With Kanye West the confusion lies with him not us. His text of freedom, that his story is one of the face of freedom staring down the reprehension of racist America, but his subtext is a young boy who misses his Mommy and blames himself. Every time West looks for freedom, every time he rails against what he sees as the forces joined together to stop him, he sees his Mom:
“My momma was raised in the era when
Clean water was only served to the fairer skin
Doing clothes you would have thought I had help
But they wasn’t satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself
You see it’s broke nigga racism
That’s that “Don’t touch anything in the store”
And it’s rich nigga racism
That’s that “Come in, please buy more”
“What you want, a Bentley? Fur coat? A diamond chain?
All you blacks want all the same things”
Used to only be niggas, now everybody playing
Spending everything on Alexander Wang
New Slaves“
While reasonable people might claim this is where West is aiming but the more you listen to him the more he reaches somewhere else: he screams, he begs, he extols, at Madison Square Garden he flips a concept he works all set to make, a moment he builds to from the beginning where he pulls off the jewel covered mask he has worn all evening just after meeting Jesus face to face. It allows him to find the freedom the mask has kept him away from for the very next song, “Jesus Walks”. But on Saturday night, instead of his message of love the one you’re with during “Runaway”, West begins to talk and, as he does, he gets himself angrier and angrier and angrier, trying to break through, trying to explain what is self-evident, that he is fine, everybody else is crazy.
But everything raises up and West sees himself as a victim again and it is hard to be free when you are seeing yourself through a mirror of persecution, it is hard to be yourself when you misjudge who you are. West was always like that but today you can see the memory of his mother, who died during a tummy tuck at the age of 58, eating him up. The subtext, the thoughts and feelings West brings to Yeezus is his mother, holding down two jobs to feed the young West, a single mom heartbroken, crying the kitchen, while Kanye comforts her. And then, with West’s success, getting cosmetic surgery, rich person’s healthcare, and dieing.
West mentions it specifically before “Coldest Winter” but there is a de-constructed sense of a little boy loss that affects the text here, it worms himself out of self conscious and on Saturday, ranting about freedom, he takes off his mask, kills the reveal later, and faces the audience. Real in his pain.
But the pain is so overstated, there may well be real affronts and Prince alone could warn you of Corporate America’s attack on musicians and creativity, but West sees it as even more than that. Aesthetically there is no difference between Prince writing “Slave” on his face with a magic market and West insistence on his right to “BE”.
There is a comparison here between Kanye and Jay Z; Jay Z plays Stevie Wonder-accommodating superstar, to West’s James Brown black man on the one. Kanye keeps on ruminating and fuming, what adult in his right mind flips out because Beyonce doesn’t get a VMA? Where is the sense of proportion here. There isn’t one because West doesn’t see it as a separate instance, what he sees is white blonde Taylor stealing Nubian Queen Beyonces crown.
And also, he sees his Mom. All black women are his Mommy and all affronts lead to death, all success is a trap and all slights are a matter of death. Yeezus is a punishing brilliant album and the concert is an astounding achievement. Kendrick Lamar opened and Kendrick is a talented fellow but he was so far out of his league it wasn’t funny. Performing a too long 45 minute set, Lamar kept on sitting on his best moments “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe”, ” Swimming Pools (Drank)” and a Tupac cover came and went and sure the audience, who arrived early for the set, approved, but it was nothing much. It was what Kanye seemed to rain against. “Is Brooklyn in the house?” Kendrick asked but the evening was well beyond that sort of sign post.
Later, Kanye would tackle the question of New York City, everything started here, he would remind us, it was here where he first met folks like Q-Tip who he only knew from television and Jay Z, for whom he went on to produce a handful of tracks on The Blueprint and got his big break. “I’ve lived here for nine years” Kanye adds.
Kanye was always a little on the eccentric side but the death of his mother sent him right over the edge. His response is now three albums deep and counting, 808s And Heartbreaks has only one subject matter and it isn’t the break up with Alexis Phifer. West was in free fall or maybe I mean he appeared to be in free fall because subsequent to his rehab West didn’t really change at all. West is the black victim, he is like a man who has been jailed for a crime he didn’t commit and his anger is so great it kills off his sense of proportion. It makes him humorless even though a man who can wrote “she got more n—–s off than Cochran”, has a sense of humor.
On stage at MSG the anger derails the set for a huge swath of time, he throws a bomb right in the middle of the set so he can warn and rail and warn, “Creativity,” he claims, “I want money so I can do this time after time after time.” He has money of course, what he doesn’t have is sales but does anybody doubt that if he wanted to write a hit album it would be beyond his abilities?
Because that’s the point of this set, it is a psychological explosion of mainstream artiness. And to deconstruct it is to find fault lines, and the fault is that West has no sense of perspective, every affront is the same as the one before it: every insult is as terminal as Donda West’s death. Jimmy Kimmel got it right when he had the skit with a child speaking West’s interview lines. West is a Peter Pan, an Oedipus, a mythic figure never growing up. A child can see no difference in pain between breaking its knee and dropping its ice cream. The thundering two hour plus fall and rise of West called Yeezus, is of a sound, it is all on one level, and the level is the very height of pop music and culture.
Yeezus isn’t what Kanye thinks it is, the move from “On Sight” -not giving a fuck to “Bound 2” -his emotional resurrection, to giving a fuck, through love, doesn’t happen. He doesn’t recover, he hasn’t recovered, even with Jesus in his sights, even with the possibility of an everlasting bo(u)nd between mother and son, it isn’t enough, he can’t break through to where he wants to be, he can’t be happy: he is too hurt, he can’t forgive and forget, he can only take everything as personal and insulting: “Did you say something? Uh huh, you can’t tell me nothing”. Look at how having a daughter changed Jay Z and now look at what it did for West. West can’t get past it, he can’t walk away from the past.
Kanye sees things very black and white: “to behave or to be or to be free”. He is fighting a battle he appears to have already won. On Wednesday he was complaining about Bruno Mars getting so many (two to be exact) VMAs. What sort of nonsense is that? How can you take him seriously?
Here’s how: he is a musical genius both the best live and the best recorded experience in hip hop.