Kanye will forever be important despite his recent turns. I would fall asleep at night as a bored black teen in suburbia listening to the music of Drive Slow or Late on Late Registration.

Note: I am using Kanye and Ye interchangeably.

I’ll get to the point. After Kanye’s Golden Era with College Dropout, Late Registration (his magnum opus in my opinion), and Graduation to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he went through a lot. His mom died and this is similar to the character of Pink played by Bob Geldof in Pink Floyd’s musical The Wall. Even though Pink’s mother isn’t shown as passing away, the maternal bond is central to both characters. Yet, Pink and Kanye both came to rely on their mothers though Pink’s mother was suffocating, whereas Kanye’s mother was his anchor. This maternal bond (I won’t go all Freudian because I don’t feel well read enough into Freud to say it) was central to both people. Further, Kanye has a had problems with women though in more recent music he’s challenged his notions such as those found in his analysis of the Madonna Whore Complex in the song Violent Crimes on the ye album. This exploration reminds me of the ill-fated philosopher Otto Weininger who wrote the book Sex and Character, but as a Jewish man who aspired to fit into what he saw as Aryan ideals, he later committed suicide. This struggle about identity is similar to me to what is going on with Kanye.

This is similar to the character of Pink in The Wall with Pink as having a rocky relationship with his wife since he’s a traveling rock-and-roll musician. Pink has issues regarding fear of loss, control, etc., and can be heard in the lyrics of the song Don’t Leave Me Now, which says, “I need you to put through the shredder in front of our friends, oh baby, don’t leave me now”, “How could you go? When you know how I need you…to beat up on a pulp on Saturday night, oh babe…don’t leave me now”. The lyrics depicts a man who blames his spouse for his behavior/internalized trauma and cannot operate without having someone to coddle his bad decisions and take his abusive behavior. I’m not insinuating this is Kanye, yet still male and female relationships (or any type) can be rocky and at times have an unhealthy level of dependency going both ways where love and abuse (or the ability to tolerate said abuse) are seen as the same. Negative behaviors can exacerbate as people push limits, essentially to see if the other stays around. Kanye’s relationship with sexual feminist icon Amber Rose (who later made a pivot to the Right Wing populism of the MAGA movement of Trump) seems similar to that of Pink’s character to his estranged wife, especially since Amber Rose left him for another rapper in an industry where masculine posturing and ego are everything, and she sexually doxed him by revealing alleged aspects of their private sex life to the world.

Pink in the film after hearing of the infidelity of his wife in between the songs The Happiest Days of Our Lives, Young Lust, and One of My Turns, goes on a psychotic breakdown and endangers a groupie.

Further, Pink’s father dies in WW2 at the Battle of Anzio and Kanye’s father was estranged from him.

In addition, after Pink’s mental condition finally collapses after the song Comfortably Numb, he starts fantasies of fascism as a type of subconscious defense mechanism to protect his deep-rooted vulnerabilities and lack of stability. He equates his lack of stability to the need to cleanse society of minorities, gays, “people with spots”, and other ramblings. He even screams to the entire crowd of his fantasy fascist supporters that he’d wish they’d all be shot. A man with deep rooted issues but he’s human.

Kanye’s was playing with fascism which is common in the arts such as some of the works of David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Ramstein, Nine Inch Nails, etc. However, facsism for Kanye is not for motif or to be ironic it seems, but seems to be a literal coping mechanism for this mental state simliar to Pink in The Wall.

I believe a part of Ye’s leaning towards fascism and antisemitism is the anger felt by a black man within Western Civilization as he juggles with the old question of “to be or not to be?”, i.e., to be a champion of our Western home or to stand at odds with it (e.g., the anti-colonial, Pan African sentiment) due to its history of systemic abuses which played a role in effectively…creating us as black people as a construct.

Pink Floyd isn’t racist or fascist and their depiction of fascism in the film was a criticism of it.

The film came out during the Margaret Thatcher years which was full of right-wing “Oi Oi” hate groups associated with the National Front and the conservative Tories in power. This is very similar to the far-right peripheries of the Trump Administration’s grassroots right-wing populism with groups such as Proud Boys.

Kanye’s play with fascism could be seen as being ironic with his lyrics in Black Skinhead which is really Kanye appropriating the hyper-masculinity of the far-right for his own purposes to scare the actual fascists. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case based on his insane antisemitic rantings. Yet, black people have appropriate white supremacist tropes and language as a means of “re-defining” certain terms, such as the N word. If the N word is acceptable, then to Kanye then maybe a black person with a Confederate Flag or worst isn’t that bad. It begs the question. For real. If you ask the black people who use the N word about why the use it, they will come up with some reason about endearment, or being rebellious, etc., but this sort of oddities seems to be what Ye was originally challenging, even though any noble attempt at challenging the status quo, was tarnished by his real mental health and personal issues, which of course coincides with his antisemitism (which seems to have started in 2016).

In one hard, Ye playing with fascism could be seen as ironic way of defending himself against it, yet, playing with irony is sometimes…simply irresponsible. Not all art needs to be ironic. Irony doesn’t necessary insinuate depth, but rather it can do more harm than good by blurring the moral lines of what we consider right versus wrong or social versus anti-social.

Kanye was one of my idols and I still support the guy. He’s a black man fighting for freedom and not just freedom from the perspective of black liberation but total “ubermench”. Yet, like Nietzsche…Ye went insane.

Yet, there’s a profundity to Kanye, his older version (not his antisemitic new version) that most might not get. His descent is essentially a waste. A waste brought on by pride.

In Greek philosophy there was a man by the name of Diogenes the Cynic who was known for living an eclectic lifestyle, having sharp cynical wit, and living a life as a homeless beggar to show the uselessness of certain aspects of society.

Anyways, Kanye instead of entirely rapping about the grassroots realism that many African Americans face such as murder, misogyny, bravado and nihilism, Kanye analyzed not only that but the silent lives of the black middle class, but he leap-frogged backwards by borrowing from Ray Charles, chain-gang hymns, the Harlem Renaissance, gospel, etc.

Kanye am existential meteorite of hyper-aware blackness that analyzed it from all angles. Kanye can vacillate between bourgeoisie and proletariat, between “house slave” and “field slave”, but instead of picking either/or (shout out to Soren Kierkegaard) he wavers above both and creates music full of pop cultural references which spans foreign film such as the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, classical musical scores, political commentary, high art, low art, fashion, etc.

Let’s be honest, hip hop changed after Kanye, and some might say for the best, yet, for a genre still dominated by black artists, he did open the window to express yourself in ways that were more experimental, existential, etc. Being black I do know that the community is highly social, i.e., we typically tend to be a monoculture – often pushing out black subcultures in exchange for what is simply the most popular at a given time, and it typically takes martyrs to take the heat to shift sentiments.

I truly feel that Ye opened more doors for many black people that they realize, even though Ye wasn’t orignal. There are plently of out-of-the-box thinkers in the black community or black people who have always “beat to their own drum” or style, but it often takes celebrities to create tectonic shifts unfortunately. For example, I grew up Akira, weird Blockbuster movies by David Lynch, listing to The Cure, etc., so Kanye when he first came out was more of a…friend. It wasn’t that he was original to me but rather I had someone to look up to who was still black and a part of the “culture” but also…our own thing. Tupac, Biggie, etc., never made me feel that way because I didn’t grow up in a destitute dire situation. I had two black parents, a home, was told to go to college and stay out of trouble, etc. My parents wanting to protect their kids from the temptations and violence that were sweeping the black community in the late 80s is a reason we migrated into suburban America like many other black people. So, what about our experiences, our stories? Kanye, Ye, whatever, revealed a blackness that was always there but often unseen to others, including black people.

Kanye’s vast array of samples and influences spanning true hip hop to Duran Duran, the film Juice with Tupac and Omar Epps, the film Welcome to America with Eddie Murphy, Bloods versus Crypts, the ability to not get a taxi as night, Richard Pryor to Bill Cosby in the 80s, to Michael Jackson to Fellini films to surreal anime, etc., in my opinion will always set him above and a part from other rappers, except for the Wu Tang Clan with people such as Ghostface Killah in my opinion.

I’m sorry but most rappers in the day didn’t take it to such levels. Essentially, Ye became the Picasso of Hip Hop, which is interesting considering Picasso did play with fascism himself as well, and was later known as being abusive to women.

Before Kanye’s fall, I use to call him the “modern day Gatsby, the hip hop Bukowski”.

I can relate to Kayne because as an African American my interests are vast. I can also empathize before judging. It wasn’t easy to simply “be like everyone else”. To white people or others, black culture is a form of punk, but when you’re black it’s just…life, so when African Americans think outside the box I always support those people and find it honorable, because equality isn’t merely a matter of nationalism or economic empowerment, but it’s a matter of representation in various fields, while also showing the world the diversity of talents and the depths of your comprehension skills.

However, Ye is…sort of dead to me now.

His antisemitism, hatred, erratic behavior are…simply unacceptable. He isn’t making any valid analysis about the state of Palestinians or critiquing colonialism, but rather he’s spreading Nazism via a black body.

I see a black man who stared at the sun of Western Civilization too much and it burned him. It broke his brain. And it is disappointing because I didn’t want his wings to melt because maybe I saw a piece of Kayne in me.

But, until Ye gets himself help, he’s nothing to me.

At this point it seems more performative than real, considering he is still able to maintain his personal finances. It is not like he is some homeless person who needs help. He has all the means to get help.