KANYE 2020
On Kanye West, Part II
N.B. This piece was written in late 2020 - before Kanye had overtly expressed his admiration for Hitler or his anti-Semitism.
‘…we are sick. We are sick. Abortion culture, sex culture, capitalism. We are sick. We as a people, as a, not just an American society, the world, we are sick, and we are keeping ourselves sick, we’re all responsible… We all play a part of it. And we’re all sick in some way and the world has been designed to keep us sick.’1
These are the words of Kanye West, spoken deep within his three-hour-long podcast interview with Joe Rogan released on 25/10/2020. They are the words of a man who, amid a hysterical political rally, began to scream and cry and admitted to wanting to abort his first child; who was the creative director of 2018’s inaugural PornHub Awards ceremony, designing trophies that looked like alien sex toys and t-shirts that featured nude illustrations of the award winners (e.g. Mia Malkova – Hottest Female Ass, Kendra Sunderland – Nicest Tits); who has penned lyrics like ‘Eating Asian pussy / All I need is sweet and sour sauce,’ ‘Black girl sipping white wine / Stick my fist in her like a civil rights sign,’ ‘You got a sister-in-law you’d smash? I got four of ’em,’ ‘I’m a sick fuck, I like a quick fuck / I like my dick sucked… you trifling’ ho bitch (bitch);’2 whose heroes include anti-capitalist icons like Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Walt Disney, Michael Jackson, Floyd Mayweather, Steve Austin… In short, they are the words of the man who epitomises our ‘sick’ liberal society – a billionaire rapper/producer/clothes designer/entrepreneur/whatever who at the time was married to a billionaire socialite/reality TV star/entrepreneur/whatever.
Immediately we reach for irony. We must stay our hands, though. For what Kanye says is neither contradiction nor hypocrisy – instead he has had a change of heart. Early in his Joe Rogan interview, a discussion held so Kanye, an independent candidate in the 2020 US presidential election, could articulate his political views in his circumspect, ‘symphonic’ way, Kanye tells us he has transcended liberal America’s celebrity culture. Now he is a ‘servant of God’ who called him ‘to be the leader of the free world.’3 The revelation that God wanted him to be president came to Mr West in the shower on 28/08/2015. Ever since Kanye has not wavered. He is resolved to follow God. He will lead the world.
An impressive ambition. Nonetheless, I miss the old Kanye – the creative genius Kanye. Music critics generally accept that Kanye was once a musical visionary. But they equally acknowledge that the quality of Kanye’s work fell precipitously in recent years. 2018’s Ye was slapdash in the extreme. His vocals for 2019’s Jesus is King were literally recorded with an iPhone. And his recent campaign theme song ‘Nah Nah Nah’ might just be his musical nadir. The perfectionist who would spend 5,000 man hours on a song and produce 50 versions of a single track now creates whole albums in a matter of weeks.
Despite his decline Kanye remains certain of his genius. He is equally sure that there has never been ‘a better time to put a visionary’—i.e., himself—‘in the captain’s chair.’4 Perhaps we can accept the latter notion. Yet if we do we must also reject Kanye’s presidential bid. Not only is his music unfocused: his presidential platform, five years in the making, is more glaucomic than visionary. Compared to genuinely competitive political animals, Kanye’s political thought lacks sharpness. His positions are unrefined, vague and confused. Passionate on abortion, ‘prayer in the classroom,’ engineering innovations, but little else, Kanye has yet to articulate a coherent political platform.5
Kanye has always had an impressively fecund mind and a talent for public appeal. His platform isn’t entirely devoid of merit; it sometimes embodies this spirit. His desire to lead with love, dignity, responsibility and empathy is admirable.6 We also cannot fault his preference for ‘brilliance and bravery’ over fear.7 Cacophonous acronym aside, his commitment to ‘H.E.A.L.’ or ‘Hold Everyone Accountable to Love’ inspires optimism. The same goes for his vague aspirations to free America from ‘shame, guilt, worry, stress, war, greed, hate, misuse of power, prejudices, manipulation, and discrimination’ and provide food and homes for all.8 Even if he refuses to pay for solar panels, we appreciate his desire to fund the arts and invest in renewable energy.9 While Kanye’s artistic decline is undeniable, he clearly retains his talent for identifying the wants of his target demographic. His ideas have a certain populist appeal.
Other ideas are harder to endorse. Most obviously, Kanye’s politics are beholden to tradition. A servant of the Christian God, he hopes to restore Christian faith to its proper place in society. Prayer, he says, should return to schools. Yet prayer never left Christian schools. By implication, it seems he wants secular institutions to make prayer part of their activities. He also thinks great universities misuse their scholars’ intelligence.10 Perhaps this is why he wants to build a 200,000-capacity stadium to house his private ‘Gospel University’ where people will sing hymns seven days a week.11 Kanye wants a theocratic education system. Religious rhapsody will mingle with learning in West’s America. Education and faith will together form a beatific experience.
A sense of the sublime saturates Kanye’s political propaganda. We see this in his campaign video that blends politics, religion, collectivism and ethno-nationalism.12 In this video filled with shots of African American families and religious communities, Kanye delivers a rousing speech before a monochromatic American flag that ripples in the wind. ‘To contemplate our future, to live up to our dream, we must have vision,’ he says. ‘We will revive our commitment to faith. We as a people are called to a greater purpose than ourselves. We have to act on faith with the sure knowledge that we are pursuing the right goals and doing the right things.’ In Kanye’s eyes the Lord’s blessing will give us epistemic certainty and ethical purpose. Being His messenger, Kanye already has this ‘sure knowledge’ of God’s intent. Science, technology, and industry, he knows, are humanity’s most righteous goals. Onscreen a spaceship circles Earth while he speaks his sublime words, together signifying our boundless industrial-capitalist potential. With Kanye as His servant, God’s desires are unmistakable. He, the Almighty One, wants state-funded capitalism. God’s tech-fetish may explain a central contradiction of Kanye’s platform. He claims to be against war; nonetheless, he intends to raise military spending.
These God-given goals demand another refinement for the education system. Everyone must be taught to be like West’s heroes in his America. We should teach an entrepreneurially minded program, he says, and promote ‘visionary thinking.’ Physics, agriculture and faith must therefore be its cornerstones.13 All three subjects are essential. ‘Spatial engineering based on faith will save the world,’14 he says. Only this can ensure West’s regressive vision of a techno-primitivist agricultural society supported by Empedocles’ ‘four elements’ of ‘earth, wind, water and fire.’15 Most tech-bros fantasise of chromium utopias. Meanwhile West embraces his newfound affinity for soil and envisions a more telluric tomorrow.
Kanye’s hero-worship transcends his obsession with industry. Most of his idols are capitalist innovators. All, however, are men. A passion for the valiant and masculine preoccupies West, who often uses the word ‘superhero’ as a compliment.16 Donald Trump’s ‘male energy’ also appeals to Kanye, who lacked a father figure in adolescence. Perhaps referring to Marvel more than Nietzsche, he also feels like ‘Superman’ in his MAGA cap.17 Kanye genuflects to patriarchy. Yet his reformed sexual politics complicate his machismo. Historically Kanye has firmly supported men, sex and men having sex. But he now believes America is a sick society, morally and sexually decadent. We’re ‘experiencing the fall of Rome,’ he says. The ‘Titanic has now hit a glacier.’18 Society is failing and sex-culture has made us ill. Our world, says Kanye, has experienced a Fall, a collapse. Crisis looms, we are sick and late-modern culture is to blame. We must thank the Lord, then, for President West, whose purifying ideas are an antidote to chaos.
For a man enthralled by industry, Kanye is surprisingly aware of capitalism’s role in this collapse. Pharmaceutical capitalists, he sees, do not truly want to ‘cure people.’ Profits will come only if they ‘keep you sick.’19 Real economic investment, he correctly notes, is also too low today. ‘People are sitting on their money’ due to their ‘fear,’20 he realises, even if he fails to identify the fount of their terror.21 Classism is also indefensible to West. The same goes for institutions that keep ‘poor people poor’ and leave homeless people ‘sleeping in front of the Gucci store.’22 Some lucid insights; Kanye, however, has no plans or policies that would curtail capitalism’s excesses. More capitalism, it seems, will solve it all. Billionaire-financed philanthropy projects also appeal to him, like his rather neo-colonial ‘city of the future’ he hopes to build on an island gifted to him by the Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, a man who once had to remind his citizens that he ‘is not a dictator.’23 They did not believe him.
‘This is all very interesting, very good,’ says Joe Rogan of Kanye’s ideas. ‘There’s nothing bad about that.’24 We beg to differ. A return to tradition. Moral degradation. Machismo fascination. Collectivism. A commitment to capitalism in a time of economic crisis. A quixotic education system dedicated to producing heroic visionaries. Techno-primitivism. Ethno-nationalism. Social sickness. The entwinement of education, government and religion. An aestheticisation of politics via grandiose ceremonies. Utopian visions. Forgive my crassness. But Kanye’s political platform frankly sounds a bit fucking fascist.
Fascism, I argued in an earlier post, is notoriously hard to define. And Kanye’s ideology here is by no means totally fascist. Mussolini would never advocate for love. Nor would Hitler abolish racism. Though Kanye has made anti-Semitic statements before,25 for now his ideology has no clear equivalent of the Nazi’s Jew. Of course, opposition from those who lack his passion for Christianity will test whether he genuinely feels ‘us as a species, as the human race.’26 His ideology may yet demand hatred for an othered group.
Aspects of Kanye’s ideology contradict fascism. While he retains some liberal learnings, Eco and Paxton’s fascist qualities and feelings nonetheless mark his politics. Other things—his fetish for industry and capitalism, his wish to aestheticise politics through theocratic-political rallies, his earthen desire to return to agricultural society, his yearning for community and connection—also align his platform emotionally and ideologically with other fascist movements. Kanye West may not be a complete fascist. Equally, though, he is not un-fascist.
Kanye West believes he no longer belongs to the ‘liberal elite.’27 A campaign video also presents him as an alternative to Democrats and Republicans.28 Both statements are correct. But he is no ‘Third Way’ candidate. He is racked between two seemingly antithetical positions that unconsciously draw on one another. Neither fascist nor liberal, Kanye West is an ante-fascist.
Our major question, then. What the fuck happened to Kanye West? Until 2013’s Yeezus he was ‘an ideologue representing nothing more or less than the hyper-individualist dogma of Kanye West.’29 Before that hot shower he was just a preacher of individualism. Yet today his self-perception has changed. He now calls himself a ‘super-famous black free-will servant of Christ.’30 [xxxiv] The first three adjectives describe Kanye throughout his whole solo career. What changed, then, was his relation to Christ.
When Kanye became God’s servant, his sense of his potential transformed. There was a shift in the virtual, the actual, the set of futures to come. To understand ante-fascism, both in Kanye’s mind and our culture, we must understand this movement in meaning and purpose. We must examine what led to his desire to serve Christ and rule America as an ante-fascist president.
Footnotes
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 2:36:40.
The first two lyrics are from the Yeezus track ‘I’m In It;’ the third lyric is from single, ‘XTCY;’ the fourth is from ‘I Love It’ (feat. Lil’ Pump), a Billboard Hot 100 #1 single released for the 2018 PornHub Awards.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 0:04:00.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 0:06:05.
His presidential platform, once available at https://kanye2020.country, begins with the following promise: restore faith and revive our constitutional commitment to freedom of religion and the free exercise of one’s faith, demonstrated by restoring prayer in the classroom including spiritual foundations. It is followed by a quote from the Bible: we will not hide the truth from our children, but will declare to the next generation his praises and wonder. psalm 78:4. It seems he does not recognise the contradiction between reviving the commitment to the free exercise of faith and mandating prayer in classrooms.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 2:50:00.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 1:10:00.
See the ‘Dear Future’ poem on his campaign site: https://kanye2020.country/
At approx. 0:31:00 of his Joe Rogan interview, he professes a dislike for solar panels, which are too ‘Edison’ and not ‘Tesla’ enough.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 1:10:00.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 0:26:30.
See https://kanye2020.country/
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 0:31:00.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 2:37:40.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 0:31:00.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 0:17:40.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 2:32:30.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 2:34:40.
I.e., the repeated economic crises that have emerged from the failures of neoliberal capitalism.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 0:17:40 and 1:07:00–1:09:00.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/haiti-jovenel-moise-dictator-immigration/2021/02/10/67fb4b06-6a53-11eb-9ead-673168d5b874_story.html
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 1:00:00.
In a 2013 interview with Zane Lowe, Kanye said: ‘People want to say Obama can’t make these moves or he’s not executing. That’s because he ain’t got those connections. Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people.’ On Life of Pablo bonus track, ‘Saint Pablo,’ Kanye also raps: ‘Black on black lies is worse than black on black crime / The Jews share their truth on how to make a dime.’ See https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/kanye-west-says-black-people-dont-have-connections-jews-fueling-classic, https://www.thewrap.com/kanye-ye-west-spouted-antisemitic-lyrics-comments/ and https://www.thewrap.com/kanye-ye-west-spouted-antisemitic-lyrics-comments/
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 0:07:30.
At approx. 1:50:00 in the Joe Rogan interview, he says: ‘I don’t know if I could classify myself as liberal, but I’m definitely kind of liberal elite, I wrote My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, like I’ve had some of the best writing, so that would put me in that class, so to say, but I’m also just a purist, like I see a Kenyan home and be like, “That’s beautiful right there.”’ I also have no idea how Kenyan architecture relates to the preceding point.
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1554, at approx. 2:28:00.