Perspective: You’d think that the man who altered the sound of popular music with “The College Dropout,” would be creative with his biases. Instead, his politics are modeled after the boring-est possible person: a straight white Christian bigot.
I am still working and thinking and writing my way through the ambivalence I possess about the relationship people like me — terminally online, 40-ish and once stans of Kanye West — have with Kanye West today. Is he a zeitgeist-steering demagogue? Or do we overstate his present-day influence in large part because we know that a pithy tweet about why Kanye sucks is guaranteed social capital? I lean toward the latter.
Sure, Kanye says and does things that are dumb, ignorant, ill formed, inaccurate, unsound, unhinged, untethered, misogynistic, anti-Black and antisemitic. But — and admittedly it feels odd to say “but” after that litany of defects — I think we sometimes conflate platform and influence. Despite his cultural ubiquity, I just don’t see how Kanye, in 2022, is still influential enough to sway or even slightly nudge people’s opinions on … anything other than Gap Inc.’s annual report.
But what happened — what’s been happening — is that his words and actions float on the veneer of provocation. It’s telegraphed instigation. And the politics at their core mirror the worst of White people’s, the worst of wealthy people’s, the worst of men’s, the worst of Christians’ and even the worst of college freshmen’s. I’m familiar with each, and they’re all so rote, so common, so boring. There’s nothing radical about anti-Blackness and nothing subversive about misogyny.
I am still invested in the conversations we have about him, his status, his illness and his legacy. How does his behavior affect how we assess his old music? Are we over- stating the danger of his words? How should we react to people who are both mentally illcausing harm? What’s an appropriate consequence for them? Do we have a responsibility to completely disengage? So many interesting questions.
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