Yeezus in the Wilderness

What the fuck is wrong with Kanye? We’ve been asking that for, what, ten years now? Yeezus, the follow-up album to Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, showed all of us how angry he was. I thought that he was finally embracing his role as the Angry Black man, a stereotype but also a valid state of being. I thought Kanye was a dude willing to tell Tyler Swift that she wasn’t as good as Beyoncê, a dude that told George W. Bush that the President’s response to Katrina was not only insufficient but also a clear sign of institutionalized racism. That was the Kanye I liked and wanted. This guy, yes, said crazy stuff. And, yes, his relationship with Kim Kardashian was a little weird. But, where it mattered, Kanye was with Us. And by “Us,” I mean Black and Brown people. That was a Kanye I could be proud of. It was a Kanye that, I believed, understood what Dr. King said so many years ago.

It wasn’t until I saw Kanye side-by-side with Donald Trump, right after the election, that I knew something was deeply wrong. Not wrong, exactly. More like broken. Before we can dive into what has happened to Kanye, we need to make obvious what should be obvious: Trump is a piece of shit.

I shouldn’t have to really lay this out, but it is important to do so. Otherwise, what Kanye is doing won’t have the proper weight. Trump has done many, many things that have exposed what a piece of human trash he is. Of those, we only need to highlight four of them.

• Trump used his standing as a reality television clown to cast doubt on Obama’s citizenship, forcing Obama to release his birth certificate in order to put to rest one of the most successful Straw-man fallacies that we’ve ever seen.
• Trump called Mexican immigrants crossing the US border illegally murders and rapists and he proposed building an actual, physical wall to keep them out.
• Trump proposed banning all Muslims from the United States and has actively tried, three times, to do it.
• After the Charlottesville incident, a White nationalists gathering that resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer, Trump said that there were bad people on both sides and that the White Neo-Nazis and Klanners were only protesting their lost heritage.

Trump has done much more than that. However, if we keep those four actions in our minds, we have a concrete and comprehensive accounting of Trumps piece-of-shit mental landscape. One could make the case that Trump is only doing this to gain votes and pump up his base of moronic, racist, backwood inbred supporters. My response to that is in a form of a rhetorical question: What’s the difference between someone who acts like a racist and a person that actually is racist?

Which makes Kanye’s odd embrace of Trump that much more insane. This is the brother that did “Jesus Walks” for God’s sake. He’s done tracks with Mos Def. For the love of God, Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy might be one of the most important albums for Black identity that we have. Why the fuck would Kanye West want to be in any way shape or form associated with Trump?

It’s actually pretty simple. Money and Power.

I’m not saying that Kanye is vomiting on Twitter to hype up his next album (he could be doing that though). What I am saying is that the current Kanye West acquits success and a good life with acquisition of Money and Power. If you have Money and Power, then you have a good life. If you don’t have Money and Power, then you don’t have a good life. It is that simple to him. To Kanye, Trump is the most powerful man on the planet. To have a good relationship with Trump is to have a good relationship with what Kanye believes to be important and worth lusting after. Kanye’s attraction to Kim Kardashian is a pretty solid sign of this. Besides what superficially attracts Kanye to Kim, it is obvious that her fame and fortune were the biggest draws. Couple that with his consistent exposure in the media and his need for attention and you have a broken person that is rotting before us like some zombified corpse.

Here is where I have to ask, for some reason, whether Ye (and by some small extension, Chance the Sort-of Rapper) is right. Are Black people connected to the Democratic party in a way that is not helpful for people of color? I don’t want to spend time talking about whether Democrats truly care about Black and Brown or if they are just trying to get our votes. What I want to spend time on is how Republicans really don’t like Black or Brown people and that, unless they change their racist, bigoted, xenophobic platform, we shouldn’t support them. To be honest, we should stop looking at this through the lens of party affiliation. If Republicans supported policies that would help Black and Brown people, then Black and Brown people should support them. But, and I want to scream this to the fucking rafters, Republicans are not, at all, supporting policies to help Black and Brown people. Republicans have, for years, hated us. I could spend an hour listing all the ways that Republicans have failed to reach out to dark skinned people. That is what makes me even more furious with Kanye. He knows this. He absolutely knows this. But, because he’s rich and because the wind and hail of the storm that is the American Nightmare can’t touch him, he has lost touch with his people. By wearing a MAGA hat, and posting that shit on a public forum, Kanye admitted one or two perspectives: Either he believes in the philosophy that Trump has embraced, a philosophy antithetical to all people of color, or he’s stupid and doesn’t understand what the fuck he’s doing. If it’s the first one, then Kanye has become a dangerous oracle for Trumpism that runs the risk of infecting other young, gullible Black people. If it’s the second one, then Kanye is being used like one of the Get Out puppets, as a physical vessel for the Oppressor to promote racism and xenophobia. There is a third option, too. Kanye is lonely and sad. He sees the attention that Trump is getting and wants some of it, just a piece. Most likely, it is a mixture of all three, culminating in the real-time destruction of a person that many of us love.

We should have seen this. In Life of Pablo, Kanye says that he misses his old self. He says, I miss the Old Kanye. We thought it was self-deprecating. Perhaps the song was even mocking us, his fans. But now, in retrospect, we can clearly see that Kanye was saying that his old self, the man that was brave enough to accuse a sitting President of blatant racism, that old self was dead. His new self, the one that is before us now, not only calls the most racist President of modern times his brother, but Kanye also digitally gives Trump head on the most explicit venues possible.

It makes me sad.