The rap world’s new-money devotees once had an affinity for Donald Trump. They saw in his rudeness and in his excess the ideal of a man who knows how to supplant old powers. “Fuck Black Caesar, niggas call me Black Trump,” Bun B gloated on UGK’s “Pocket Full of Stones,” from 1992. Raekwon called himself “Black Trump” twice. Rick Ross, a poet of free enterprise, invoked Trump’s name in lyrics at least nine times. The businessman, in return, regarded these black men as curios, symbols of ambition, posing with them at events held at his towers, his smile wide. “You know, it’s amazing—all the rappers, all his African-American friends, from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, have pictures with him,” Donald Trump, Jr., said, of his father, in February.
Kanye West also had a Donald Trump line, on the track “So Appalled,” from the 2010 album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”: “I’m so appalled, Spalding ball / Balding Donald Trump taking dollars from y’all.” Back then, the fleeting identification read as a funny detail in an extended boast on individualism. Now it looks like the first blush of a vacant and galling conceptual romance. Released in June of 2016, the video for “Famous,” West’s take on Vincent Desiderio’s “Sleep,” featured wax models of celebrities, including the Republican candidate for President, lying naked together in an enormous bed. In the same year, at the Sacramento stop on the Saint Pablo tour, West told a bewildered crowd that he supported Trump. And in December of 2016, he visited the President-elect at Trump Tower. “I wanted to meet with Trump today to discuss multicultural issues,” he said, in a since-deleted tweet that day; in another, he cited “bullying, supporting teachers, modernizing curriculums and violence in Chicago.”
This week, it became clear that West met with Trump because he thinks of him as his spiritual complement. The past few days have marked the climax in a decade of exhausting showiness from West. The forty-year-old artist has long inhabited the role of the fickle vanguard, given to muddled rants and clear-eyed pontificating in equal measure, as easily activated by the injustice of the police as he is by Bill Cosby. (West’s “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” tweet, from 2016, looks especially vexing today, when the comedian was found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault.) West is a brilliant musician—with two forthcoming albums to promote—who thrives in the shock of messy, intended-to-be-profound adjacencies: he thinks of himself as a rich Jesus, a persecuted fashion magnate, an anarchic Walt Disney, an artist-President, and, now, a new black Donald Trump.
Last week, on Twitter, the channel of communication beloved by both him and by the President, West started off by hyperactively posting tech-evangelist aphorisms—“Let’s be less concerned with ownership of ideas,” and other such jargon; a philosophy book written in real time, he called it—and screenshots of designs from the forthcoming Yeezy collection. On Saturday, he tweeted, “I love how Candace Owens thinks,” referring to the black YouTube propagandist who regularly admonishes Black Lives Matter. He continued down this road, posting videos by the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, a known Trumpist, and attracting the attention of Alex Jones. “I admire your bold moves against the thought police,” Jones tweeted at him. “And if you want to see these control freaks really grow crazy, please join me on my podcast!” Yesterday, he professed his Trumpian kinship: “You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother.” Then he continued to bombard us with sweet nothings about “free thinking” and the stigma of love, as if to cocoon himself from the brunt of his own provocations. Trump himself affirmed West— “Thank you Kanye, very cool!”—and so did the MAGA Internet, all of a sudden hungry for that Hollywood affiliation they’d previously pooh-poohed. This morning, TMZ posted a video of West delivering a freestyle while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat signed by Trump.
It’s impossible to know how sincere West is most of the time, but it is my belief that West sees Trump as he sees himself, and as he sees his wife, Kim Kardashian West—as one of the last true and pure performance artists, as a fellow-guru of celebrity in its rawest distillation. Trump’s demagoguery is, to West, a blueprint for West’s own imagined Presidency, which he first announced at the MTV V.M.A.s, in 2015, and evidence of an aesthetic victory; the political ramifications of his endorsement of Trump are collateral ripples that he refuses to register. (After the singer John Legend, West’s friend, gently reminded him of “the harm that Trump’s policies cause, especially to people of color,” West posted a screenshot of their text exchange on his account as an example of friendly disagreement.) In his obsessive adulation of those who stir up cultural conversation, West delights in ignoring the actual content of those conversations. He would have us believe that he is a citizen only of the country of conceptual art. Yet, as I await the releases of his albums in June, I imagine that West’s admiration of Trump, however much he wants to divorce it from the President’s appalling xenophobia, will warp his artistic legacy in a way that could prove unsurmountable. It casts a stupefying light on what we have called “The Old Kanye.” The young prodigy who told America that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” the older artist who made “New Slaves”—were these just performances, too?
By the minute, West continues to bombard us with an unpredictable mixture of empty slogans, dangerous dog-whistling, and inscrutable self-awareness. As of this writing, after the music Web site Pigeons & Planes posted some of his tweets as captions to New Yorker cartoons, Kanye posted screenshots of them to his own Twitter account without comment. From his fans, there have been angry lamentations, indifference, and speculative woe: “Kanye’s gone” and “Kanye’s in the sunken place,” they say, referencing the conceit from “Get Out” in which black consciousness becomes trapped in a perpetual slumber, and the black body plays host to the will of whiteness. Among some fans there’s a superstitious belief about West: that following the death of his mother, Donda, and his marriage to Kardashian West, the defenseless black genius seems to have been sucked into some Faustian contract with fame. This idea is one way for fans to cope with the fact that their beloved artist has changed. On Wednesday, West posted a photograph of the intimidating caverns of his Calabasas home: “does this look like the sunken place?” followed by many laughing emoji. Loud whispers about West’s mental health are invasive and infantilizing, as both he and Kardashian West rightly pointed out this week. The artist was telling us that he is in control. However crushing it is to do so, we should take him at his word.
A previous version of this essay misidentified the painting that inspired the “Famous” music video.
Sourse: newyorker.com
