The Lose-Lose Discourse Around Kanye

We are all hiding behind the mask of culture war.

From @patriot.juice

Kanye West goes on Infowars to proffer emphatic and effusive praise for Adolf Hitler from behind a black rubber mask, where fake schizo was confronted by actual schizo. Kanye faces us without a face, blotting out its terrible incitements and demands, but he is down horrendously. Even the ethics of a horrific figure like Der Führer are neutralized behind a mask.

The mask obliterates the theater of the person, a refusal to peer into the visible, the sphere of exchange. But the spectacle and display that’s supposed to retreat into the hidden recesses of the subject have instead rendered us all grinning commodities. Isn’t there something Hitlerian about stardom, about celebrity, about this unrelenting culture war? The idol on stage, the lights, the fixation, the ecstatic crowds dancing around at their will?

Online, we are behind a mask, performing a myth of ourselves. There are no winners in this discourse, only the ideological perils ruining Kanye and us alike. This is Schrodinger’s 2016 Election Redux. The same gremlins have emerged from the same alt-right fever swamps, their shit-eating grins scrunching up into a hideous grimace, presenting the same political stakes, the same hateful edgelord 4-chan rhetoric. Feed into the outrage and the backlash to Kanye’s Nazi apologia, and you reaffirm the contrived right-wing victimhood complex; shudder in silence, and you become complicit in the unchecked spread of metastasizing racism.

It is rather strange, as we rubberneck and gawk at this vapid and delusional oblivion, for anyone to plead enlightenment or empowerment when we are all reduced to mere pawns in the culture war. Kanye has no politics, no purpose other than to be a bizarro polemicist who is hell-bent on presenting his every self-obsessed rant as a galaxy-brain act of iconoclastic triumph. His performance of politics, intelligence, and insight is a bombastic and unrelenting burst of petty grievances and incomplete thoughts, easily adaptable to the barnacles who are delusional enough to believe that joining a sea of pink, puffy homunculi in red MAGA hats is somehow an act of transgression. Kanye’s sincere and extreme valorization of narcissism is the most monstrous, Trumpian nonsense that people otherwise pretend only Trump embodies.

I don’t really think less of Kanye as much as I think less of Kanye fandom, which has always imbued every last thing he says or does with undeserved profundity. The enduring stanning is now an unbearable experience, if not an indefensible commitment, especially as his musical stagnation seems so pathetically secondary to his cheap provocations.

I also think less of the discourse surrounding mental health in response, as it imposes a sanctimonious litmus test on mental illness, commodifying it as a quirky A E S T H E T I C that pathologizes and glorifies mildly maladaptive behaviors as ✨neurodivergence✨ while glossing over the more unsettling tendencies of psychosis. Anti-Semitism is abhorrent. Kanye’s reactionary heel turn warrants social and professional blowback. Of course, everyone who lives with mental illness does not slip into unbridled racism or passively witness their personal agency unravel into complete abstraction. Anyone who argues so further stigmatizes what remains largely misunderstood by mainstream society. But I can see how a troubled mind, taxed so hard and for so long and at a high level, might produce such a grotesque and impenetrable fiction to fortify itself.

There seems to be a cognitive dissonance between the sentiments of “accept and uplift people with mental illness and give them compassionate help” and “Kanye did a Bad Thing, and since there are other people with mental illness who don’t do these Bad Things, Kanye’s behavior is uninfluenced by mental illness.” Two statements can be true: Kanye is an asshole and he is also clearly undergoing some sort of breakdown. He should be plopped down in a quiet room with a bowl of soup, not paraded in front of whirring cameras by obnoxious far-right grifters exploiting his vulnerability for a desperate grasp at relevancy.

It would be easy to be bored with Kanye—with all of this—if these antics weren’t emboldening a rising spate of hate crimes and what was previously more latent anti-Semitism. In a way, this culture war is a mask of general undirected spite. Hiding underneath this mask is an oppressive amount of blandness. The only logical response to all this is to follow the lead of those who successfully brigaded the r/Kanye Subreddit, flooding it with Holocaust awareness posts and terraforming it into a Taylor Swift fan page. I wish I had an answer better than to spread love, but every other option feels so deflating and defeated.

The thrum of aggregated content, screengrabbed tweets, aimless thinkpieces, and random internet ephemera is just a gilded mask of our own design. When we ask for everything from celebrities and pop culture, sometimes we get it.

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