No one wants to deal with this. There’s no golden arrow, no silver bullet for the social media unraveling of a celebrity. There’s no good feeling to be won by correctly identifying that, in fact, Kanye West has not been red-pilled but is actually just marketing a new album. There’s no power in denigrating his praise for President Donald Trump and Peter Thiel, nor is there meaning in providing the empathy earned from an artist we’ve come to love. There’s nothing to do, really, other than watch and wonder.
Like thousands of people my age, Kanye West acted as a kind of a mirror. Sometimes, it was the type you’d find in a department store dressing room, tilted, slimming, aspirational. Sometimes it was the kind the Evil Queen in Snow White would gaze upon — a mask for the hideous. It felt like the mirror shattered today. Across 15 years, Kanye has been a maker of things that people love and a maker of statements people love to hate. But his music — the thing that keeps his followers invested — has routinely been coronated as innovative, rewarding, exciting, incisive, delirious, vulnerable, ferocious, and restorative. He’s a waterfall — a sight to behold and dangerous. In the days since he returned to Twitter, a social media application that has changed the world and makes people feel miserable with a grave profundity, Kanye has clipped the barbed wire around his mind and begun espousing the empty phraseology of alt-right thinkers who rallied around President Trump.
This isn’t exactly new — Kanye visited Trump Tower shortly after the 2016 election and was photographed with the president. And Kanye has always fancied himself a seer. “They made us hate ourself and love they wealth,” he rapped on his first album. He has a self-possession and certitude that is easy to fall for and even easier to turn on. This string of recent statements — including a show of support for the conservative commentator Candace Owens, misinterpreting the message of Get Out, sporting a Make America Great Again hat alongside two wealthy middle-aged media executives, and plainly praising the president’s administration and his ideology — has been delivered in the same style of all of his previous “rants.” Brisk, erratic, propulsive, dubious statements that are both enthralling and worrying. From 2013: “No matter how they try to control you, or the motherfucker next to you tries to peer pressure you, you can do what you motherfucking want. I am Picasso. I’m Walt Disney, I’m Steve Jobs.” From 2010: “I feel very alone very used very tortured very forced very misunderstood very hollow very very misused. I don’t trust anyone but myself! Everyone has an agenda. I don’t do press anymore. I can’t be everything to everybody anymore. I can’t be everybody’s hero and villain savior and sinner Christian and anti Christ!” From 2008: “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!” From 2006: “If I don’t win, the awards show loses credibility.” Simply Google “Kanye rant” and “[year]” and you’ll find numerous examples expressed on his blog, his Twitter account, at awards shows, during telethons, on stage, and from the bowels of his home. Kanye West is very online.
But this feels different and more damaging now. The intellectual parameters of his new approach are rigorous and unfair — if we don’t have the same point of view, the rest of us are just sheeple. This is a uniquely 2018 vision of dialogue — agree with me or you are a deluded fool. Is it silly to feel sincerely bad about the way a musician is communicating on a social media platform? Perhaps. It could indicate a descension further into the ravine of confusion and obsession that constant connection allows. But that same connection with Kanye allowed for a great deal of joy in my life. I’ve interviewed and spoken with him several times in my career, profiling him for magazines and watching him present his music in private settings. He has been, by turns, kind and inattentive, despotic and thoughtful. He has asked me detailed questions about the origins of my socks and also about my mother. He has yelled at me and fallen asleep in the middle of one of our conversations. Most of these interactions were nearly 10 years ago, and people change. His story was extraordinary to tell, and his willingness to perform his life in interviews is an undeniable element of his rise. He willed it with words. As Kanye became the centrifugal force of modern celebrity culture in the past decade, marrying the princess of that same culture, he amplified every aspect of his persona — louder, more fearless, more aggrieved. He is impossible to look away from, unable to be reconciled. We can coyly say we miss the old Kanye, but he never really left. He just grew more defiant.
I haven’t looked away since his return to Twitter, and have been reckoning with whether a rapper’s personal politics or mental health or private life ought to have any effect on the quality of my day. Put your faith in the famous at your own peril; many of them are horrific people with terrible ideas. But when your work and personal life are bound up in the actions of famous people, you’re bound to be disappointed. The gentler way to view this is to adopt some of the awoken brain chemistry that Kanye has been applying, a through-the-looking-glass ideology that is internet culture writ large. Not “Maybe he’s onto something,” but “Maybe we all need to reevaluate how we see the world.” It’s certainly spreading. Then you see something like this.
What to do? Watch and wonder. Hope this actually is a simulation. Retweet with a clever emoji. Worryingly text your friends. Unfollow. Earlier today my colleagues Justin Charity and Rob Harvilla sought to unpack everything that’s happened with Kanye in the past week, and found themselves searching for the same contempt and empathy that I’ve sought, in part because both of them have spent a great deal of time watching and analyzing his career. Kanye West doesn’t really care. He’s still got jokes. The bigger worry I have is whether I should. I’ve not been discouraged from checking out the album he’s promised for June 1 — if I’m being honest, I’ve never anticipated one of his albums more. How grotesque. The Kanye West delusion is not one from which he’s suffering, but we are. It’s the lie that he — or anyone — is just like us, struggling against a machine, aching to express ourselves as clearly as possible. He isn’t us, but we’re in this together. “My fans are fans of themselves” is as true an aphorism as he’s spun this week. The thrum of captured tweets, aggregated content, aimless think pieces, and random internet ephemera is just another day in a paradise of our own design. When we ask for everything from the famous, sometimes we get it.
