Ye wants your love
In 2018, Kanye West put on a Make America Great Again hat, and the reaction was not gentle.
Despite the shock and uproar, it’s not hard to see how we got here.
Kanye says Yeezus was his best work. He was right.
His infamous ‘Imma let you finish’ moment at the 2009 VMAs instantly cast Taylor Swift as America’s Darling, and him as America’s Villain. They have since traded and then un-traded those roles, but it’s hard to overstate how much that public rejection hurt him. After the fallout, he intended to quit music altogether and withdrew from society; when he did finally make his return to the studio to have his revenge, the album he wrote had more than one allusion to suicidal thoughts.
His only plan was to somehow craft the greatest album of all time, win the public back over to his side, and show America once and for all what happens when they doubted him. That album was not Yeezus, but its prequel, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
The stories that came out of his time in that studio in Hawai’i paint an almost unimaginative picture of an obsessive maniacal rockstar genius – he rented out the entire Avex Honolulu studio complex in Oahu indefinitely, he slept in the studio or not at all, he pasted an absurd list of rules on the wall, pulled no punches when someone didn’t meet standards, and watched porn – genuinely – for inspiration.
He assembled some of the greatest minds in hip-hop and music (including The RZA, Raekwon, No I.D., Kid Cudi, Fergie, Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj, Bon Iver, Pusha T, Swizz Beatz, Ozzy Osborne, John Legend, Aphex Twin, La Roux, Alicia Keys, Elton John, Drake, and Rihanna), desperate to be responsible for combining their collective greatness. In short, it worked. MBDTF was an instant classic, and features frequently in lists of the greatest albums of all time, of any genre.
At the VMAs the following year, he returned triumphantly from exile, performing Runaway for the first time, a track now regarded as one of pop music’s finest works. Kanye would doubtless insist it transcended hip-hop, because that was in effect the purpose of the album. He had to prove the public had him all wrong, that he wasn’t someone they could pigeon-hole as one of the many hip-hop artists they thought had more ego than talent. He made this point with a distinct unsubtlety, flooding the stage with (wait for it) ballerinas; an effective if unimaginative way of screaming I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK I AM at his audience. It was a profound and revealing moment, particularly because the moment also seemed to scream I AM WHO YOU WISHED I WAS.
This was a little sad, because in retrospect, it wasn’t true.
Two years later, normality resumed. With an authenticity those ballerinas had lacked, he cathartically shouted “soon as they like you, make ‘em unlike you / this kissin’ people ass is so unlike you” on I Am A God, the third track of Yeezus, an album which was not only utterly brilliant but furious, bitter, and abrasive, with its most venomous bars railing (notably) against racism. In 2015 he called Yeezus ‘so much stronger’ than MBDTF, deriding the latter as ‘an apology record’. He hated the weak, vulnerable version of himself he’d shown on it, and vowed it wouldn’t return. Yeezus was everything people hadn’t expected or asked from Kanye, and in his eyes, that made it his biggest success. If in MBDTF you’d helped Kanye up off his knees, in Yeezus he’d pushed you over and told you to get him a glass of water.
Kanye the Desperate was dead. Kanye the Arrogant was back.
Kanye lives to subvert, not (just) because it’s what great artists do, but because he, in particular, has to. Kanye’s relationship with the public is not a good or healthy one: he needs to feel above us, but is completely lost should he be caught trying and failing to get our approval. MBDTF was a hail mary. If it hadn’t landed, he may have never recovered.
Doing the opposite of what people want and expect from him lets him simultaneously tell the world he doesn’t need them, and still get our plaudits when he (invariably) succeeds. Many were turned off by Yeezus, but that was the point. After MBDTF, Kanye had regained the freedom to not care.
The pair of albums was his rebirth, what he needed to do to assure himself that he controlled the public, not the other way round. The first was an appeasement, therapy for Kanye at his lowest, bringing the public back to him by force of raw talent, while the second was a subversion, therapy for Kanye at his highest, repelling everyone away again, just to see who stuck around.
But it’s worth noting that his first four albums were visionary, free, unaffected by public opinion; and unlike those, although more honest than MBDTF, Yeezus was still not an album he made for him. That line on I Am A God was a confession that, deep down, Yeezus was an album that had only set out to do the opposite of what we wanted - as if we were an old ex that he still needed to spite.
The wound had healed, but the scars still ached.
In 2015, with Trump three months and three debates away from an unlikely, but increasingly plausible election, Kanye announced, yet again on the VMA stage, that he would one day run for President. The response was about as bad as it could be. People – his friends, his peers, the public – laughed.
Of course they laughed. Kanye said crazy shit all the time, and this was up there with the craziest. No, he obviously could not be President. Running would be a waste of everyone’s time. Knowing him, the moment had just gotten to him and he’d blurted it out, and soon it would all be forgotten. At best, perhaps it was a strange publicity stunt. At worst, a bizarre joke.
Except it was none of those. In reality, he’d been quietly meditating on this idea for a while, and had probably pictured that moment as an announcement to inspire the whole nation – because, Kanye thought, if Kanye can do it, maybe you can too. To him it was honest and raw, his vision of the future: an America that was his would be an America for the people, except now they would truly be his people.
But he wasn’t taken seriously; he wasn’t even condescended to. We’d once again swatted him aside, and now he felt small. His miscalculation was severe: artistic talent, however blessed, does not qualify you for Presidency.
In spite of this common sense line of reasoning he took it personally. The public was preaching common sense, but what he heard was No. No, he was noone. No, he was not the people’s leader. No, he could not be President.
A burning, familiar hurt was welling up inside him.
89% of African-Americans voted for Hillary. Donald Trump has sexually assaulted 23 women and counting. He is – explicitly – racist. Over the past 50 years, celebrity endorsements of the Republican party have consistently been rare and unpopular. It was not unclear what famous, apparently-liberal African-Americans were expected to think of the sitting President of the United States.
But Kanye is Kanye, and with his perspective skewed by renewed public humiliation, this expectation was not the rational result of several horrible, indisputable, and commonly known facts. No, it was a sheep mentality. The people were wrong. He was being told what to think. And so – he thought – this was a golden opportunity for him to pleasantly surprise everyone, and break the aptly-metaphorical chains the mainstream had cast on him.
Kanye’s public affinity for Trump began long before he put on the MAGA hat – but only after he had told the VMA crowds that he would run for President. Soon after the election, he began tweeting out both vague and explicit endorsements of the President. Notably, he was shouted down each time, sent to the naughty step by a concerned and overbearing public, furious that a black American – and one of the most influential Americans – would choose to lend his support to a man who had carefully included Nazis and KKK members in his description of ‘very fine people’.
And unlike most of us, Kanye does not really know what Trump has actually said and done. In a revealing moment, in conversation with Kanye, rapper T.I. asked whether Kanye supported Trump’s travel ban of Muslims entering America. Kanye was nonplussed: “What’s the travel ban?” Holed up in a quiet Montana mountain house and (apparently) sheltered from any form of media, Kanye has the luxury of being able to talk, rap and tweet revolutionary things with as much ignorance as he’d like.
The more things he said, the more the puzzle pieces slotted together. Kanye, it turned out, knew none of the facts, but he thought he knew the story: underdog, enemy of the mainstream, beats the odds to win over America.
To him, Trump represents not racism, but the freedom to do, say, and achieve what he wants. To Kanye, the MAGA hat was an act of defiance, of subversive rebellion. Noone can tell me what to wear. Noone can tell me what to think. Noone can tell me what to say. Noone can tell me what to do. Noone can tell me what I can’t do.
So here, in thirteen words, is Kanye’s Trump love story:
Kanye watched the world tell Trump he couldn’t be President. Trump became President.
Trump had ignored the critics, and done something Kanye couldn’t.
To Kanye, the rest was – is – irrelevant.
In a better era, it would be good, even great, that we disagree with each other about anything and everything, and for Kanye to surprise us by supporting a politician we don’t like. Our collective right to hold bad and terrible opinions should be truly – truly – important. We’ve deeply internalised this idea as a population, and we herald the middle-ground as the position of the enlightened, of those who know how to compromise, of our moral elite.
But in a better era, we would not disagree on this. In a better era, liberals and conservatives would argue about taxation and privatisation; not about police brutality and the legacy of centuries of slavery. In a better era, ‘wearing the racist President’s hat’ would be a weird proverb, not something you can do for twenty five dollars.
The heroes of the civil rights movement in the 60s are those who were furious, those who fought, those who literally died to oppose the oppression of a skin colour; not those who wrung their hands and reasoned with the beaten and the dying that everyone has the right to their opinion.
If there’s a range of things currently considered acceptable or reasonable to the mainstream, Kanye is intentionally expanding the brackets that had until now defined the start and end of that space to include new, exciting possibilities – except those new possibilities are predominantly the acceptance of racism. In doing so, he rendered his anti-racism activism on Yeezus, if not meaningless, certainly a lot less haunting.
This sentiment isn’t about retribution, or ending Kanye’s career – I’m listening to Kanye while I write this. It’s about considering the standards we hold people to before we parade them around as the Greatest Of All Time of anything – because whoever the GOAT is, it’s not the guy who supports racism and anti-racism whenever they suit him.
If Kanye really wants to be a radical and a contrarian to the mainstream’s genuinely restrictive ideas of what black people are expected to think on politics, there are a million things he could say that might actually be worth listening to.
He could start by critiquing America’s only Black President on many things: his use of drone strikes; his belittling the issue of Flint’s lack of access to clean water; for caving in to Joe Liebermann and giving up the Public Option on Obamacare.
He could critique Kamala Harris’ record on criminal justice, or highlight the lack of candidates representing the large numbers of African-Americans who do not actually like liberal policy, but who feel forced into voting Democrat simply because they recognise them as the less racist party.
Many of these arguments are flawed, but they are at the very least not anti-intelligent. If Kanye wants to be seen as the free thinker he has decided he is, he should come up with something less absurd than extending an olive branch to America’s racists, and find a better way of advancing the culture than creating space in it for those who think racism and anti-racism are just the two sides of a very tricky debate.
It is entirely true that Kanye hasn’t acted with malice. Like the rest of us, he’s a complicated human; he just happens to be one who has worked his way to the top of the societal food chain, but wants us to see him as the victim whenever he’s told off for flagrant arrogance.
Ultimately that arrogance is the core of the issue. He’s well known for jarringly grandiose claims, calling himself “a God”, “this generation’s closest thing to Einstein”, and “the greatest living artist”, but these shouldn’t be misunderstood as delusions – they are his fuel. He says these things carefully and deliberately to give himself something to live up to every time he walks into a studio, and it’s a tool he will never, ever give up.
The effect is wide-reaching, predictable, and an illuminating way to understand Kanye. His focus, determination and perfectionism is unparalleled; his ego is a cracked eggshell, his mental health a rollercoaster. His art became his everything, so without it he is nothing. The arrogance he’s created in himself produces horrible blind spots: he’s too smart to read; too ‘free-thinking’ to listen; too close to divine perfection to admit he was wrong; too Great to ever have been bad.
For Kanye the artist, the future will always be bright. But for Kanye Omari West the human and role model, there is less hope: 42 is a little late to start an overhaul of the fundamentals of your personality, given that even fatherhood hasn’t changed him.
I still love Kanye. He is childish: his moodiness, his gleefulness, his fearlessness are all deeply endearing traits – it’s fitting too, because ‘flawed brilliant man-child’ is the most constructive way to look at him. The best parents love their kid unconditionally, but know when some straight talking is needed; the worst ones insist their kid has the right to do whatever they want.
So love Kanye, he needs it. But don’t give him your adoration.
Not yet. Not until he earns it.
