Ragebait

The Ordeal of Kanye West

Leda and the Swan, Wang Xingwei 2007

The victim of a malodorous disease which renders him abhorrent to society and periodically degrades him and makes him helpless is also the master of a superhuman art which everybody has to respect and which the normal man finds he needs.
~ Edmund Wilson, Philoctetes, The Wound and the Bow

He wanted music be so good that lyrics wouldnt stop us from listenin
~ MKbaba69 (YouTube comment, ‘WW3’)

How old was I when I first noticed Kanye West? It was probably that ridiculous ‘Touch The Sky’ video with him as Evel Knievel and Pamela Anderson, but I’m not sure the music stood out, compared with the music he was making for Jay-Z and Beyoncé. His cinematic sound was everywhere long before his name, face and voice became familiar, indeed I’m still not sure I can recognize Kanye’s voice in a crowd. Hayley mentions ‘All Falls Down ft. Syleena Johnson’, his pop take on Black female ambition, as her entrée, and its bounce and strum sound familiar. I definitely noticed ‘Gold Digger’ but could I tell you what was original in it? I noticed Kanye with some respect when he sampled Can’s ‘Sing Swan Song’ for ‘Drunk and Hot Girls’ on Graduation; it merits an entry on Horrible Music Wiki as that album’s weakest track. The track, which was 2 years in production, and 5 minutes 14 seconds long, samples a waltz - how many hip hop tracks do that - and feels as drunk as its subjects undoubtedly were.
In all likelihood, the first Kanye West track I really liked was Estelle’s ‘American Boy’, which, as time goes by, stands out from the pop of its day more and more by combining a romantic, jazzy melodic flow with a pumping house beat that still sounds modern, maybe the classiest thing he ever did. His rapping’s good too.

At some point, I bought a cheap copy of 808s and Heartbreak from JB Hi-Fi. There was something about the sound of ‘Heartless’ I liked, the Autotune, the 808 sub-bass, these were new sounds to me, the ‘Heartless’ tune was good, but a whole album of it didn’t get played much.

My relationship with Kanye stepped up considerably when one of the kids, then both far too young to be listening to such things, burned a CD of My Dark Twisted Fantasy from YouTube mp3s and insisted on playing it on the lengthy car trips we took regularly in those days. King Crimson samples and Black Sabbath riffs? Okay, this guy is actually interesting, squaring the circle of the black & white musicks so well. And ‘Runaway’ wasn’t just a good song, it was refreshingly self-aware for the hit it became.

She find pictures in my email
I sent this bitch a picture of my dick
I don't know what it is with females
But I'm not too good at that shit
See, I could have me a good girl
And still be addicted to them hoodrats
And I just blame everything on you
At least you know that's what I'm good at

And I always find, yeah, I always find
Yeah, I always find something wrong
You been puttin' up with my shit just way too long
I'm so gifted at finding what I don't like the most
So, I think it's time (so, I think it's time) for us to have a toast

Let's have a toast for the douchebags
Let's have a toast for the assholes
Let's have a toast for the scumbags
Every one of them that I know
Let's have a toast for the jerk-offs
That'll never take work off
Baby, I got a plan
Run away fast as you can

Kanye’s albums from now on are often packed with guest spots from other rappers, who tend to sound like him, and have similar nouveau riche “am I the asshole” preoccupations, as well as guest producers whose work he curates ruthlessly. It’s unusual to find a striking female voice among the guests, but Nicki Minaj dominates the hyperaggressive posse track ‘Monster’ in one of a brilliant album’s finest moments. Jockstrap dropped her isolated vocal track into their 2024 Coachella performances just to show how inscrutably cool they are.

The rich are different to you and I, and sometimes their doings are shrouded in mystery that hides realities we’ll never know. This is the case with Kanye’s unaccountable marriage to Kim Kardashian; how far it resembled a normal marriage (pace Tolstoy) and how far it was a better-resourced and more protracted version of a MAFSA tryst, we can never know. In a saner person, the toxicity that followed might be a clue, but I’m not sure, because in Kanye’s world symbols can swamp reality. Whatever the case, this liaison was a tipping point. Kim only has 2 songs (and one collab) on Spotify, many years apart, but they’re pretty good. ‘Jam (Turn It Up)’ (2011), produced by The Dream, raised money for the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Getting ahead of ourselves here, but Kim’s 2024 Christmas song ‘Santa Baby’ was something else, attracting some YouTube critique even more demented than the shit Kanye says.

It’s on Yeesus, the equally brilliant, more innovative, and far more divisive follow-up to My Dark Twisted Fantasy that some of Kanye’s choices begin to seem more than usually offensive. Exhibit A is ‘Blood On The Leaves’, which samples Nina Simone’s version of Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’. A protest song that Holiday was made to pay for in misery, a song more imbued with the pain of the African-American experience that any other, is used to contextualize, defend, or emotionally enrich - a rich man’s bitching about alimony.

You could've been somebody
We could've, ugh, we could've been somebody
Or was it on the first party
When we tried our first molly
And came out of our body
And came out of our body
Before they call lawyers
Before you tried to destroy us
How you gon' lie to the lawyer?
It's like I don't even know ya
I gotta bring it back to the 'nolia

It’s genius, but it’s also beneath him, as it’s beneath Holiday and Simone to be used as props in this way. It’s fashionable, lazy, and usually a case of the pot calling the kettle black to call people who trouble us narcissists, but Kanye in ‘Blood On The Leaves’ seems to tick every box, being shameless, arrogant, exploitative, envious, entitled, deluded, and no respecter of boundaries. It’s Art, so this is not necessarily a bad thing…yet. I couldn’t find David Crosby’s disgusted response to ‘Blood On The Leaves’ but here’s a little something from an earlier occasion.

David Lynch, in the other hand, said “‘Blood On The Leaves’ is one of my favourite songs”, and invited Kanye over to talk about making the video, though their collaboration never came to pass.

’BLKKK SKKKN HEAD’ is a song that prefigures today’s gestures, including the ‘Black KKK’ outfit; Kanye showing African Americans they can appropriate all the symbols of White intolerance. Why? Now it’s because he can’t see his kids, apparently. But at the time of Yeesus, I think he’s just captivated by a spectacle of power, represented by this bovver-booted glam stomp, for reasons both Leni Riefenstahl and Theodore Adorno would understand; a drum-heavy music, tribal and territorial, like hip hop in its prime.

Theology is the science of drawing logical conclusions from an illogical premise, and Jesus Is King, Kanye’s 2019 neo-gospel album might (alongside the 2018 Kid Cudi collaboration Kids See Ghosts) be the best work from the post-Yeezus period, perhaps because it’s not so all-about-him; listening to the self-induced trials and tribulations of Kanye West told as a black victimhood narrative has become boring (Vultures? Rich people’s problems pts 1 & 2). On Jesus Is King Kanye chooses to take a break from himself, for the most part, and to serve God best by serving his Art. By some miracle, humility actually seems to enter his soul, and the very improbability of such a thing makes much of this album a moving experience even for an unbeliever like me.

The subjects of my blogs haven’t dominated my dreams heretofore, but Kanye is an exception; his baleful, sorrowful, pitiful presence has been seeping through everything. Maybe it’s because I know far too much about European antisemitism and the pan-German movement that Hitler exploited. Raised in the aftermath of the Second World War, I’ve read the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from A-Z, watched every war documentary (until the History channel ruined that artform), read the important books - Primo Levi, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Anne Frank, Rudolf Höss, Franz Kafka, et al. But it’s 2025 and the generation raised to care about the Shoa, because Hitler’s bombs were aimed at our parents too, and our side won a war that was actually worth fighting, is dying off, as is the social capital the Jewish people earned through their martyrdom, frittered away in Israel’s neo-Zionist quest for lebensraum and collective punishment, challenged by Western left-intellectualism switching its support to Islam, undermined further by open far-right support for Israeli exceptionalism. These are the most anti-Semitic times I’ve lived through, and none of this is Kanye’s fault. He barely seems to be aware of his context - he could strengthen his position in some circles by giving Gaza as a justification, but either he doesn’t know or care about those people at all, or he’s aware that that would be going way too far, even for him.

Why is he doing it? As Freddie deBoer correctly states, obsessive bigotry, e.g. racism, misogyny, and antisemitism - is an all-too-common feature of mental illness. The structure of the KKK itself was designed in a state of delirium tremens, which is why there’s so much repetition of the letter K, involving nonsense words like Kleagle, Klux, Ku (pronounced “kyou”). Obsession and compulsion to do and say appalling things as if in the grip of demons is easy enough to understand, as is a paralyzing fear of falling into such a state. On the other hand, Ye is still surprisingly functional, and witty, for someone in the grip of mental disintegration. Syd Barret only managed 2 LPs, Alexander Spence one, once separated from reality. So you do have to wonder if it’s all an act, with some ulterior motive, some long view only Ye can see with his bipolar superpowers. Kanye has, for example, always made repeated jibes against the white establishment, from the black American point of view, in his raps, including ‘All Falls Down’, to give only one example among hundreds.

'Cause they made us hate ourself and love they wealth
That's why shorty's hollerin', "Where the ballers at?"
Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack
And a white man get paid off of all of that

He’s still making claims like these, statements that are “woke” in the original meaning of that word. If he’s still up against whiteness, then there’s nothing the White establishment hates more than white supremacy, which is associated with Poor Whites, with failure and resentment. They’re doing extremely well without it, prospering unfairly just by checking their privilege. To be reminded of the old ideas by one of their Black heroes behaving badly (another pet hate of white elites) must really get under their skin. I expect Ye finds this very amusing. He virtually says this in his stupid ‘Heil Hitler’ song.¹

They don’t understand the things I say on Twitter…
N*gga Heil Hitler.
All my n*ggas Nazis, n*gga Heil Hitler…²

I can understand this - who doesn’t want to fuck off entire sections of Twitter? In my 60’s-70’s childhood, “Heil Hitler”, with the Hitler salute, was what people said if they felt brave enough to mock some overbearing authority figure - cop, teacher, parent, union rep. At them, not with them - no-one misunderstood the gesture as connoting support for literally Hitler. The performative Nazi offensiveness of punk, degenerating into the more vicious bootboy version, as well as the appropriation of Nazi pageantry by the Mongrel Mob gang, put a stop to that. But if this is what Kanye means, the joke against Twitter scolds falls flat because of his association with antisemitism, which makes him look like the Nazi. And he’s digging ever deeper holes, for example by befriending Nick Fuentes, an openly anti-Semitic influencer, and including him as an adviser in the ‘Heil Hitler’ sessions.³ Perhaps, goaded by delusions of a Jesus-like calling, he really thinks he can be credited with bringing all people together and reconciling all competing ideologies by rejecting none; he suggested something like this when he first visited Hitler Trump in the White House. Ideas, though, are superficial; Hitler, the swastika, and the Klansman robes are some of the most potent fetishes of our anglophone tribe, and Ye is the unholy fool whom the Gods have chosen to parade them.

All this Hitler shit has to be dealt with, but it’s not my reason for penning these words. In this tweet, and with this pained, almost half-finished exploration of a song, Ye changed the game for rappers. Beat that, Kendrick. Don’t even try, Drake.

The cover art for ‘Cousins’ is the painting Leda mit dem Schwan by Paul Mathias Padua; which caused a scandal when it was exhibited in 1939. Luckily, it appealed to Adolf Hitler, who bought it to hang in the spare bedroom in the Berghoff. It’s possible to read more into Kanye’s choice of a Leda and the Swan image than just the Hitler joke. I hope Eva liked the painting, I wonder if Bianca does.

If ‘Cousins’ had come first, would Ye have gone Nazi? If Ye hadn’t braved going Nazi, would he have found the courage to release ‘Cousins’? The music is memorable, more structured than it first seems, and closely follows the lyric; it’s also, like much of Kanye’s oeuvre, hard to categorize, because his choices are his, his designs reconstructions from elements of current and past trends instead of attempts to fit in with them. Indeed, made by an unknown, ‘Cousins’ would be classed as Outsider music, the latter day electronica equivalent of Skip Spence’s Oar.⁴

Only a day later, Kanye is exploiting his ‘Cousins’ story in his custody war with Kim; as reported in the LA Times, he seems to be accusing her family of “white supremacy” machinations.

”On the day Kobe Bryant died, the family went to Kylie Jenner’s house where, he said, vintage Playboy magazines were ‘strategically placed within arms reach of every child in that house which was every half black baby’.
He suggested that people would know ‘who was behind that’ and said that as a father, he had ‘wanted to change that for my kids.’”

So much for him being in favour of white supremacy - he can’t keep the act up for a day. If I’m confused, and you’re confused, imagine his state of mind. But I can’t help noticing that ‘WW3’, ‘Bianca’ and ‘Cousins’ are among the best things Kanye’s done, isolated from the chaotic Cuck/WW3/Bully/Donda 2 release strategy that’s attended them and that challenging PR campaign.⁵

‘Cousins’ seems to have taken the confessional streak in Kanye’s lyrics as far as it can go. Some commentators have said that this raises ethical questions - shouldn’t such things be disclosed in therapy, or in structured interviews? But Kanye isn’t some beloved child star, he’s been rapping adult content for years, and there he was the other day in a Klan robe and a swastika. He needn’t keep his trauma or his thoughts about it private, nor align it with any broadcaster or podcaster’s agenda or interests, and besides, he’s an artist — it’s his job to tell us exactly what he wants to tell us.

Better people than me think that Kayne West is a suicide risk, and he does take a lot of drugs in ‘Cousins’, nitrous, “10 percs to get high” followed by a near-death experience, 2 pints of Quagen. Let’s hope that he knows what he’s doing, and that his ego is big enough to last the distance. You too. The Cuck songs should come with a warning.

If a red swastika isn’t a warning I don’t know what is.

Algorithmic miss diagnosis - ‘ADHD’ by Paris Hilton

1. ‘WW3’ is a far better version of the Heil Hitler idea.

2. Asterisks as in the original news item. I don’t make the rules. No-one knows who does.

3. Fuentes, whose father is Mexican-American, is “part of a small but increasingly visible number of far-right provocateurs with Hispanic backgrounds who spread racist, antisemitic messages”.

4. Ye’s current work resembles Oar in that many of the songs seem to have been written around improvised bass guitar riffs, and further arrangements have stayed loose and relatively minimal. The sound and confessional style of ‘Cousins’ also resembles the groundbreaking 2012 Autotune electronica album My Teenage Dream Ended by fellow reality TV star Farrah Abraham, discussed in detail in the comments section of the last Songs From Insane Times. Abraham was inspired by Benny Benassi’s ‘Cinema’ remixes (2011). Ye has described the Skrillex remix as "one of the greatest works of art ever made".

5. ’Bianca’ is Ye’s heartbroken plea to his architect wife Bianca Censori, a redoubtable woman who seems to have finally walked out on him after reading his tweets.

She's having a panic attack and she is not liking the way that I tweeted
Until Bianca's back, I stay up all night, I'm not going to sleep
I really don't know where she's at
I'm tracking my bitch through an app
I'm tracking my bitch through the city
I guess we the new Cassie and Diddy