kanye west

Sund4r & DJP otfm

he's not a very articulate guy

I feel like a lot of the charitable programs and good things he’s done are overshadowed by his boredom in doing them, or the disinterest in continuing them. There are some good sentiments, like those Moka mentioned, on those early albums and in some of his public appearances at the time (the Katrina live on air call-out is still great), but I’ve always gotten the impression that he does things out of a sense of obligation of what he thinks he’s supposed to be to different people.

I remember an interview with Rhymefest from a few years back where he voiced his frustrations with Kanye putting him in charge of an outreach program that he then ignored. I think the implication was that Kanye’s new Kim-influenced lifestyle was to blame, but I really think Kanye just does Kanye. The presidential aspiration stuff is just him wanting to do the same bullshit at a different scale, and with the current president basically doing that, I get where he’s coming from (and it is a bad place).

I mean, I think this is a bad way to live life and he’s mostly interested in his own self-aggrandizement

the video clip I saw was an actual mess but the sentiment about his ramblings on abortion seems to be “I could have been aborted. Me, Kanye!”

You don't have to be insane to be an utterly unsympathetic dick.

― shout-out to his family (DJP)

...but it helps!

honestly though i feel like there's a case to be made that being unsympathetic enough for long enough will eventually DRIVE one insane

I think we want for that to be true in order to promote the idea that being good to others is a fundamental component of being a rational, functioning individual but I don't think it's a true statement. Or, to put it another way, sociopathy is defined by the norms of society and acting in concert with society is not always conducive to mental health.

I am neither a psychologist or a philosopher so take that statement with a giant mound of salt.

I mean doesn't he brag about never reading books? I don't know why we'd expect his political views to be any more informed or interesting than some random dude you went to high school with on facebook. he's just really good at music and making ugly sneakers.

if there's one thing i wish i could change was this weird baseline assumption that if someone is exceptionally skilled in one area it means this aptitude translates to other areas

For every Condoleezza Rice, there are at least a hundred Ben Carsons/Kanye Wests.

He's long had a way of conflating/collapsing his personal successes and challenges with those of society in general. It worked pretty well on Yeezus, less so in the current context.

hmmm. let me refine that statement.

i think that there have always been successful, functioning people who were utterly unsympathetic pricks. that's pretty basic history, i'd have a hard time arguing with that statement.

i also think that being a "conservative" of any sort in america requires one to exist with truly herculean levels of cognitive dissonance. humans in general are very adept at not seeing things they don't want to see. humans are very adept at compartmentalizing. the president in america... i mean, i try not to use emotionally loaded language, but i struggle to find a better phrase than "insane death cult". less loaded phrases seem to me like soft-pedaling.

I think the issue is that my rando high school friends on FB aren't running for President (or PM).

For every Condoleezza Rice, there are at least a hundred Ben Carsons/Kanye Wests.

― shout-out to his family (DJP), Tuesday, July 21, 2020 2:44 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I would 100% rather have an uninformed person like Carson/West in political office than an informed, unscrupulous, unapologetic mass murderer like Condoleeza Rice

You have that now. How's it going?

I would 100% rather have an uninformed person like Carson/West in political office than an informed, unscrupulous, unapologetic mass murderer like Condoleeza Rice

This is 100% fucking stupid and why we are in the current position we're in now.

xps to Kate:

Being a "conservative" requires you to distrust change. I think you can boil pretty much every conservative stance down to "it's worked so far, why do we need to change it?"

Trump isn't conservative, he is a narcissist and a user who preys on conservative thought. If he thought he could accrue power by and make money off of Socialist rhetoric, he'd do that. The driver for his behavior and a lot of the people running the conservative movement now is avarice, which is why Kanye fits in so well with them and why in the modern age, it's nigh-impossible to interact with at least half the political actors in US politics in good faith. (Do not mistake this for excusing conservative thought, which has its own problems worth several threads of their own.)

I would like to apologize for the redundancy in my previous post and would like to make up for it by calling Whiney fucking stupid some more

i also think that being a "conservative" of any sort in america requires one to exist with truly herculean levels of cognitive dissonance.

I think we all require Herculean levels of cognitive dissonance to get by, but it also depends on your own experiences and environment and the information streams you are exposed to.

why you would choose rice - who is inarguably culpable in supporting a number of actions at least roughly akin to war crimes - as an exemplar in contrast to kanye?

also i have forgotten if i am on the kanye thread or the politics thread

Being a "conservative" requires you to distrust change. I think you can boil pretty much every conservative stance down to "it's worked so far, why do we need to change it?"

― shout-out to his family (DJP)

i mean not to get all into semantics but are you talking about "conservatism" as an internally consistent, rational, and coherent ideology? because i know that a lot of people writing for the national review _claimed_ there was such a thing, this vast sea of anti-trump conservatives. hell, i knew some people who claimed to be "anti-trump conservatives" themselves... and then voted for him anyway because they believed he was the "lesser evil".

also i have forgotten if i am on the kanye thread or the politics thread

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses)

#onethread

i don't think it's really a question of whether kanye is suffering from mental illness... he's publicly acknowledged he's bipolar, has been hospitalized previously, and has also previously talked openly about going off of his meds. his tweets from last night indicate that ppl close to him are trying to get him back in the hands of professionals, and just from personal experience of knowing someone w/ the illness that kind of social media posting seems consistent w/ a heightened manic period

but it's pretty easy to divorce the recent sideshow from his political beliefs. his newfound interest in abortion isn't surprising when you read the ppl helping him w/ the south carolina rally were an anti-abortion film score composer and some other shadowy "spiritual advisor." if you think about his turn towards evangelical christianity in the last year w/ sunday service and the whole weird atmosphere around that, i think it's pretty easy to trace the roots of some of what he's saying. in a way it's quite retrograde as far as republican politics go.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/kanye-in-s-c-two-political-novices-are-running-his-campaign.html

"at least this guy has never committed war crimes" was a popular argument for Trump over Clinton iirc

if 9/11 had happened on Trump's watch there probably wouldn't be a planet left

trump was actually voted "Most Likely to Commit a War Crime If Allowed To" in junior high so it's not like we weren't warned.

whiney is really bringing his A game

people saying trump hasn't committed war crimes, give the man some time jeez, there's only been gestapo in portland for like a week or so

pretty sure ICE detention centers already measure up

you're right, missed the mark there

anyways, really, america induces mental illness. capitalism induces mental illness. not to elide personal factors or responsibility but reducing it to "dude is nuts" seems to miss so much. i would certainly describe trump as mentally ill even if you can't match him up with something in the DSM-V or whatever. (fuck the DSM-V)

also isn't there this narrative lurking that his mother's death may have been related to surgery kanye helped pay for? if so that's a bit different than "not getting over it." and yet we can feel bad about that and still conclude that he currently meets the definition of "dickhead" or worse

Look, I’m an outsider because I’m neither black nor American, so speaking about American identity politics or the struggle for black people in America is something out of my comfort zone and I don’t feel I have the rights or authority or even the pertinent knowledge to talk about it.

However, I do understand - as incoherent as it is - that somewhere in there, Kanye is actually very passionate about inequality, this isn’t something new that he’s pushing for personal gains. How could it be? If this is about him pushing a new album release, or wanting to split votes, or wanting to be a member of the Adidas board - this whole thing he’s doing might be one of the stupidest ways to do it. This hurts his chances of succeeding in any of those. And Kanye has proved several times he is not an idiot. He’s no genius either - contrary to what he may thin. But, I don’t see the endgame in here... I think it’s pretty clear this is actually a mental breakdown and he’s in self-destruct mode. I hope he stops refusing the help and actually starts constructing towards the goal he is passionate about.

I thought one day I might become one, these "sensible conservatives" of whom I heard spoken. As I got older I studied studied the past more and more, tried to understand myself as someone not new. I started going to church, identified myself as a Christian, became skeptical all of the Good Ideas people kept proposing that didn't seem like they would quite work out in practice, seemed like they might do more harm than good, and it was easy for me to say that, easy for me to judge in that way, because I was a white man.

And then 2016 happened, and the people I thought were my friends, again, once again, turned horrible, monstrous, in front of my eyes, and even though I'd been told many, many times it was a Bad Thing to run away from my problems, I ran, not because I was afraid of them but because I was afraid of _becoming like them_.

And I went on with my life, and when I came back to visit, a year later, everything looked very different, and I started to realize that I was a very different person than I thought I was.

I was lucky. Lucky and privileged. I feel no guilt or shame for that, but I also know my path is not open to a lot of people.

<i>this isn’t something new that he’s pushing for personal gains</i>

you're right, it's not new. Everything he's ever done has been solely for personal gains.

aw fuck.

Like if you think anyone with narcissistic personality disorder even has the faintest conception of what it means to give a shit about any other human being I got bad news for you

Some of them do a decent job of miming empathy when they have something to gain from being perceived as caring.

Yep, eg every post-mortem mention of his mom

Agh sorry I gotta quit with this thread, I have always loathed this piece of shit deeply

yeah it’s very clarifying to say Kanye is Bad, in opposition to the things that are Good

we can think his trump support and opinions are beneath contempt and also acknowledge things like this

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/06/04/entertainment/kanye-west-two-million-dollar-donation/index.html

Kanye doesn’t care about black people.

dan, you are on the fucken mark, my dude. if it really was about breaking everything and establishing true equality, he wouldn't be barking up the trees of the current establishment. fuck this guy; he is trying to monetize his psyche while passing it off as a power move for equality. all it is is one shamelessly mediocre attempt at "self-realization" after another. pathetic.

Trump isn't conservative, he is a narcissist and a user who preys on conservative thought. If he thought he could accrue power by and make money off of Socialist rhetoric, he'd do that. The driver for his behavior and a lot of the people running the conservative movement now is avarice, which is why Kanye fits in so well with them and why in the modern age, it's nigh-impossible to interact with at least half the political actors in US politics in good faith. (Do not mistake this for excusing conservative thought, which has its own problems worth several threads of their own.)

― shout-out to his family (DJP), Tuesday, July 21, 2020

djp also killin' it here. funny that both tr*mp + k*nye respectively found their true personas through twitter (possibly k*nye earlier, as his blog rants predate the prominence of twitter by a bit iirc) — a platform whose entire premise is "try to say short sentences that will get you as much attention as possible." it's a narcissist's paradise and they've flourished accordingly. i see both of them as exactly the same kind of evil. makes perfect sense that k*nye now wants to be a politician. it's the only way he can cash in most effectively at this point.

in closing: k*nye sucks and always has. fuck him.

Black people will truly be free when Kanye becomes the main shareholder of adidas and/or president of the USA.

Until then, thanks for nothing Harriet Tubman.

***retweets***

i don't think kanye is such a bad guy

really bad takes. kind of erratic, but i think some of this is about phrasing things in the most provocative way possible to get a response. wouldn't be a good president.

jesus is king was actually a dope record though, musically and lyrically.

one thing i value about Kanye is that, on the record at least, he lays it all on the line. he doesn't pretend to know more than he does and he never shies away from very awkward and even--i'm sorry--dumb trains of thought, as long as they are authentic.

what you hear in "Jesus is King" is a guy who has come up in a world of consumerism and is still attached to those values. but he sees that they are hurting him. and from this standpoint, he is trying to understand Christianity, or see what's in it for him. and there is actual struggle here, moments where he sounds like he is trying to see what it would be like to subordinate his ego to a higher power. real-time, spiritual wrestling. he seems to know what transcendence might *feel* like but how to integrate that into the ethical demands of religion, he's trying to figure it out.

a lot of his music similarly comes from this place of doubt, which is why it's so easy to make fun of. but there is courage in doing this, in being Kanye.

i mean, it's also exhibitionistic in a way the blogosphere used to encourage. christopher lasch wouldn't have much time for it. but even in that there is something refreshing--somehow, it just seems shockingly un-manipulative. he's a real one.

JiK is def an interesting record but it's also awful in some pretty obvious ways

i mean, the way he says "chik-fil-A" at the end of "closed on Sunday" brings me a lot of joy. what else is there?

jesus is king was actually a dope record though, musically and lyrically.

one thing i value about Kanye is that, on the record at least, he lays it all on the line. he doesn't pretend to know more than he does and he never shies away from very awkward and even--i'm sorry--dumb trains of thought, as long as they are authentic.

what you hear in "Jesus is King" is a guy who has come up in a world of consumerism and is still attached to those values. but he sees that they are hurting him. and from this standpoint, he is trying to understand Christianity, or see what's in it for him. and there is actual struggle here, moments where he sounds like he is trying to see what it would be like to subordinate his ego to a higher power. real-time, spiritual wrestling. he seems to know what transcendence might *feel* like but how to integrate that into the ethical demands of religion, he's trying to figure it out.

a lot of his music similarly comes from this place of doubt, which is why it's so easy to make fun of. but there is courage in doing this, in being Kanye.