Kanye West is doing his Yeezus tour and he brings a white Jesus on stage, a real guy who looks like your average Broadway Jesus, so why is he doing this? I thought Kanye thought HE was Jesus? In this case, it is redundant and quite trite, haven’t we seen this a million times before in Hollywoodian biblical productions? And god, in this picture, Kanye looks like one of the three wise men!
According to several blogs, the white Jesus says to Kanye: ‘I didn’t come here to make bad people feel good. I came here to make dead people alive. That’s all I need from you is to show people the light — the light of truth in you.’ And he comes back later on, at the top of a mountain, ‘alongside a group of women back-up dancers dressed in white’… What? Jesus had back-up dancers? If people wanted to attend church they would have gone to the church. Watching a few videos of the show online reveals even more eccentricities: Kanye West climbs that mountain too such as if he was Noah rapping his ten commandments.
So I am not sure what to do with that:
– if it’s not offensive or blasphemous, what’s the point?
– If it is respectful of religion, it looks totally ridiculous, just like one of these series of shows that the Cathedral of Crystal, a huge church built by Robert Schuller’s famous and rich cult, has been hosting for decades around Easter and Christmas times. Kanye certainly didn’t innovate anything there.
At the end I find this very funny, but the problem is that it wasn’t intended to be funny, right? No, Kanye takes this extremely seriously, explaining this new move when talking to San Francisco radio station Wild 94.9, as if he had discovered a new country:
‘We do plays all the time where people play Jesus.’
‘What’s awesome about Christianity is that we’re able to portray God. We’re allowed to draw an image of him. We’re allowed to make movies about him. In other religions, you’re not allowed to do that. One of the things that I wanted to really get across with that, is that you can have a relationship with Jesus, you can talk to Jesus. In the same way someone would have a ‘Jesus is my homeboy’ [T-shirt], this is the way I would express it.’
Jesus is his homeboy? Wasn’t it a meme generated precisely to make fun of Christians? Oh Kanye don’t tell me you didn’t understand this? You look even more ridiculous this time.