Wake Up Mr. West

After three listening parties and a variety of other media stunts, Kanye West’s highly-anticipated album Donda was released on August 29th. I was supposed to write a review of the twenty-seven-song album, but after he revealed Marilyn Manson, DaBaby, and Chris Brown were part of the project, I no longer felt this was a beneficial task. In February, Manson was outed by former partner Evan Rachel Wood, alongside other women, as being sexually abusive and manipulative. Additionally, DaBaby directed a slew of homophobic comments to the crowd of Rolling Loud in July, causing him to be removed from future festival dates. Chris Brown has had multiple charges of sexual abuse and violence towards women for over a decade. 

I have defended Kanye more than most, and I continue to listen to his music regularly, which some have abandoned after the onslaught of toxic public appearances and personal choices he has made in the last several years. It has gotten to the point where Kanye’s desire for the spectacle and the provocative has nearly blinded him, and while this behavior has been going on for some time, at least the music was better then. 

This notion, that the relationship between quality of work and the excusing of intolerable behavior is linear, is somewhat hard to digest. Everyone has those we pardon or defend, and the greater impact an individual has had, and the more opportunity they were given or created to touch someone’s lives, the more freedom they have to act reckless and remain relevant. In addition, the more a public figure’s direct personality is part of their performance, the harder it is to excuse their behaviors. For example, sports player’s political opinions or violence against women is rarely held to the same standard as it is, say, actors, who viewers have to watch more directly without interruption. In every corner of the professional world there are people who have done awful things, and there are endless degrees of nuance when trying to compare problematic individuals, making it quite arbitrary. How does one reconcile Tom Cruise (vocal Scientologist) with Woody Allen (pedophile)? JK Rowling (transphobic) with Sylvia Plath (racist and anti-semitic remarks)? Coco Chanel (Nazi) with Alexander Wang (accused of sexual misconduct)? These propositions are not useful in terms of reaching an answer or taking capricious sides, though I think an awareness of the complications of denouncing human lives is. 

Kanye seems to have dwelled in fame and abundance for so long he has become a parody of his former self. I think he gets off on seeing those who stand by him in blind devotion and his ability to continuously dominate the music news cycle despite the onslaught of “who cares?” comments. I hesitate on ruminating too much on Kanye as a person because the level of his fame is far from my comprehension, in addition to his mental illness that does not fully excuse his behavior, but is also an undeniable factor. Listening to Donda this morning, and hearing Kanye’s mother speak on the track that shares her name and the album’s, I was reminded of her death and how it was weaponized. When Kanye went on the Jay Leno Show to apologize to Taylor Swift and how he acted at the 2009 VMA Awards, Leno said to him, “I was fortunate enough to meet your mom and talk with your mom a number of years ago, what do you think she would have said about this?” Kanye begins to cry and it is clear he is a man who is hurting and has no idea how to deal with his grief in such a public space, while Leno reclines in his seat smugly, seeming to believe this was a legitimate journalistic pursuit. Soon after, Kanye then escaped the public eye and sought refuge in isolation, creating My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in the process. Do we forgive his cruelty because of the hurt he was struggling to come to terms with, or because the result was one of greatest feats in production and contemporary music at large? Do we seek empathy for a person in pain or do we look past this complicated scenario and instead focus on the resulting artistic excellence? 

In Roman mythology, there is a concept of Rota Fortunae, or Wheel of Fortune, which states the higher one climbs, subsequently the harder they will fall. It is a sort of karmic explanation, and I think it is helpful in understanding how the celebrity can become so distorted or act with such carelessness that causes them to lose all the resources or respect they were so fortunate to receive in the first place. Because Kanye has yet to really test the bounds of legality in his controversies, he cannot be compared as easily to some of his polemical peers. He instead pushes the limit as to what he can get away with, and to some he is no longer worth paying attention to. Considering his immense ego, this is perhaps the hardest blow. For a lack of a better word, I really hate that he is standing in solidarity with chauvinist abusers. On “Violent Crimes,'' Kanye raps, “‘Cause now I see women as something to nurture/ Not somethin’ to conquer,” being enlightened at 36-years-old to the humanity of women after having a daughter, and then just a few months later releasing the vapid and offensive “I Love It” with Lil Pump. I do not expect to look to Kanye for feminist theory, but for him to put his mother on a pedestal and include an homage to feminist poet Gwendolyn Brooks and then go out of his way to promote individuals who threaten women and queer spaces is not artistry, but cowardice. Not to mention, in an age with an abundance of popular, incredible female rappers, not one made the cut for Donda, which itself has around twenty features. 

These words will probably disappear into the void of discourse on Kanye and cancel culture, and probably for good reason since this has all been said before and I cannot tell if it is even worthwhile to say. I do know that the moral and ethical shortcomings of those we elevate are worth acknowledging over ignoring. Ignorance is never bliss when it comes to holding people accountable, and this is a necessary practice in order to create a world with less violence and suffering. The hope is that to be wary and critical of celebrities, with whom it is easier to remove personal attachments, will create values that will trickle down into one’s own life. Kanye is no role model, and he is no saint no matter what his nickname may suggest. While I hope he reaches a place where he no longer does harm unto others or himself, I am giving up on hoping that he is a person who more closely resembles my values than he lets on. The great bell hooks writes, “We have power as consumers. We can exercise that power all the time by not choosing to invest time, energy, or funds to support the production and dissemination of mass media images that do not reflect life-enhancing values, that undermine a love ethic.” While writing this essay may not have been the best exercise of this quote, I aim to keep hooks’ words in mind when moving through the world. Ask yourself “Who does this harm?” The answer may not always be pretty, and sometimes may even be overlooked, but at the end of the day, the important thing is to ask.