Boy Was I Wrong About Kanye West!
It is a testament to how unhealthily invested I am in the life and career of Kanye West that he was the subject of my very first major piece of fiction. In 2017 I was moved to write a short novella about the relationship between Donald Trump and Kanye West called Kanye & Trump because, as someone who had experienced a life-changing manic episode, I felt like I understood what Kanye was going through and why he was acting the way he did.
How crazy is that? Is it possible for anyone to really understand another person, let alone an enigma like Kanye West?
In my foolish narcissism I thought that I knew what Kanye was experiencing because I had gone through something roughly analogous when I was following Phish in the Summer of 2011 for my book You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me.
I saw Kanye’s intense identification with Trump as a sort of spiritual and emotional fever that would rage bright and hot and then burn itself out quickly.
That’s the essence of a manic episode: what’s happening to you feels real and intense and important in the moment but with the benefit of hindsight and perspective, as well as the appropriate medication, you realize that you were in the grips of a profound madness that presented itself as reality.
Since I discovered that the wunderkind producing beats for Jay-Z and the rest of Roc-A-Fella was also a rapper with a story and an ego as big as his beats I’ve identified with Kanye on an unhealthy level.
I identified with Kanye’s ambition and alternating currents of self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement, although part of Kanye’s descent has involved abandoning self-deprecation and self-awareness for Messianic self-mythologizing that would embarrass Michael Jackson.
I loved Kanye’s music. I related to it. For years I had a ritual where I would play Kanye’s “Touch the Sky” before sending off an important email as a good luck charm, a silly superstition.
Because I love, or rather loved, Kanye’s music I projected all manner of positive qualities onto him. Surely the man who gave the world The College Dropout and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy couldn’t be a terrible human being!
Someone who wrote so sensitively about race and class and ego couldn’t support a monster like Donald Trump, could they? So I wrote a novella with a happy ending where Kanye wakes up from his manic fever and realizes what a fraud Trump is and has always been.
How could I have gotten things so wrong? How could I have written something ostensibly based in truth that so egregiously mischaracterized the nature of Kanye’s relationship with Trump and his mind state?
For starters, I guess I thought that I understood Kanye because we has similar struggles with mental illness and bipolar disorder in particular. But I realize now that our struggles were different and that you cannot understand another person’s madness from the outside, even if you know them very well.
I would go further and say that it can be difficult to understand your own mental illness from the inside as well. That’s part of what we’re seeing now: Kanye does not understand what’s happening to him, what caused it, or how to treat it, so he’s lashing out in anger and confusion in every direction.
I also wanted to believe that Kanye West was, on a fundamental level, a good person. I wanted to believe that he was a force for good in the universe. I wanted to believe that behind all of the bluster and arrogance, the performative obnoxiousness and trolling lie a big heart, a loving soul and someone who genuinely wanted to make the world a better place.
I also assumed that Kanye’s flirtation with the hate-fueled right wing politics of Trump and Candace Owens was just a weird, passing obsession and not a permanent shift in his perception of the world.
I did not want to believe that someone I identified with so strongly, that I thought I understood, could fall for such hateful rhetoric from such clear-cut grifters.
I was wrong. I was very wrong. I thought that Kanye was a good person who would quickly abandon Alt-Right, White Supremacist politics when he now seems deeply committed to the racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia fueling Donald Trump’s toxic cult of personality.
It’s surreal and sad watching Kanye ineptly parroting Breitbart talking points about white men being the most oppressed, persecuted and wronged demographic in existence and George Floyd’s death being anything other than murder.
I’m tempted to say that we lost Kanye but it’s increasingly apparent that we never really knew him at all, just the person we wanted and desperately needed him to be.
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