In Defense of Kanye West

My love for Kanye West's music has long perplexed the people in my circle. I have been sung the "Fishstick" song a dozen of times, woke up to texts that "my boy Kanye" has done some embarrassing thing or another and my wife, after 4+ years, still gets adorably confused when I mention my love/respect/admiration for Kanye.

Now, this post isn't about whether if Kanye West is a good musician (in my humble opinion, he is) or whether if he's a jackass, but why there seems to be this huge chasm between the Kanye I know and this other Kanye that everyone else knows.

The Kanye you know, I presume?

Let's Talk about Rap For a Second: There is something uniquely American about how the narrative of the society turns on "Losers" and "Winners". These labels mostly depend on one's economic status and there are clear status symbols to mark where you fall on this spectrum. If you're a man, these status symbols are how many cars you have or how many women you slept with, as well as the size of your genitalia and how much you can "lift".

Perhaps that's why Rap, to me, also feels uniquely American as well. See, much of the contemporary, popular Rap revolves around this axis -- punctuating the journey that took the artists from being a Loser to being a Winner. Those who come from a criminal background mention it repeatedly, no matter what their current status is (Jay Z) and even those whose backgrounds aren't criminal tend to mention their hardships growing up. (Kanye West and his humble beginnings) In America, wealth might buy you stuff -- but to get respect, your roots matter. It's the journey, not the destination. We love Superman right away even though he's an alien with extraordinary powers because he's a farm boy from Kansas -- but we need the wealthy Bruce Wayne's parents to die in front of him in the most traumatizing manner.

As a result of this focus on "Winning" and the need to establish their roots; many rappers focus on autobiographical narratives. Who else is better to symbolize the journey from "being a Loser" to "being a Winner" than someone who actually went through it? In turn, they too become symbols. Jay-Z, for example, is not only a successful rapper, he's also an entrepreneur who hustled his way to the top. He was a drug dealer who dropped out of high school... Now he's on a first name basis with the President. The man is American Dream personified.

But this approach, sooner or later, ends up with everything being awesome. The rapper is now at the top of the food chain and, now having won, can only rap about Winning because that's what's going on in his life. The rapper talks about how much money/cars/girls they have and their awesome lifestyle. Also sprinkled into this mix are bizarre boasts about courage ( Jay-Z: "I played chicken with a Mac truck! Y'all muthafuckas woulda been moved!") and penis size. (Ice Cube: "And my dick runs so deep / It puts her ass to sleep!") Overall, they're focused on masculine symbols of power.

Actual lines from Rick Ross: "Celebratin' wealth, pourin Moet in her hair! / Trunk full of white, car smell like blue cheese!"

To Bring It Back To Kanye: What's Kanye's autobiographical narrative? What is he a symbol of? To most of the people I talk with, he seems to be an almost grotesque symbol of opulence, someone who is completely obsessed with showing off the myriad of ways he "Won". And I completely understand how you can get that picture if you only know him from his moments of public embarrassment and the music of his that plays on the radio. Here's a short list of Kanye West's songs that have been released as "Singles", which means they have been chosen as the most commercially viable songs to sell his albums. These are the songs of Kanye you probably know: Gold Digger, Stronger, Can't Tell me Nothing, Good Life, Diamonds of Sierra Leone, Homecoming, Love Lockdown, Amazing, Power, Niggas in Paris -- to count a few.

You will find that most of these are songs about affluence and how awesome Kanye West is. For example, take the song Amazing. It's literally three minutes of Kanye West going "I'm Amazing. It's Amazing". Here are the lyrics if you want to check them out, but it's basically a massive ego trip with lots of auto-tune. But here's the thing that sets Kanye apart: believe it or not, as opposed to many of his contemporaries, Kanye sings about being a Loser and how the idea of "Winning" through collecting status symbols is just an illusion.

Amazing is a single from Kanye West's album 808&Heartbreak which is the album he recorded after his mother's death and he broke up with his fiance of six years. Personally, bar none, it's the most depressing album I have ever listened to. It's an album filled with despair, regret and self-loathing where auto-tune is used to punctuate the hollowness. The album begins with the song Say You Will, which is a vulnerable plea to his fiance to stay ("Wish this song would really come true / I admit I still fantasize about you"). Other songs in the album include Welcome to the Heartbreak, which is a song about regret and how his material possessions are making him miserable ("Chased the good life my whole life long / Look back on my life and my life gone / Where did I go wrong?"), Coldest Winter, which is his longing for his dead mother. (It's 4 a.m. and I can't sleep / Her love is all I can see / Will I ever love again?) and the album climaxes with a live, freestyle performance, Pinocchio Story, that is just one of those songs that are so raw, they're almost painful to listen to. In this song, Kanye laments about how the wealth he "won" isn't making him happy ("There is no Louis Vuitton to put on / There is no Y.S.L. that they could sell / To get my heart out of his hell / And my mind, out of this jail") and how much he misses his mother. ("And there is no Gepetto to guide me / No one, right beside me / The only one, was behind me / I can't find her no more / I can't follow no more -- I just want to be a real boy, I just want to be a real boy")

So, in this context, the song Amazing is no longer about ego-stroking, it's about a man who has hit rock bottom trying to keep his sanity by chanting how he must be worth something.

Kanye sings about the Losers of Society: Kanye sings about blood diamonds (Diamonds from Sierra Leone), the private prison system (New Slaves) and gang violence (Murder to Excellence). And he does it in an angry, genuinely invested way, except, of course, these songs don't get airplay.

Let's take a look at Murder to Excellence. This is from the album Watch The Throne -- the big single from this album was Niggas in Paris. Backed by a fucking chilling children's chorus, here are some lyrics from Murder to Excellence:

"Is it genocide?
Cause I can still hear his momma cry, know the family traumatized
Shots left holes in his face, about piranha-sized,
The old pastor closed the cold casket,
And said the Church ain't got enough room for all the tombs.
It's a war going on outside, we ain't safe from,
I feel the pain in my city wherever I go,
314 Soldiers died in Iraq,
509 died in Chicago."

Just to make sure you get how risky/ballsy these lyrics are, I want to punctuate how he equates Soldiers in the United States Army to "Soldiers" in the Chicago gangs. The former are the most venerated people in this country (our protectors, those we thank compulsively and reflexively) whereas the latter are the most hated (black gangbangers, the urban blight, our boogeymen, even being near one could have the police shoot you). It's a cogent observation too, drawing on how both groups have many things in common. (Your mileage may vary on this one, obviously, but to me the similarities are: They tend to be poor, give their lives to the machine that made them poor in the first place and so on.)

And then there is Diamonds of Sierra Leone, which is pretty much an amalgamation of what this entire post has been about. You see, the "single" Diamonds of Sierra Leone is about how awesome Kanye is, has 12 million views on youtube and has a music video. The album version of Diamonds of Sierra Leone has 1 million views and has no music video. Here are some of the lyrics from that version:

"Good morning, this ain't Vietnam still / People lose hands, legs, arms for real / Sierra Leone connects to what we go through today / Over here it's a drug trade, we die from drugs / Over there they die from what we buy from drugs / I thought my Jesus-piece was so harmless / 'till I seen a picture of a shorty armless" (A "shorty" is a child)

Again, I'm not advocating that he is eloquent about it or even these songs are good -- but when was the last time your favorite singer talked about Blood Diamonds or Private Prisons? And would you have thought that the Kanye West you knew talked about these things? If not, then what else don't you know about this human being we all love to gleefully hate?

For example, did you know that Kanye West directed this music video himself?

Kanye West as a complex Symbol: How does any of this excuse how he snatched the microphone away at the Grammy's (twice!) and just ran his mouth off? How does this make his "George Bush doesn't care about black people!" moment less painful? The guy obviously lacks tact, doesn't he? Yes. He does. But think about that for a second -- does that warrant hate?

People we should hate (those who run Private Prisons and wear Blood Diamonds) do have tact. They have perfected the art of non-communicating. Their answers are canned, they have fifteen people in their entourage who make sure their client will never, ever say something like "George Bush doesn't care about black people!" They direct the national conversation, but they do not speak.

Kanye speaks. Not always eloquently, but he speaks. His comment about how George Bush doesn't care about black people could be taken as a precursor to the "black lives matter" debate we're having today. Even his comment, that got bite-sized into a flashy quote we all can point at and laugh at, was preceded by a pretty spot-on critique of the status-quo:

"I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, 'They're looting.' You see a white family, it says, 'They're looking for food.' And it's been five days waiting for federal help because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I've tried to turn away from the TV because it's too hard to watch. I've even been shopping before even giving a donation, so now I'm calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help—with the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way—and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us!"

Do you know who actually boasted about allegedly shooting "looters" during New Orleans? The American Hero Chris Kyle. Who we all collectively worshiped last year in American Sniper. And yet, somehow, he's the hero and Kanye West is our villain. Maybe there's something wrong about us.

Maybe he speaks gibberish 90 percent of the time, but he speaks.

Kanye West as The Ultimate Loser: Kanye did everything right. He had this origin story down, the whole journey from being a Loser to being a Winner, and yet he doesn't fit into the paradigm. Winners are supposed to be Men -- controlled, masculine, strong, not bothering the status quo and harp on how being a "Winner" makes them feel awesome. It's the endgame. It's the American Dream.

But Kanye is much more like a child. He's immature, impulsive, and honest in a way someone on the top, a "Winner", is not supposed to be in his personal relationships and political views. He disturbs. He's annoying and loud. He obviously wants to fit in, but doesn't know how. So we point and laugh because that's what Losers do. And it's even worse because it doesn't compute within our paradigm: He should be a Winner but he still acts like a Loser, which means something about him must be fundamentally wrong and broken, something that even the American Dream can't heal.

In his latest album, Kanye is an angry, frustrated beast borne out of our hatred for him. Both in form and content, the entire Yeezus album is an assault. He screams and yells his way through the entire thing and his lyrics are confrontational, even ugly -- it's as if he's daring at us to hate him. It's a massive Fuck You to the society who picked on him. His megalomania is a perverse defense mechanism, now enlarged to almost comical proportions. (The album is called Yeezus and features a song titled I Am a God.) But this isn't a secure man boasting about his success like, say, Jay Z -- far from it, Yeezus is an abused child screaming back the only way he knows how. The center piece of the album is New Slaves, a scream of a song where Kanye yells: "I'd rather be a dick than a swallower", accepting his status as a villain rather than someone who gets picked on.

(By the way, you can argue that those lyrics are misogynistic and almost sexually violent. I'd counteract by saying that's a motif through the song about how black men are perceived. The song ends with grotesque rape imagery (Fuck you and your Hampton House / I'll fuck your Hampton spouse / Came on her Hampton blouse / And in her Hampton mouth) that's about how the status quo sees and stereotypes black men -- and, by proxy, Kanye himself.)

But within all this chaos and rage, there is something tender and childish about how he compares himself to the Adam Sandler's character in the movie Waterboy. (I'm 'bout to wild the fuck out / I'm goin' Bobby Boucher!) In Waterboy, Adam Sandler's character is cruelly picked on, only to discover that he can use his repressed anger on the field and achieve success. Of course that is someone Kanye would empathize with.

Mr. Bobby Boucher. 

In Conclusion: Yeezus sold poorly compared to Kanye West's previous efforts. There was no cool, happy single to pull out of the album because Kanye no longer cared about being liked. So Black Skinhead and New Slaves were the two singles. Both of these songs are as angry and political as their titles suggest. They failed to chart like Kanye West's previous singles. But, ironically, you can still hear Black Skinhead during Motorola commercials -- without any lyrics, of course.

We ridicule Kanye for talking out of turn and being annoying, as if those are the worst sins one can commit. But the part of him that makes him disrupt award shows and yell at George Bush for not caring about black people, the childish, brutally honest core of him, is the same part that makes him tackle controversial issues like homophobia in hip-hop and rap back in 2005 when it wasn't popular to talk about it. It's that core of him that allows him to be vulnerable and cry on stage when he sings about his mother. It's that core that makes him warn us about the pitfalls of materialism and "Winning", despite the fact that he's breaking ranks and differentiating himself from the other rappers. Shouldn't we embrace this? Isn't this what we expect from our artists?

Or do we want to be entertained by those who looks put together and prim? Do we only want to be shocked when we know we're in on the joke like when Lady Gaga wears some other bizarre dress? Are we more interested in listening to another schlockly pop song written by the same person who writes all the other pop songs? If so, what does that say about us? Can't we handle a little chaos?

And, lastly, I give you this. Please listen to it. It's only 2 minutes 53 seconds long. It's a live performance of his song "Hey Mama", after his mother died. I can't help but think how vulnerable and open he is here in a way that many contemporary artists, especially a celebrated millionaire rapper, can't even dream of. And how we made him into the villain he is today.

Well, that got pretty serious. Here, have two pictures of Kanye West as an elephant. Apparently it's a thing!