Kanye West: Nazi or Nihilist?
In the absence of meaning, does anything actually matter?
We are drowning in a sea of content. Music, art and creativity of all kinds are everywhere and nowhere all at once. There are men and women as talented as Leonardo De Vinci and Amadeus Mozart who are Geico claims adjusters and grocery store clerks waiting for an algorithm to discover their genius, just for their hair to gray, their skin to wrinkle and their dreams to die in front of them before they could ever get themselves in front of the world.
There’s a reason for this. Talent, beauty and brilliance are no longer enough to cultivate an audience. The ticket to Tinseltown is absurdity and sensationalism — robbing everything of its meaning. This applies to every living artist in our era, and likely every artist who will come after. As a result, art will be sacrificed in the name of recognition, and a race to bottom will begin. Well, it actually has already begun…
And Kanye West is the highest profile example.
Kanye West is one of the world’s greatest artists and underdog stories. He was the producer who desperately wanted to rap that no one believed in, and eventually through hard work and persistence became one of the most successful rappers of all time. Shortly after, he was a rapper who desperately wanted to be a fashion designer that no one believed in, and eventually through hard work and persistence, became one of the most influential fashion designers in the modern era. Everything after the Yeezy Boosts that came out (including the Adidas I’m wearing as I write this) kind of looked like the Yeezy Boosts.
But in the internet era, your flowers die fast. Kanye West, despite having multiple classic albums in his catalog, was no longer the topic of discussion. Drake, an inferior artist with superior media training, ripped the rug from under Kanye’s feet, leaving him fumbling for relevance in a space he once dominated. To call Kanye a sore loser wouldn’t be accurate. Because in reality, he hasn’t lost anything. Kanye West, even with the recent descent into madness, people still perceive as a legend — a flawed legend, but a legend none of the less.
But even legends have to grapple with the rising waters they're forced to swim in, and the age of meaninglessness has submerged Kanye completely.
Nothing happens overnight, and Kanye’s transformation into a self-described “Nazi” didn’t either. He flirted with it before he fucked it. His first flirtation manifested into MAGA territory, but slowly transitioned into antisemitic tirades, praise for Adolf Hitler, doing an entire interview in a clan outfit and countless tweets essentially that equate to screaming “Look at me! I’m a piece of shit!"
But he doesn’t mean it. He just doesn’t know what else to do. When the world wasn’t reduced to an embarrassment contest, Kanye could comfortably release music that people would take the time to consume and sit with — usually for days at a time, and they would derive their own meaning from Kanye’s musical output. Kanye knows on some level that his artistry, no matter how good, is competing against an endless stream of everything that could ever be done and said. This naturally reduces the impact and meaning of his art in his own eyes. Kanye has sacrificed his entire life, and lost his mother to the limelight his artistic endeavors afforded him. His mother, Dr. Donda West famously died during a plastic surgery operation as more eyes were on her and her newly famous son.
Kanye’s meaning was derived from the validation provided by his artistry. If artistry doesn’t matter, then for Kanye nothing matters. But this isn’t limited to just Kanye. This effects us all collectively, as art is bigger than Kanye West, and in many ways, bigger than all of us.
Because art is everything. The architecture that make up our cities, the way the cars on the road look, the street signs that direct them, all of it art.
Art imitates life as life imitates art in an endless cycle of creation that provides us all with a sense of ourselves — but as we collectively lose our sense of self, we lose our sense of art and the meaning it provides.
Artists — neophytes and legends alike, have to engage in spectacle for engagement. This isn’t done because they want to, this is done in the hopes that the people laughing at the black Nazi who is telling you all about how he sucked his cousin’s cock will take a look under the hood in an attempt to understand why people care about the nonsense coming out the black Nazi’s formerly dick-filled mouth in the first place.
But by then it’s too late, the Costco Family just put out a new video, and the world is left to wonder… Boom or Doom? Even though it doesn’t matter. Because before you even have the time to think, it’s gone…
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The need to be edgy plus mental illness = disaster