I read everywhere people calling Kanye West a punk, and this irritates me. After the release of his last album ‘Yeezus’ and pictures of Kanye wearing a Pussy Riot red balaclava, you could see the term punk everywhere in reviews and articles. Here are ten reasons why Kanye West is not a punk:
1. He is always looking for validation and he always gets furious when he is not recognized by an award show. He is constantly looking for recognition, and even better, he cares when his friends don’t get the award (see the Taylor Swift/Beyonce episode). Just a few days ago, he complained about Bruno Mars winning the MTV Music awards! Real punks couldn’t care less about award shows and rewards.
2. He speaks as if he was starting a revolution but all he can do is landing in the middle of the occupy Wall Street people, wearing his gold chain and Cartier watch, and being clueless and dumb. All his revolutions are fake, all his revolts are imagined in his songs but there’s no action. He may be spiting in the face of society, he may be talking about racial injustices in his lyrics, but he is a multi-million dollar artist living in a big mansion in Beverly Hills, and getting married to a rich white girl who has built her fame with her ass on TV. Where is the rebellion? He is confusing narcissistic arrogance with revolt.
3. Kanye West apologizes all the time! He apologized on Leno in front of million of people for the Taylor Swift incident, then he took back his apology! He also demands for apologies and that’s why he called Jimmy Kimmel when the late night comic made fun of one of his interviews. Apologies are a big deal for Kanye, not for punks.
4. Kanye sees himself as a victim and always feels persecuted by media and paparazzi, ‘The media crucify me like they did Christ’, he declared. Punk movement is about activism and involvement in the world, real punks care about social injustice, Kanye only cares for himself.
5. Kanye is a sell out, begging big corporations for money and endorsement. This is one of his rants during a show at Hammersmith Apollo, in 2013: ‘Please corporations. Can you please support me, please? Me, Kanye West? I swear I’m a nice n—a now. I swear I’ll put the pink polo back on. I swear to you. Please? Just for 3 million dollars. I need it so bad. I need a new pool in my backyard. So I’ll tell all my fans your shit is cool. And if they believe in me they should also believe in you … Did the corporation send the check yet?’ Yeah, it’s so punk to beg for a pool in a backyard.
6. Kanye cares a lot about being loved or not, he provokes with no action behind, he just likes to attract the attention, but at the end he is: ‘What’s my public rating right now? Are people liking me again? Enough to get some money from the corporations? Are they liking me now? They forgot about the whole Beyonce thing right? OK, cool. Is it OK now?’ and this is linked to the previous point, because you need a public rating to get the money, and this is what matters for Kanye at the end, the money. Punks are the antithesis of popularity, they don’t care if they are loved or not.
7. Kanye West thinks he is making history every time he moves a finger: ‘I’m doing pretty good as far as geniuses go … I’m like a machine. I’m a robot. You cannot offend a robot … I’m going down as a legend, whether or not you like me or not. I am the new Jim Morrison. I am the new Kurt Cobain … The Bible had 20, 30, 40, 50 characters in it. You don’t think that I would be one of the characters of today’s modern Bible?’ he said in a radio interview with Tim Westwood, in 2008, but there’s about a million of quotes like this one. He has compared himself to everyone, Martin Luther King to Walt Disney and Steve Jobs as if he was looking for another identity beside himself. Punk rock is about being yourself.
8. Kanye cares a lot about the way he looks and fashion in general, he dresses to be seen and admired, for the outrageousness and the shock value of the outfit, not because he wants to be free. He even wants to be a designer and sells his clothes. This, of course, is the opposite of the ‘commercially marginalized’ nature of punk rock.
9. Kanye is very conventional, he is about to get married and to sign a pre-nup agreement! It’s so bourgeois, mainstream and unpunk of him, he says it himself ‘If you ain’t no punk holla we want prenup’!
10. Kanye is a nonreader, he even admitted it in 2009 ‘Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud nonreader of books.’ He is so uninformed he has claimed things like this during live concert (in Philadelphia in 2005): ‘[AIDS is] a man-made disease. [It was] placed in Africa just like crack was placed in the black community to break up the Black Panthers.’ This is crap and dangerous. Punk is also about being an informed free thinker and not believe whatever unfounded conspiracy theory you have heard somewhere. Kanye thinks he is a genius but every time he opens his mouth he sounds dumber and dumber:’ I’m much more important than Rosa Parks. What was she fighting for? The best seat on the bus? I’m fighting for something bigger than that. I’m trying to bring opportunity to all black people by way of example through the power of my excellence, you know? I’ve inspired millions though my music. Without my lyrics black people would be nothing, they’d be stuck back in the projects. I’ve been doing this for ten years, and now look what’s happened: we got black lawyers, black doctors, black architects and black water bottle designers. And it’s all thanks to my inspiration,’ he declared in a recent interview, ‘Now Martin Luther King is different. He actually achieved some important things. But nevertheless his contributions don’t measure up to mine. I was the first black man to ever pitch an Italian designer leather jogging pants’. Every time, I say to myself, this has to be a joke, right? But if it is a joke, it’s getting old,… we don’t need more of this absurdity, the real Kanye should show up, or is this the real Kanye West?
People confuse arrogance, narcissism and rudeness with punk, Kanye had only one punk move, and it was quite a while ago, during the Hurricane Katrina telethon, when he said on National TV that Bush didn’t care about black people. And this is the good thing about him, you never know when this could happen again.