For the first time in two decades, Kanye is on an island. It’s not a nice island. He’s hanging out with Nick Fuentes, praising Hitler, and going so far off the deep end that he’s making Alex Jones of Infowars visibly uncomfortable. His behavior needs no detail beyond that; it’s everywhere in the press and the whole thing is sad to see. Many have written that he’s suffering from mental illness, needs help, and that further media exposure is unethical. And though his words are reprehensible, hundreds of millions of people rubbernecking as a lonely man loses his mind is an ugly thing.
But it’s not sufficient to say that Kanye’s going crazy. That’s a lazy description, and it elides the last twenty years that the general public has had with him as an artist. Every now and again we see abrupt 180-degree-turns in public opinion, where we love X turns into we hate X with a full erasure of the former view and no attempt to reconcile or relate those two opposing views. Those moments always feel like quasi-dystopian groupthink to me. Let’s discuss Kanye in more depth, get controversial, and, for bonus points, without making armchair psychiatric diagnoses.
Conviction in the Self
The first thing to understand about Kanye is that his career starts with rejection, over and over again. He dropped out of college to pursue music full-time at age 20. Record labels ignored him for years because he didn’t fit the stereotypical image of a rapper in the early 2000s. He finally got first commercial break when he was 25. Five years is a long time — 20% of his life — to be ignored. But he never wavered from his style or vision, and after five years, he started to be rewarded. After seven years, he got rewarded bigtime. The College Dropout was a blockbuster album.
This is significant. Most people appreciate and can talk a big game about not listening to what society thinks and sticking to your guns, but virtually nobody can do that for five years. The vast majority will give up much faster than that. You’ve got to be stubborn, but more specifically, you have to have enormously strong conviction in your own views and a real ability to stand up and not conform to the expectations of others. And in simple terms, Kanye was rewarded for that. Not just once, but many times over in his career, both in music and in fashion.1 He was enormously talented in bringing iconoclastic artistic visions to the public and then being right.
So Kanye learned — or perhaps always knew — to trust his own judgment above all. Had he listened to the advice of others, chances are he wouldn’t have been nearly as successful. There’s a vein of Steve Jobs in there: no focus groups, no surveys, no desire to conform or join an in-group, just sheer internal, first-principles driven vision that tells the audience what they want. For a product or fashion designer or artist in general, being successful with that approach is the most powerful possible position, it is as close as it gets to infallibility.
This great conviction in the self is a major part of what’s made Kanye so successful as an artist, having been cited as a serious contender for greatest living public artist many times in the past decade. It’s also what has sent Kanye down his ideological controversy: he has full faith in his own judgment, and seemingly none in the judgment of others. If anything, he may pattern-match it to prior instances in his life: the greater disagreement he faces, the greater his eventual vindication.
This is a very tragic thing in a classical sense: this conviction in the self, the great enabler of Kanye, the producer of his success, is now working against him, tearing him down and reducing his great achievements to rubble. It’s the stuff of Greek tragedy, to rise and fall by one’s own rare internal gift.
Interpreting Expression
The other thing to understand about Kanye is that he’s bad with words. I know, that’s ironic, he’s extremely successful as a spoken-word artist, etc. But I mean it seriously. If you’ve listened to past interviews with him,2 Kanye says all kinds of things that are outlandish and sound-bite quotable. For worse, that's the case especially now.
But it takes a mature listener to not take him literally, but to make the effort to interpret him. For example, take when Kanye spoke to Joe Rogan about being against abortion, he said: “…there was a chance that Kim and I didn't make the family we have today (...) the greatest advocates for abortion are men from ages 31 to 37, and that's how old I was and I felt like I was too busy. My dad felt like he was too busy for me.”3
I am personally very strongly pro-choice, but the quote above carries a salient message. Here’s a guy who loves his children and is horrified by the fact that he considered not having them just because he was too busy. That’s a valid feeling! I can be pro-choice and also pro-natalist, agreeing that it’s sad when adults decide not to have children because they’re too busy with their careers. Is abortion to blame for parents making that choice? Obviously not. But if you cast the abortion debate into simple pro-natalist and anti-natalist positions, you can see how West would come to this expression.
Stepping into more controversial territory, Kanye’s descent into antisemitism seems to come out of long-ongoing personal struggles, concluding in a misguided belief in a Jewish conspiracy. For nearly his whole career, Kanye has been complaining about getting screwed by managers and accountants, by his contracts with record labels, by his deals with Adidas and others, and so on. He’s been preaching for years about the predatory nature of the music industry, and has tried to create an analogy to the YCombinator SAFE — a standard legal contract for technology entrepreneurs — for musicians to protect them from getting exploited on terms. On the flip-side, he’s been open about a life-long pornography addiction that threatened his marriage. Imagine that you’ve been fighting all these hostile influences for years: that stuff is bound to make you at least a little crazy. It primes you for falling down a rabbithole that offers answers as it draws a conspiratorial narrative between these disparate opponents. People are suckers for grand unifying theories, especially of the me-against-the-world type, and people are suckers for in-group vs. out-group dynamics. Unfortunately, Kanye is no exception here.
Let’s step it up further. When Kanye says I like the Nazis, I love Hitler — you can take that in the context of antisemitic comments he’s made about a Jewish conspiracy. But quite literally, he joined that with: “I’m a Christian. I love everyone. I love the Jewish people. I also love Nazis.”4 Seriously, how do you read that? As hateful, hardcore antisemitism or as loving and forgiving? When the Christians or Buddhists say that you must forgive and love your enemies, does that include Nazis? Do you take an absolutist stance here? Do you take Kanye's statements at face value, in the first place? Does he lie? If he means what he says, what does that mean for our interpretation of his words? What, if any, is the right level of the benefit of the doubt to extend here? Beats me.
The whole thing is a mess, of course. Kanye’s quotes from the Alex Jones Show above were interspersed with harder-to-understand, more overtly-unhinged stuff about Netanyahu, and others. But Kanye has always been a producer, a mash-up guy, expressing himself not directly but indirectly: pulling this sample and that sample, throwing it together, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, and iterating. We’re now seeing him do it with the biggest, most dangerous topics — politics, religion, antisemitism, all in public.
Before Kanye’s descent over the past twelve months, I’ve always thought that this mash-up style makes it take real work to interpret the guy. You have to take his words, try to scrape away all the mash-up stuff, the “samples” of contemporary other-people’s-words that only proximately represent his views, and try to get to the salient kernel of the thing that he’s trying to express. And in that respect, his words — even if they have to be disentangled from layers of stuff — have historically always been important. He’s a great artist, and that means having his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, more closely than virtually anyone else. I hope we don’t lose him.
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And also in many other respects: for example, West adored his mother, who was a college professor. The act of dropping out of college — against her wishes — takes on more significance with that perspective.
The three-hour Joe Rogan interview is a good example.
I have slightly edited these quotes for clarity.
I am potentially paraphrasing what he actually said; at the time of writing I don’t have an interview transcript on-hand.
Beautifully said. while hubris holds a lot of value for creators, the greek dynamic holds that overindulging her inevitably invokes her sister goddess nemesis: destruction, suffering, and punishment.
Especially vital to remember in light of sbf.
Might I ask if you have an email address I can send some thoughts to in regards to a question posed in another article?