Kanye West is the only human being alive

https://web.archive.org/web/20150709021526/http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/2013/12/kanye-alive-limits-of-human-personality.html (Read this brilliant article from Devin O’Neill circa 2013 if you haven’t before my piece, says what I think without the MAGA turn far better than I)

It’s definitely embarrassing to say, but seeing as he’s been out of the news cycle for a solid 40 minutes, I love Kanye. I love Kanye like Kanye loves Kanye because Kanye loves Kanye more than anything else, and I love that. It became cause celebre to outright dismiss and cancel him for the numerous dickhead things he did last year, and I can’t blame anyone for doing that. He is at his nadir, showing his ass constantly, and not quite having the musical talent or creative wizardry to back it up. Kanye’s career spiral indeed mirrors the body-swapping mythology of Get Out, akin to the preached false consciousness of DuBois, and pantomimes a classic case of a famous black man thinking he is bigger than the superstructure which created him and his conditions initiating this breakdown.

Yet Kanye is also a human being. To my knowledge, he has never done anything criminal or abusive to someone else (though preaching MAGA could certainly be construed as criminal). His ideologies, if you can even call them that, are very predicated on the self, not usually stretching outside his ego, yet he clearly cares about his fans and the relationship between them. The only tangible thread we have from us to Kanye is his music, and when it gets dumbed down and blander, like on ye, we can no longer forgive his transgressions. Kanye is different from you and I, he must base his outlandish personality on the merits of his art, and when it fails, the bravado shatters and the facade is lifted. Kanye is a mere mortal like the rest of us and he doesn’t like that.

Is Kanye having a midlife crisis? Maybe. But he also has three kids, and a fourth on the way. Being a father suits him, in giving up any sort of pretense and persona in favor of genuine love. He is bipolar and somewhat facilitated by his wife, who no doubt hates the antics but cashes in on the attention granted, given the Kardashian brand. The line between their relationship as legitimate and contrived grows ever stranger. And yet, they’ve been married 6 years, a long time for a marriage to be fabricated for the media. Despite the predatory and parasitic nature of the Jenner/Kardashian clan, I find Kim and Kanye to be oddly cute (though I still wish there would be a divorce album).

Kanye is the most on-display musician on the planet. No other person consistently bears their emotions, doubts, wants, fears, and troubles onto a stage like he does. He is utterly exhaustible and it can be grating. Even still, he stands as the one celebrity I am completely and unequivocally in support of. His dramatic streak hinges on melodrama constantly, but in bizarrely relatable ways. He stays doing dumb shit and having bad opinions, fucking up in new albeit harmless manners. Far from the composure of Beyonce or the palatable nature of Lady Gaga, two contemporary stars from the late 00s who only gotten more mature and bigger as they get older, Kanye’s arrested development creates sagas more grandiose and garish than any sort of manufactured tabloid conspiracies.

So please, Kanye keep fucking up. Keep doing weird stunts with Kim and your kids and having new, half-baked ideas that aren’t predicated by fleshed-out knowledge. You are the symbol of the unculture, in an era of sanitation and media training and corporate proximity, you are raucous and unhinged and full of surprises even if they are wrong and sigh-inducing. You begat the human condition to its logical extreme, beating Nietzche’s head in with the id, ego, and superego all at once. If the celebrity is an glorified entertainment product, trussed up for consumption, you fit the mold to a tee, and take a flaming shit on it at the same time. But most of all, you inspire me to examine my own warts and blemishes. It is this introspection that allows us to keep shedding the skin anew in pursuit of self-actualization, never getting too comfortable or haughty. So, thank you for being the jackass you are. I wouldn’t want it any other way.