The Eternally Exhausting Kanye West

#Barf

For years I had a curious ritual. Before I sent out an important professional email to my agent or book editor I would listen to Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky” to psyche myself up. I saw Kanye as my personal good luck charm. By booting up “Touch the Sky”, I hoped to channel some of his swagger and bullet-proof self-confidence, his unshakable faith in his own greatness. 

For two decades now I’ve had an unusually intense relationship with an unusually intense artist. I loved Kanye as a prolific producer for Jay-Z and other artists before he became known as a rapper. So I was a huge fan way before 2004’s The College Dropout but that album affected me like few before or sense. I saw myself in Kanye’s wild oscillations between good-natured self-deprecation and crazed narcissism, in his scrappy, if not entirely accurate or truthful underdog story and burning hunger to really say something of significance, to leave an indelible imprint on the world. 

When I was trying to get my first book published, The College Dropout was both my soundtrack and my inspiration. I was proud of Kanye’s success as a rapper because I felt so emotionally invested in him, his career and his music. When people said he was obnoxious and insufferable and a talentless asshole I defended him in part by arguing that he was a genius and the rules are different for geniuses. 

I saw Kanye as someone who single-handedly made the world a more colorful, vivid and interesting place, as a source for good in the universe. Being a Kanye fan has generally not been easy. Even before the whole Trump thing, it involved an awful lot of excusing or overlooking or rationalizing terrible behavior but the rewards were substantial as well. 

Kanye put out great albums and staged elaborate, audacious concerts. I’ve paid hundreds of dollars to see Kanye perform with Jay-Z and did not regret it. The three Kanye shows I’ve been to rank among the most unforgettable and amazing concerts I’ve ever had the privilege to experience. In my estimation, College Dropout and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy are two of the best albums of the last fifty years. 

Hell, I wrote a fucking novella about Kanye’s relationship with Trump as my first real piece of published fiction. Then he inexplicably and horrifyingly hopped onboard the Trump train and it became impossible to support, or even listen to someone I unhesitatingly would have called my favorite rapper at various points in my life. 

They have fun!

Supporting Trump and meeting Trump and wearing a Make America Great Against hat and signal-boosting the holy living shit out of Candace Owens proved clear-cut deal-breakers for me. I don’t like the dude’s beats enough to overlook or excuse his embrace of Trumpism. 

On Independence Day, Kanye received a whole lot of that sweet, sweet, all-important attention that he so desperately craves when he tweeted “We must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future. I am running for president of the United States! #2020Vision.”

My response to Kanye’s “announcement” was threefold. I rolled my eyes. I let out a Dan McCoy-like exhausted sigh and I felt tired. 

As Kanye undoubtedly intended, the tweet made headlines and prompted all manner of feverish speculation. Was Kanye really running for president? If so, would he run as a Democrat, a Republican or an Independent? Would a Kanye candidacy hurt Trump or Biden? With the election only four months away, isn’t too late for Kanye, or anyone else, to launch a legitimate presidential campaign?

They say that the key to understanding Donald Trump as a politician is to take him seriously but not literally. Perhaps we should treat Kanye the same way. So while his tweet certainly seemed to suggest, if not outright assert, that he would be entering the 2020 presidential race, as evidenced by the seemingly unambiguous words, “I am running for president of the United States!” maybe in Kanye’s mind, “running for president” could also mean “launching a new shoe line”, “cutting gluten out of my diet”, “making a point of reading 9 Chickweed Lane every morning” or “buying a biography about Theodore Roosevelt off Amazon.”

All of those questions about the legitimacy or seriousness of a Kanye presidential run are ridiculous. Of course he’s not going to actually run for president after destroying much of his credibility as an artist and thinker by throwing his enormous power behind the deplorable likes of Candace Owens and Donald Trump.

It’s achingly apparent that Kanye’s presidential tweet is just another cheap publicity stunt, another desperate bid for attention from someone who can’t handle the idea that something huge is happening now—the presidential election—that does not directly revolve around him. 

Alternately, it’s his way of distancing himself from a toxic figure like Trump without doing something as banal as support the deeply uninspiring likes of Joe Biden. 

Yes, I’ve gone through all sorts of phases in my relationship with Kanye West. As of the writing of this blog post, the phase I am currently in, and will probably remain in forever, is one of complete and total exhaustion and disillusionment. 

I’m over Kanye. I really am. He meant something extraordinarily important to me throughout my adulthood but I have run out of patience for his pranks, poses and provocations. I don’t care. I just don’t fucking care anymore. 

I don’t care if this is Kanye’s idea of pop art or performance art or being a cultural disrupter. 

I never thought I’d write this, but I now find Kanye boring as well as exhausting and I suspect a lot of Kanye’s other ex-super-fans feel the same way. 

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