“Kanye, can I talk to you for a minute? Me and the other billionaires was wondering could you do a lil’ som, something beautiful, something that the chuds is goin’ love when they hear it! That’s goin’ make them start oinking up and down and sharing fake FBI stats an’ stuff. Think you could probably do something for the chuds for graduation to sing?!”
Kanye’s starting off 2019 in the most Kanye way he can Kanye. Despite his previous statements to “keep out of politics“, he seems to have done a Kanye and Kanye’d back to that new old new Kanye.
Oh boy, here we go. But wait, didn’t he just drop this shit like two months?
He did, or at least he says he did. Alrighty then: new year, new Ye. This is goddamn depressing, because his music is so goddamn good. It’s really just exhausting being a Kanye fan. I thought he was done with this, like it was fad like planking for racists or something.
Okay, so let’s be real: Kanye didn’t necessarily lie. The real truth is that Kanye actually doesn’t really have any real clear “politics” to betray. I mean, what policies does Ye actually advocate for that Trump proposes? I mean in a tangible sense. Dragon energy? Cosmic vibes? Pleasant odors?
What the fuck is going on?
Here’s some “politics” he actually says he stood for in October, 90 mins before he decides to just drop “politics” all together:
None of this stuff is an actual policy position, but rather an aspiration or goal, and all of them are expressly not a Trump policy. That’s Kanye’s mode: a feeling, a sense of something, even if ephemeral but inoffensively positive. There’s no demand here, just some euphemisms that read like campaign platitudes. Expecting some sort of systemic critique is asking too much, perhaps, but this is a guy whose chosen to voice his opinion. No market force demanded he do this.
Since Trump is completely vacuous, someone as surface-thin as Kanye can attribute whatever they want to him. He’s a God-Emperor, a businessman, a violent thug, a buff plumber, the destroyer AND savior of America. Whatever folks need him to be, Trump is, because he is nothing. And for Kanye, Trump is like a blank wall he can paint whatever he needs him to be.
The MAGA hat is the most obvious representation of this. For Kanye, it’s a Rorschach blot. He is attracted to the rebirth concept of it, grafting his own experience onto an ideology that simply isn’t compatible and does not mesh with the perpetuation of it. Kanye wants the good stuff, the “greatness”, the rising, the feeling of being dynamic and creative, when MAGA actually means placing white identity at the center of American life once again in its entirety, and expressing cruelty and dominance over perceived weakness.
Kanye loves to talk about love in the abstract, in between advertising Tidal and his hobo clothes the color of plumber’s caulk. It is no small irony he is married to the most famous person in the world who is famous for being famous. Also that Kardashian was one of the few people Trump actually listened to. Because she and Kanye are famous and validate Trump’s pathetic desire for that validation. Alice Marie Johnson is no one to Trump, and commuting her sentence gains or loses him nothing but the approval of a famous TV person (which is all he ever wanted in the first place).
Ye himself said on Jimmy Kimmel:
“It’s not about policies ’cause I’m not a politician like that, but it represented overcoming fear and doing what you felt no matter what anyone said and saying you can’t bully me, liberals can’t bully me, news can’t bully me, the hip-hop community, they can’t bully me.
Because at that point, if I’m afraid to be me, I’m no longer Ye. That’s what makes Ye. And I actually quite enjoy when people actually are mad at me about certain things.”
Good job standing against the “bullies”, not thousands of activists horrified by Trump’s barbarism. He is authentically confusing, a good faith troll. He means what he says, most likely, but he’s not saying anything with substance. He wants to be an iconoclast for the sake of being one. Yet rather instead of being an icon for his musical talent or artistry, he’s more interested in stirring the cesspool so the camera swivels to him. He’s becoming more known for being outrageous than actually having anything to say artistically: an icon who’s an icon because he so desperately wants to be one. Sound familiar?
Back at his most famous ad-lib, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people“, Ye wasn’t lying. And it’s also not strange that he has an affinity for Trump, a fellow “icon” beset by enemies on all sides. George W. Bush, despite getting all weepy when his dad finally died, is a racist, sociopathic monster, a war criminal with few equals, but his worst crime in Ye’s eyes was being part of a curated elite, a favored son of Yale, and back before the current moment, had spat in the face of the Chocolate City. In 2005, Katrina was the first real crack in the Bush facade, revealing an incompetent, destructive leader. He sees Trump as being somehow not this, buying in completely to the man’s fake image of outsider-ness.
Kardashian was quoted in USA Today:
In fact, she said West is “very not political, actually. He just happens to like Donald Trump’s personality but doesn’t know about the politics,” adding, “He will always say he was friendly with (Trump) before, and he’s the same person and friendly with him now…. but he’s just fighting for free thought and the freedom to like a person, even if it’s not the popular decision.”
Oh, gotcha. Clear as mud. It’s about free thought and expression. I assure you, Ye, the red-faced white people screaming about refugee Super AIDS and pedophile pizza parlors have little interest in free thought and expression, especially when they call bland corporate media the harbingers of Marxist propaganda.
It’s also doesn’t help that Kanye has the attention span of a gnat. His Twitter is choked with self-congratulatory RT’s and a bizarrely large collection of Ye tattoos. It’s no wonder he loves the tattoos from fans: he wants that same permanence, as flat and 2 dimensional as it is, the ink is still in the skin.
Reporting you’re literally off your meds, Tweeting bumper sticker slogans every minute for hours, then radio silence for days smells like a manic episode. He’s been open about his bipolar, which is not the same as de-stigmatizing it. His desire to change the conversation on mental health also doesn’t help if he adheres himself to a violent white supremacist ideology that has a literal body count, meanwhile engaging in increasingly erratic behavior. In a recent song Yikes, he sings about how bipolar is a “superpower”, ending it with a bizarre scream.
(Also, Kanye, maybe you shouldn’t encourage your teenage audience to stop taking prescribed medication because you think it turns you into Musical Iron Man or some shit.)
Kanye just likes people who have become brands: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, his wife, Trump, etc. They represent a level of success that transcends wealth, to the point they have become their products and are inextricable from them. Brands are lifestyle machines, not products like phones, electric cars, or steaks from Sharper Image. These walking brands excrete the appearance of freedom, when in fact they are trapped by their brand management, prisoners of their own making. This is your brain on capitalism, deep-fried to a crisp, thinking a guy in a black turtleneck was literally making the iPhone himself with a soldering iron.
What’s most distressing about this about-face back into MAGA is his return to good ol’ internalized racism via his critique of the Democratic Party as a “black plantation”. Trust me, you can dunk on the Democratic Party plenty without this crap. Remember, Ye had a big row with Candace Owens over her Blexit bullshit, distancing himself from the entire astroturf movement.
Besides the inappropriate allusion to slavery, it also posits black people as incapable of making their own decisions in political affiliation, along with some not-so-subtle welfare queen comments straight out of 1980 Reagan. Pretty saucy coming from a multimillionaire with a clothing line made by borderline slaves themselves.
Despite this, he also cut a $200K check to 2019 Chicago mayoral candidate Amara Enyia, a Democrat. You can 100% be a person of color and not automatically a Democrat, but that doesn’t mean, if you’re not that, you have to be a MAGA psycho. It’s not an either-or. (Check out the Black Socialists of America if you’re looking for a genuinely different narrative.)
When it comes to Trump and race, Kanye’s in another galaxy on this:
“He will do the things that are necessary to make that happen because he’s got an ego like all the rest of us, and he wants to be the greatest president, and he knows that he can’t be the greatest president without the acceptance of the black community,” the rapper added. “So it’s something he’s gonna work towards, but we’re gonna have to speak to him.”
Uh huh.
The absolute blind spot he has for Trump isn’t going to gain him any diehard MAGA fans, who would be rightfully unwelcome at a Kanye concert, surrounded by people of color they resent and its more extremist elements even consider to be sub-human. What does he expect to happen exactly? Positive vibes and free love to flow from a man who exudes cultural resentment and joyful sadistic cruelty? Trump doesn’t agree with a single thing Kanye has ever supported, not in a meaningful way, but that doesn’t matter. They’re Dragon Energy Chi Brothers from Planet X, birthed from the Phantom Dimension to bring peace, love, joy, and creative aura to someone to do something positive for “the community”.
I don’t know anymore. According to Ye, oxygen costs twenty dollars, GTA IV car mods are cool, and he has a sick green aura. The Bible is his favorite app, but he loves that you’re such a fuckin’ ho.
In conclusion, Kanye is a land of contrasts.
“What in the FUCK was that, Kanye?! I told you to do some shit for the chuds!”
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.