De-compensating Kanye
The last few weeks, I’ve been wanting people to pay attention to Kanye. This is odd for me, as I’ve never wanted to pay attention to him, and thought he got overall too much attention. I’ve always liked his music/production but thought he was a kinda shitty rapper, and given how much actual talent there is in hip hop I always wondered why people gave him a pass on the shitty rapping front.
It was this interview that changed it:
Look at his eyes. You see that wild-man mile-long depthless stare? That is the look of the man in the late, exhausted stages of a manic episode. I know that because he says so, or, in the way that is familiar to me in the grip of mania, he assumes that it’s assumed that we can all see he’s stopped trying to not be manic. He’s surprised when Big Boy is surprised that he’s talking about his “diagnosis” — his mental health, his grip on reality; he’d thought that’s all they were talking about all along. I mean, look at the shirt he’s wearing. Around 7:35 — look at the surprise on Big Boy’s face when the word “diagnosis” comes up and the difficulty he has recovering — the interviewer thought that he was sharing a reality with the interviewee, and in that moment he realizes: this isn’t about politics and art, this is about a man’s breakdown. It is an “episode.”
The relevant clinical word is “decompensating.” That’s when you just stop putting in the effort necessary to compensate for reality, in your thinking, speaking, or actions; when you give up on the constant, effortful process of translating your inner world into something that can be understood by other people in the shared social space we call reality. It’s when you give up on the hope that you could possibly make yourself understood. It’s when, for instance, you feel a wave of gigantic freedom wash through your body, and realize, hey, I’ve always been free, because I have free will — I can make decisions, I am an autonomous soul navigating a grotesquely oppressive world Oh! But everyone’s always had free will — we’ve always had choices, even if I was under the most brutal oppression, if I was enslaved, even then I would at least have the terrible, violent, miserable choice to throw myself overboard or to hang myself or even do something explicitly suicidal like run at the overseer or the master and I know he’ll shoot me, even then I could make the fateful choice of death over slavery, but then, when you open your dumb fucking mouth to make yourself heard you say something that is stupid, inane, and obviously false, on its face and by definition: “slavery was a choice.” Sure he said it to get a rise out of people, to get attention — but when you think about that statement, it’s more blatantly nonsensical than it is offensive; the very definition of the word “slavery” is that it’s not a choice. It’s not like Kanye was trying to argue a historical point, but that his expressions are symptoms of his “superpower”: bipolar disorder.
I’m not bipolar myself, but I sure as shit relate to that. De-compensation for Kanye is a privilege that results from his success and fame — since he’s Kanye, he gets to give up on compensating for social reality, and he can go make a record about it instead of get shot or arrested:
See, this a type of high that won’t come down
This the type of high that get you gunned down
Damn straight. Half of the people who are killed by police in America have a disability, which includes a psychiatric diagnosis. Police are often the first responders to crisis situations, to manic episodes and people who are decompensating, but police aren’t doctors, they’re cops. They know how to order people around and arrest them at gunpoint. And when the subject has stopped compensating for social reality s/he is less likely to follow every shouted direction to the letter — “hands up, Lie down” etc. The problem hasn’t even been really looked at. And we all know that jails are the largest “provider” of mental health services in the country. And that’s just the worst case scenario; the other scenarios are shit too:
Think about people that have, uh, mental issues that are not Kanye West that can’t go and make that, and make you feel like it’s all good. Think about somebody who does exactly what I did at TMZ, and they just do that work, but then Tuesday morning they come back and they’ve lost their job.
When Kanye came out with that MAGA hat, I like all his fans thought it was odious. But someone who’s proudly, fully going mad can’t be held to the standards of civility of the #resistance. He isn’t after a political message, he’s launching an indirect attack on our shared grip on reality, challenging us and inviting us down the madness hole, or at least, telling us explicitly that’s where he is. And I do think we need that right now. To me, decompensation is a perfectly rational response to life in Trump’s America, to late capitalism and now fascism. The seas are dying — by 2048 there will not be a single fish in the world’s oceans.
They know I got demons all on me
Devil been tryna make an army
They been strategizin’ to harm me
They don’t know they dealin’ with a zombie
Niggas been tryna test my Gandhi
Just because I’m dressed like Abercrombie
And then he puts his diagnosis on the cover art of the album. And of course he’s surprised his own friend and interviewer — and his fans — doesn’t realize that this whole thing is about his goddamn bipolar disorder until he says it in an interview instead of in a song, using literally exactly the same words. About the superhero thing, though:
That is mad pride. It ain’t one thing or another — it can be a disability and still be a powerful and prideful part of a personality. He can, because he’s Kanye, need help, ask for help, get help, and be able to make a record that people listen to instead of getting pushed out of culture and society entirely. We should all have that freedom, that support. We should be able to stay free, make art.
Shit could get menacin’, frightenin’, find help
Sometimes I scare myself, myself
Shouts to the Icarus Project and the whole mad pride movement. Educate yourself.
