Let's Talk About Kanye.

(Finally, a white guy weighs in)

Hello, and welcome to the 11 of you who have subscribed since my last post, on the implications of embedded tickets on YouTube videos.

If today’s piece seems like a detour from what you’ve come to expect here, allow me to point out that this mailing list was created in 2019, after my write-up¹ of a Chicago listening party for Kanye West’s album Jesus Is King reached the front page of the r/Kanye subreddit.

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Jesus is King Listening Party Recap

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I personally messaged everyone who commented nice things on that Reddit post, thanked them for their kind words, invited them to subscribe, and we were off to the races.

I then went on to write Jesus is King and Jesus is Born album reviews:

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[Album Review] Kanye West - Jesus Is King

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Edition #2, Gospel Boogaloo

And later shared a running diary recapping my experience attending a Donda listening party.

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[Review] Donda Listening Party #3

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There are also plenty of Kanye-related posts in my drafts, such as an unreleased 2022 article comparing / contrasting Ye and then-Brooklyn Net Kyrie Irving. Ultimately I shelved it, because I felt it didn’t add anything new to the discourse, but I did make this graph for it:

For the record, the piece you’re about to read resides squarely in the “Bar Mitzvah entrance music” overlap, slightly north of a joke like, “Now when I walk in, every bubbe do the power clap…clap…clap…”

Anyway, here goes nothing. My thoughts do not reflect the thoughts of all Jewish people, much in the same way that my thoughts do not reflect the thoughts of all left-handed people, nor all people with a moderate-to-severe allergy to animal dander.

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The (terminally online) world has (once again) decided Kanye West is beyond redemption.

For over a decade, Kanye stans have insisted we separate the artist from the art.

The jeen-yuhs from his crazy.

But now?

A swastika on a T-shirt on a website in an advertisement on the world’s biggest stage, and suddenly the moral fog has been lifted.

The same (terminally online) people who shrugged at antisemitism the past 16 months are now furious. Not because they actually care about Jewish people, by the way, but because antisemitism is now (once again) a matter of hating an unambiguous villain.²

emmanuelacho

A post shared by @emmanuelacho

Yet another Courageous Act of Defiance against yet another Male Public Figure who we have reduced to be Synonymous With All That Is Ontologically Evil.

Personally, I’ve done all I can.

I tried signing Kanye up for Birthright, but he doesn’t meet the age restrictions:

Sorry Ye :/ You would have loved Shalvata.

But the outrage feels so… selective.

And performative.

And self-serving.

And opportunistic.

And crotchless.

The people dunking on Kanye as though this were a shutter shades-era, “being a jackass” moment don’t seem to understand this isn’t another case of a canceled celebrity turning heel, or an enterprising grifter joining the Austin comedy scene.

This is a man who has been unraveling in public for over a decade, and only now, when the damage is undeniable, do people from the outside decide to chime in.

The Substack writer Freddie DeBoer, who frequently writes about having bipolar disorder, commented on the situation, even before the Super Bowl commercial incident. I recommend reading the full piece, but I’ll share some excerpts below:

• [Kanye has] grown increasingly unstable, particularly on social media, prompting more and more criticism and performative exhaustion from the type of people who most directly shape American culture and media.

• This underlines how strange elite attitudes towards mental health and disability have become: the more or less explicit attitude of West’s many critics has been that, as he has become more and more unstable, they have grown less likely to allow for the possibility that his actions are influenced by mental illness and thus not entirely his fault. That’s weird!

• But why would treating disabilities as perfectly valid identity markers lead to less sympathy for West? Because it prompts a dilemma: these people really hate Kanye, but they’ve been trained by their political tribe to see those with disabilities as perfect unblemished angels, beings of pure light, in common with progressive attitudes towards “marginalized peoples.” The only way to resolve these feelings is to deny that West’s behavior could possibly be the result of his disability. If identity liberalism insists that people with disabilities are to be treated as blameless, and you’re an identity liberal who very much wants to blame Kanye West, you must deny that he has a disability or that his disability could possibly be related to his behavior.

• This is what has led to the sublimely witless claim “Mental illness doesn’t do that!” It’s become a commonplace on social media. 20 year olds with absolutely no background in psychiatry confidently stare into their front-facing cameras and declare what mental illness can and can’t do. Mental illness can prompt people to cut out their own tongues, to light themselves on fire, to kill their children because they believe that CIA bugs are implanted in their brains, but it can’t prompt ordinary socially disreputable behavior or bigotry, apparently. It’s hard to believe, but very convenient for people who are desperately trying to keep various elements of their personality and politics stitched together without confronting the contradictions.

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Kanye West at his 2010 performance of Runaway at the VMAs.

Rap music is one of the only places where men are publicly allowed to love themselves.

And no one was more aware of this than Kanye, who once said, “If you’re a fan of Kanye West, you’re not a fan of me, you’re a fan of yourself”.

Kanye turned confidence into art.

His lyrics granted permission to declare your own greatness.

To assume that mentality of delusional, unwavering self-belief.

He shared a code for self-esteem, a mindset for how to move through the world.

Affirmations for the kind of person who doesn’t know what affirmations are.

But now, keeping up with him, listening to him, reading articles about him, dealing with him at all, feels impossible – because it’s all so heavy now.

Maybe it’s not my place to empathize with him.

But I can, and I do.

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I’m reminded of a time I once played pickup basketball in Oslo, a city that makes Minneapolis look like Atlanta.

My team won a quick game of 3-on-3, and a group of three black guys were waiting to play next. Instead of staying until we lost, one of my Norwegian teammates started to take off his basketball shoes and pack up.

When I asked him where he was going, he openly said, “Oh, I don’t like black people”.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“What do you mean?”, I asked, dumbfounded by his candor.

“Well, one time in my youth, I was out late at night, and I was jumped and mugged by a few black guys. So I don’t like them very much”, he replied, matter-of-factly, as if I had asked him why he didn’t like tomato on a hamburger.

“So you’re just openly racist?”, I asked, to a stranger in a foreign country.

“Yep”, he said, as he hopped on a Lime scooter, and scooted away.

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The cynical data analyst in me would advise both Kanye and the Norwegian basketball player to increase the n of their sample size before making such sweeping generalizations about a group of people.

But when you’re inside a mind that no longer obeys logic, you’re not looking for a representative sample. You grasp at anything that makes your delusion make sense.

In Kanye’s case, a few Jewish people screwed him over (or at least, he feels like they did). And instead of seeing greed as a universal trait in his chosen industry, he drew a conclusion that enabled him to outwardly place blame through an existing ideology.

The deeply sad part isn’t that Kanye lost his mind and became antisemitic.

It’s that this was inside him from the jump.

For better or for worse, this is Kanye’s truth.

Because when you’re in a manic state, the truth comes out.

Not the truth.

But your truth.

The stuff you bury. The stories you tell yourself.

The little resentments you let fester in the back of your mind.

That’s what’s ultimately so depressing about this.

And I don’t think most of the righteous understand what they’re dunking on.

They think this is another exchange of controversy for attention.

I know it’s easier to frame this whole situation as a case of Bad Guy Does Evil Thing.

But if you’ve been really, truly paying attention, you know this isn’t that.

To close, I will again turn to DeBoer:

• Do you have to entirely forgive Kanye West for his bigoted statements? Do you have to break bread with these people, be their friends, support their careers? No, you don’t. Instead, you should use your brain. Your understanding of their mental illness should mitigate your judgment. It should complicate your moral instincts. It should inform your decisions about how you want to treat someone.

• The point is that there is no simplistic rubric you can apply for how to feel about mentally ill people, their disorders, or their behavior, including Kanye West, no matter what TikTok says. “Mental illness doesn’t do that” is embraced so lustily precisely because it appears to remove the burden of responsibility of judgment, takes away these sticky, unhappy, shaky decisions we make about how to treat people with mental illness. And in that it’s part and parcel of a broader world of identity liberalism which has relentlessly pursued an ethics of moral simplicity and universal ethical binarism, dividing the world into the utterly pure and good and blameless on one side and the forever unclean on the other. Madness is particularly poorly suited to this sort of thing, which is why so many liberals are so aggressive in insisting that “mental illness doesn’t do that.” They don’t want to experience the unmoored feeling of being unsure of how to judge someone.

• We have to do whatever we can to reject the notion that disabilities are lovable little quirks that define the self, rather than unfortunate hindrances that we should get rid of if we can or, if we can’t, ameliorate with appropriate policy. And we have to stop demanding that the world fit into our rigid binary beliefs in good and bad, in blameless victims and awful oppressors. The world’s more complicated than that, particularly regarding the broken mind.

1. I have since converted that into a Substack post, which you can read here:

2. Two of them, really, if we want to go back a month.