Maybe he’s the defining voice of Hip Hop’s most recent generation. Or maybe he’s a sideshow cloaked in elaborate clothing and one, simple lie—the idea that his overhyped, unremarkable ends justify all these bizarre means.
The Beautiful Dark Twisted Truth About Kanye West
“Who is Kanye West?” As his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy hits stores this week, it’s a question that has more answers than ever before.
You might hear he’s the most vulnerable, honest, and conflicted artist of this generation. As gifted a producer as anybody in the history of music. So gifted, he can make himself sound credible as a rapper, the skeptics would respond. But then, even today, plenty of Americans still don’t know him as a musician. He’s just that militant black dude that keeps popping up on TV and causing trouble.
As Kanye raps on this latest album, “What’s a black Beatle anyway? A fuckin roach?” But hearing that amidst all this confusion, it’s fair to ask: “Who said Kanye was a black Beatle, anyway?”
...And there’s the rub.
Nobody can deny Kanye’s gifts, but Kanye definitely can’t deny Kanye’s gifts. The problem is, if you focus on the second clause in that sentence, you shortchange the first, and it just detracts from your ability to enjoy some of the most engaging, varied, inventive and—above all—intricate music being made in 2010.
The perfect sample here, the perfect keys there. High-minded and profound in one heartbeat, crude and debased in the next. More than anything else on Kanye’s Fantasy, what shines through is his attention to detail. Nothing’s done by accident. The heavy breathing at the end of Hell of a Life, the carnival of sounds and samples on Power, the whiny instruments in the middle of Devil In A New Dress, and of course, the soft piano keys of Runaway set to the raw, ugly confessions of a self-proclaimed scumbag. All of these are conscious choices that Kanye makes.
The layers of sounds and themes take hold sub-consciously, and the end result is an album that’s impossible to stop listening to, and even harder to explain. Blame Game, though, is where Kanye as an artist comes into focus. It’s a song about a breakup where he raps honestly about the conflicted world of emotions that arise therein.
”I took a piss and dismissed it /
and I went and found somebody else /
... ‘Till about 2 a.m. and I call back and I hang up and I start to blame myself /
somebody help”
Later, he stops the song to recite a poem on heartbreak by Chloe Mitchell:
Things used to be, now they’re not /
anything but us is who we are /
disguising ourselves as secret lovers, we’ve become public enemies /
We walk away like strangers in the street, gone for eternity /
We erase one another /
So far from where we came, with so much of everything, how did we leave with nothing? /
Lack of visual empathy equates the meaning of L.O.V.E. /
Hatred and Attitude Tear us Entirely.
It’s dark, brooding, poignant... And next to the piano on the beat, underneath Kanye’s vulnerability and John Legend’s chorus, it’s art. The song resonates. Not for those reasons, though, but because of Chris Rock’s insanely profane interlude talking to the fictional ex.
“Yo, you took your pussy game up and a whoooole ‘nother level. This is some cirque du soleil pussy now! Shit! You done went all porno on a ni**a.”
After Kanye’s emotional back-and-forth, the poetry, the John Legend... We get this bizarre, rambling exchange from Chris Rock that makes him sound like the biggest hedonist in the world, and then you picture Kanye in the studio cheering this on, and you can’t help but question Kanye, too. It’s the sort of thing that really begs the question that everyone’s going to be asking this week, as he takes over the music world one more time: Who the fuck is Kanye West?
The answer goes back to what we mentioned earlier—Kanye is the artist so gifted and preternaturally honest with his music that he can make a song like “Blame Game” emerge from the studio heartbreaking and profound and pretty much perfect. But he’s so keenly aware of his talent that he’s audacious enough to jeopardize his perfect song about heartbreak by adding a three-minute soliloquy to “Cirque Du Soleil pussy” from Chris Rock. Then he’ll justify it all by calling the juxtaposition an exhibition of his soul, or something. And maybe his logic rings true, maybe not.
Either way, though: What’s the point? Why must he make this harder on himself?
That’s the riddle with Kanye, in general.
He’s turned himself into an artist that’s impossible to stop listening to, and even harder to love. The first is accomplished through an ungodly work ethic and a pathological attention to detail. The second is more effortless. Because you can’t love what you can’t explain, and with each passing album, even Kanye sounds like he’s struggling more and more just to understand himself.
For instance, when an NPR host asked Jay-Z about misogyny in Hip Hop, Jay answered calmly, explaining that where he’s from, relationships are dysfunctional on both sides. The poet, he explains, is just reflecting on his own experience. And when Gross asks whether Jay inhabits that character when he’s making music today, he corrects her, and explains that if you look closely, the themes in his music have evolved. From Ain’t No Ni**a to Big Pimpin, then to Song Cry, to Bonnie And Clyde, and finally, to Venus vs. Mars. He’s gone from rapping about hood rats to heartbreak to his committed relationship, and finally, to rapping about the frustrations of that arrangement.
With Kanye, he’s gone from Never Let Me Down to Gold Digger to Drunk and Hot Girls to See You In My Nightmares, and now to this latest album. One minute he’s serenading a Devil in a New Dress, and the next, he’s the scumbag on Runaway who hooks up with a pornstar in Hell of a Life and ditches her by the end of the night. Then on the next song, he’s cursing himself in Blame Game.
How do you make sense of someone so clearly struggling with his own sense of himself?
Answer: You don’t really have to. Kanye’s confusion manifests itself in different ways, but he’s honest about it. As fame and success have turned him into something more complex, he’s not afraid to air his frustrations with himself. And whether he’s unreasonably crude, laughably brash, or painfully self-loathing—whether he’s the defining voice of his generation, a militant black dude causing trouble, or a sideshow cloaked in elaborate clothes and one, simple lie—there’s one common denominator to all of it. The confusion makes for compelling music, and a character unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
You don’t need to empathize with Kanye or embrace his character to appreciate what he’s doing. If you can get past the uneven exterior, the art is good enough to resonate independent of the artist. And as for Kanye the artist, who everybody listens to but nobody loves? ... “Who is Kanye West?”
He’s an artistic genius, and like any other genius, it’s at least partially a curse. He’s bound to his work and obsessed with his legacy, driving himself deeper into his own subconscious to understand and harness his emotions. And even as he shares too much of himself or indulges in the figurative Chris Rock interlude that makes him look petty and confused, the genius just comes into sharper focus. He’s falling farther and farther from the guy he was when he told his story on Last Call or joked about a Workout Plan for ghetto chicks.
Back then, he was just a producer who wanted everyone to listen to his rap, and his candor and enthusiasm were refreshing. Now that everybody’s listening, the candor’s still there, but the enthusiasm has been replaced by this emotional wandering as he figures out what he wants to say. And as he drifts further into the no-man’s land reserved for artistic geniuses, his star keeps rising, and the music only gets more interesting.
The truth is, Kanye may be cursed, but it’s a gift to the rest of us. Buy the album and enjoy it.
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