What’s good, Medium? Kanye West edition

11–21–2016

Have you heard the news? Kanye West is canceled.

Kanye stopped his San Jose show on November 18th to go on a rant in which he revealed he didn’t vote, but if he did, he would've voted for Trump. He also asked Black people to “stop focusing on racism.”

A few nights later, Kanye stopped his Sacramento show for another rant, this time calling out Beyonce, accusing her of only agreeing to perform at the MTV Awards if she knew she was winning an award over West and Drake. He performed three songs before ending the concert.

People, generally, were not here for it.

Here’s what folks had to say on Medium:

SF Ali is SUPER not here for Kanye and you can @ him if you disagree:

When you’re struggling to survive, and half of America wants you banned, deported, interned, or killed, you don’t enact the labor of entertaining the pure, unadulterated horseshit vomited by classless, chucklefuck charlatans masquerading as cultivated, commonfolks’ champions. Fuck Kanye West.When your elderly father gets targeted and robbed the weekend after the election, and you’re told you’re overreacting to very real policy proposals to place you, and anybody who looks like you, on a registry, and inside a camp, you don’t bother to “hear them out”. You don’t parse through all the noise looking for a signal which really isn’t there, but has a phantasm retrofitted after the fact to sound edgy, contrarian, badass, millennial… fuck that noise.

Micah Peters compares Kanye’s plea for Black folks to stop talking about racism with his “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” moment during Hurricane Katrina.

Now, one way to read this is: Kanye, like a lot of us, gets that this country doesn’t understand us, and refuses to even Google it. Kanye, like a lot us, gets that this country doesn’t like us all that much. Kanye, like a lot of us, is tired.The racist traumas in America are rampant, and the effects are wide-ranging. After all the anger and outrage are used up, what usually follows is exhaustion. And a way to combat that exhaustion is to escape — to talk about something else for a while. What? “Whatever the fuck you wanna talk about.” But talking about other things — like Star Wars — should by no means make us forget what made us want to talk about other things in the first place. Star Wars won’t save us. And Kanye rants won’t either.

Which brings us to the other way to read it: Kanye, like a lot of them, doesn’t mind us being aggrieved, but would like for us to be a little quieter about it.And honestly? Fuck that. People at the head are always telling people at the rear how and when to be upset about things. In a way — a sad, distressing way — this is a mirror image of his Katrina moment, refracted through time and wealth and not having any neighbors.

Rebecca Akrofie takes a compassionate approach, noting that Kanye’s rant has some good points and uses his lyrics for more context:

Throughout his rant, West seems to refer to Trump as a metaphor for “telling it like it is” or just not censoring what he’s about to say. Such a conflation just seems ignorant.

But we know West suffers from something else: Paranoia. On 2004’s, “All Falls Down” he speaks honestly about his experience with impostor syndrome. The feeling of not belonging in the rich world with all its trappings, despite having the net worth to qualify.

Man I promise, I’m so self conscious
That’s why you always see me with at least one of my watches

“All falls down” by Kanye West (2004)

He has attempted a high end clothing line. Whatever you think of the products, fashion is a white world where discrimination and fewer opportunities for black models and designers are well documented. In all, he appears to be a man who has felt the pressure consistently to prove himself where he is conscious that his race is a barrier.

Jenn Marie defends Kanye because “ a child in fancy clothes is still a child” (lmao)

Kanye’s political opinion shouldn’t offend or surprise his fans. His job is entertaining the people of America. His advisors have informed him that Trump’s people now run the country.

Of course he is pro-Trump. He’s broke, remember?

Ezinne Ukoha says we must forgive Kanye. Here’s why:

And Kanye fucked up so badly due to what he said and did but we must forgive him. We have to believe that he is under the spell of a decision gone awry. We know what desperation looks like. It is the voice that peeps out with a yell that can’t be suppressed by the ideology that what we know and believe will save us when the hours grow darker without the threat of sunlight.

We are in the dark.

Some of us have been baking longer than others but the truth is that I get how and why Kanye became Kimye with Trumped up fantasies of how to escape the symptoms of rhetoric that only White men can shit out without passports.

Kanye apparently canceled the rest of his Saint Pablo tour. It is still unclear how this will impact his presidential ambitions.