The Inscrutable Mr. West
When I was trying to make the jump from The A.V Club head writer to author I had a silly ritual before I sent out an important email. To get me into the right mindset, I would play a song that had tremendous meaning to me by an artist I identified with on an almost unhealthy level.
The song was “Touch the Sky” by Kanye West. At the time I saw the producer turned rapper as both someone a lot like me and an aspirational figure. Like me, Kanye was a big-talking dreamer from Chicago who alternated between sly self-deprecation and blatant narcissism. He was a wildly ambitious young man in a terrible hurry to make his mark on society in the biggest possible way.
That was the relatable aspect of Kanye’s persona. Even with Jay-Z as his mentor and star-maker, West still cut an underdog figure. The aspirational component of Kanye’s much-mythologized life was that he didn’t just talk about making the leap from super-producer to household name MC: he made it happen. He fucking did it.
Kanye wasn’t just my favorite rapper and producer; he was a goddamn inspiration, my good luck charm, someone who dreamed out loud, then turned that dream into reality through a combination of talent, hard work, connections and unrelenting drive.
I consequently cut Kanye a lot of slack. He may have been a colossal asshole, but he was my colossal asshole. Besides, Kanye was a genius and the rules are different for geniuses. When he would do something objectively obnoxious I chalked it up to passion.
He was a passionate man. Sometimes he was too passionate, but I saw his passion, his genius and his madness as inextricably intertwined.
That obviously changed when Kanye became a very public Trump supporter. As someone who despised, and continues to despise, Trump with every fiber of my being, I could not, for the life of me, understand how someone I felt such a deep connection to, who inspired me to reach for the stars, could use his tremendous power to promote the toxic philosophies of Trump and Candace Owens, his malevolent mentor in the ways of arch-Conservatism and empty provocation.
I once felt like I understood Kanye. I once assumed, wrongly as it turns out, that we were a lot alike. But in the awful years since he put on that red baseball hat Kanye has become increasingly inscrutable. I have no idea what is going on in the man’s frazzled brain and I once wrote a poor-selling novella (Kanye & Trump) with him as a main character.
When I look at Kanye now I see an unsolvable mystery and an utter enigma but I also see a man in a tremendous amount of pain. Becoming one of the richest, most famous and powerful musicians in American history seems to have made Kanye suicidally depressed.
Kanye really seems to have stepped his asshole game up since turning his life over to Christ. It feels like Kanye has not achieved even a moment of inner peace or tranquility.
The famous gif of Kanye’s expression morphing instantly from that big, infectious smile to an angry scowl that betrays nothing other than bottomless rage says it all. A man who once radiated joy from every pore now seems lost in a world of pain he does not understand.
Part of what makes Kanye so inscrutable is that someone who was once so self-aware now does not seem to understand himself or the world anymore, which is why he lashes out in furious anger if something does not go his way.
I was stuck by how incredibly uncomfortable Kanye looks in a video taken not long ago of the rapper partying with his new girlfriend Julia Fox, Madonna, boxer Floyd Merriweather and various other famous folks.
Actually they ALL look miserable. If this is what being rich and famous is like I’m glad I never ascended the same rarified heights as my onetime hero, because all of the success in the world seems to have only made Kanye sadder, madder and more unknowable.
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