the work that is put in.

The pain that he speaks of is the pain and the strife that comes from communities that have been kept in intolerable conditions for the better part of 300 years. And the people that come from those intolerable situations put that pain in their music, and in return, they become a part of a machine that sucks them dry. Because we all know who benefits the most from the pain and hurt that is found all throughout hip-hop. Yes, that person may be able to move their mama out the hood, afford themselves a nice life, just as Kanye has. But where it came from remains how it is.

It’s gotten to a point that these record labels and movers of the industry target these communities because they know it sells. And that pain has become so commonplace and accepted as to be rendered happenstance. When that white kid from American suburbia turns on NBA Youngboy, he’s listening to NBA Youngboy. But is he really listening to NBA Youngboy? Is he understanding what he is digesting? Because as a culture, all of us have accepted that the pain of Black musicians is not excruciating enough for us to do anything about it.

When these music executives parasite the talent from the areas their ancestors had a hand in destroying, it doesn’t seem to bother enough people for us to demand that it changes. And of course, it isn’t at all lost on me that this is really the story of Black people in America. Because I repeat time and time again, nobody deserves America as much as Black people—because nobody has had to suffer as much for this country as Black people. Yet, they reap the least benefit.

And this is the pain that, when I squinted my eyes and listened closely, I could make out from what Kanye West was saying. Why is he not the chief beneficiary of his pain? Why are Black people not the chief beneficiaries of our pain?

I believe, as a country, the gripes of Black people aren’t taken seriously. The voices that are often cries from the Black community remain unheard. It is not at all lost on me that the real backlash that came for Kanye West was when he started attacking Jewish people.

If I could take you down memory lane, in 2018, I believe—or around that time—Kanye, in the midst of what now seems to be quite regular, did a TMZ interview where he said slavery “sounded like a choice” because, how could one allow themselves to be slaves for 400 years? For 400 years. And a few years back, the man that challenged him, Van Lathan, came out and said that in that same interview, Kanye actually said something along the lines of, “I love Hitler,” “I love Nazis,” or something to that effect, and they took it out of the interview.

And I thought to myself, why did they feel the need to take that part out of the interview, but him disparaging the bravery and perseverance of a people destroyed but never conquered for 400 years—they kept that in the interview? Because whoever made that decision knows, just as you and I know, that disrespecting Black people doesn’t lose you anything. It might get you some bad press and you’ll have to put out a subsequent press release. But the disrespect of Black people is far too common for it to be a real risk when somebody does it.

When he started to say he loves Hitler and Nazis publicly, that’s when the people who have real power deemed him a bad asset.

Let me dispel any doubt that what I’m writing here is going to turn into an Elders of Zion conspiratorial suggestion about how Jews control the world and all the media companies and the banks. I think that’s largely bullshit, and anti-Semitism is disgusting. But what I mean to get at is that anti-Black beliefs and behaviors are so commonplace in this nation that they aren’t taken seriously.

What they did—by waiting until Kanye West started hurting the people that look like them before they deemed him irredeemable—was admit who it was okay for Kanye West and the rest of the world to disparage. This was always what it was going to come to.

They didn’t react then. And Kanye started to think he was invincible. The logic is rather simple. If I’m Kanye, I’m thinking, “Hey, I’ve been disparaging my own people for years now, doing things that Black people—the people that love me the most—find offensive. But I haven’t really lost anything. I guess I can do this to anybody.”

But it was a bad lesson to learn.

Because the only lesson that can be learned from that is that you can only disparage Black people. You can only disparage people who don’t have power. And unfortunately, in America, Black people don’t have enough power.

In turn, Kanye seems to then become somewhat of a Rorschach test and a Frankenstein’s monster. For those who feel aggrieved by the same systems that he feels aggrieved, there is something worthwhile that he’s saying. And for those who feel aggrieved by the admittedly putrid things he’s saying, he is somebody that needs to be done away with. But the latter point might be a bit more interesting.

Kanye is essentially the monster that this country has made. A young, Black, successful artist that comes from the pain put upon him and his people, triumphed, made it out, and then realized that there was no escape. No matter how high, how far, how rich, how successful you might be, the shell that you exist in can never be changed. All you can do is make good art, rub shoulders with the right people, play the game, and at least you can live a life your ancestors only imagined.

But that was never enough for Mr. Kanye West. It’s probably when he realized that regardless of his genius, he will always be a Black man, than, i imagined something finally snapped.

How can somebody—and I’m speaking as if I was Kanye—how can somebody as talented as me, as impressive as myself, still be constrained by the same constraints I felt back in the hood? How can these people who benefit off of me not give me the keys to the kingdom? How can they still own my masters, my shoes, my pain? So I guess I’ll wear theirs.

Of course, it’s completely corrosive. And little is done by wearing a Nazi chain. It’s mostly self-destructive. But often, there isn’t much else to do but self-destruct. It isn’t at all different from what young black men do to themselves in their neighborhoods. The strife and suffering run so deep that the mind can only think of self-destruction. It gets to a point where killing somebody who looks just like you seems to be the only solution for the situation you find yourself in. What Kanye thinks he’s doing is bucking the system that he feels is insisting itself upon him, but in fact, he’s become just another grotesque reflection of it. He is a mirror to what this country can do to the black mind, what it keeps doing to the black mind. He is a reflection of where many of us end up because pain is a rather faulty compass.

And for me, this is the only explanation that I’ve been able to conjure for why he walks around with Nazi iconography. And it comes back to the point I was making about pain and whose pain is taken seriously. The Holocaust, and what was done to the Jews, is the most terrible thing that has ever been done to a people. But so is slavery. And so is what is done to Black people in this country every single day.

And whether you choose to be offended by what I just said is up to you. No, I don’t agree with what he’s been doing. And what I’m writing now is only taken from a small glimmer of insight that I found from what he’s been saying. But the ills that pain Kanye come from a very real place. And there are scores of people who feel similarly aggrieved.

There are millions of people in this country who are angry—God, they’ve been angry for so long—and if their anger is not rectified, they too will try and burn it down. They too will meet pain with pain.

We can’t look away. We mustn’t.