Kanye West and the Art(lessness) of Trolling
Evil Republican strategist Steve Bannon likes to talk about “Flooding the Zone.” The idea is to hit opponents in so many ways and from so many directions that they have no idea how to respond.
It’s difficult enough fighting a war on one front. It’s damn near impossible to effectively fight a war on a dozen fronts, particularly if those fronts are determined by an enemy with no respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, or human decency.
Right now, the Trump administration is flooding the zone. It’s overwhelming our political system in a way that forces Democrats to be on the defensive, to react to Trump’s unending aggression instead of working toward their own aims.
Flooding the Zone is inherently overwhelming and disorienting. It’s supposed to knock the competition off balance, making them scramble to undo damage instead of being proactive.
It’s also, unfortunately, effective. Trump has given Democrats so many reasons to fear for the future of our country and democracy that it’s hard even to know where to begin.
Do we prioritize fighting Elon Musk’s unprecedented and almost undoubtedly illegal assault on the government's autonomy, independence, and effectiveness? Or is it more important to stand up for trans rights at a time when they’re under assault like never before? Alternately, should we be focussed on the Gaza Strip or fighting massive deportations?
Ideally, we should be doing all of these things, but that seems difficult to the point of being impossible. Fighting Trump’s assault on American democracy is a full-time job. Who has the time?
Kanye West recently decided to Flood the Zone in multiple ways. He seems jealous that his frenemies, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, are monopolizing all the bad press by destroying the government, so he decided to do everything in his power to get people to pay attention to him.
First, he coerced his clearly scared and reluctant wife Bianca Censori to walk the red carpet at the Grammys in a dress so sheer that she was essentially naked in public, with cameras flashing and the whole world looking on.
That would be enough transgression for most provocateurs but Kanye was just getting started.
Next, he went public with being diagnosed with autism late in life. There was a time when that might have been major news that could change how people perceived the disgraced pop icon for the better. It would allow them to feel empathy for West, to see him as a troubled man struggling with symptoms of a neurological condition rather than the world's biggest asshole.
I was also diagnosed with autism late in life, along with ADHD and bipolar. I believe that West is autistic. Autistic folks like myself often have difficulty understanding social dynamics and appropriate behavior.
For example, someone with a neurotypical brain would see that an artist they liked had lost an award and felt bad for them. Kanye’s neurodivergent brain told him that the world needed to know who he thought should have won the Grammy, so he should go on stage and tell Taylor Swift that his friend Beyonce should have triumphed instead.
There was a time when finding out that Kanye was also neurodivergent would have meant a lot to me. It would have made me identify with him and his struggles even more.
That was a long time ago. Kanye was once my favorite rapper and producer. In the past decade, he has done several thousand things that have made it impossible for me to support him.
We barely had time to process the public nudity and autism diagnosis when Kanye finished destroying what was left of his legacy with a multi-day online rant that flooded the zone with hate speech.
Kanye built bridges solely for the sake of burning them. What’s fascinating and horrifying to me is that the previously respected rapper, producer, and fashion mogul saw his Twitter rant as art. He even tweeted that his reputation-destroying hate orgy represented “my greatest performance art piece thus far.”
The former billionaire thought of himself as a performance artist, not unlike Marina Abramovic. Kanye wants to be the Jenny Holzer of Jew-hatred. He probably thought that his days-long hate spree belonged on the wall of an art gallery.
Kanye’s spectacular symphony of anti-Semitism centered on Jews with a ferocity, intensity, and anger worthy of Kanye’s hero, Adolf Hitler. He was filled with rage towards Jews and women and “Woke” and Dave Chappelle but overflowed with love for Hitler and Diddy, who he angrily insisted should be freed immediately.
It was all too much. Kanye has never been more exhausting than he was during his massive, multi-day hate spree.
I’d check in occasionally, then duck out because I want to hold onto what’s left of my sanity and belief in humanity. The last time I checked, Kanye was straight-up posting hardcore pornography to see if he could get away with it.
This won his posts an NSFW tag, but he kept on tweeting lovely sentiments like, “I’m a Nazi” and “I love Hitler.”
Lots of people leave what I will always call Twitter because it has too many Nazis. Kanye left because it did not have enough Nazis.
Kanye’s online spree even torched his ostensible allies. He got angry at Musk for stealing his swag with his Nazi salutes and alluded to having slept with Ivanka Trump.
At the end of his rant, Kanye tweeted, "I’m logging out of Twitter. I appreciate Elon for allowing me to vent. It has been very cathartic to use the world as a sounding board.”
Then his feed went dead. That also felt like part of Kanye’s performance art; he took his trolling and his Jew-hatred as far as it could go, then ended it all when he thought that he'd had his say.
Here's the thing. Kanye is rich as fuck. He had lots of rich, famous friends. He’s accomplished just about everything a rapper/producer can achieve, but his heart lies in being an asshole to strangers on the internet.
The same is true of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. They’re so rich and so powerful that they can do anything, but what they choose to do, what they see as their true purpose, is be obnoxious online.
Kanye does it better than either man because he is a writer, an artist, and funny, both intentionally and unintentionally.
At one point in his rant, he bragged about turning down three requests from Make-a-Wish kids in wheelchairs. I’m not sure that was intended as a joke, but that’s pretty fucking funny in a very dark way.
It’s not funny enough, however, to justify his heel turn into the world’s most anti-semitic, self-hating black man.
Kanye sees trolling on Twitter as an art form, but he’d be better off doing literally anything else, except, I dunno, starting up a more racist, extreme version of the Proud Boys. On second thought, maybe it’d be best if Kanye kept his cruelty online instead of bringing his hatred of women and Jews into the real world in an even more aggressive fashion.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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