K*nye West is dying
Involuntarily, I’ve known Kanye for most of my life as an image.
I’ve told everyone that I loved him as a person, and as an artist. As a vessel for truth, beats, rhymes, style and design. More importantly, I’ve told myself that I’m in control of how I view him and how I hold space for him in my heart. But I can’t be totally sure about that. I’ve grown a lot since the summer of 2002, when I first encountered his mythology. I understand now how important it was for me to have a north star at that point in my life and for the subsequent 20 years. I believed I had a say in how I liked him.
But truthfully, he has always operated as an image, floating in the sky.
He has functioned as a necessary piece of iconography that inspired me to no end. I love Kanye West maybe only for that reason. Because as a symbol of a black man, a rap superstar, a fashion innovator, a spoken-from-the-heart creative force, he contained his maximum potential as an image. More so than as a real person or a member of any community I could access. He was mythological rather than functional; an example of someone who had a magical capacity for more and more and more.
If you think about it, his iconography and what he represents is staggering. If you know, you know. The iconography that is Kanye West has, without exaggeration, toppled industries. He is The limitless engine of self-belief. For so long now, in the pause before Kanye opens his mouth or drops a new project: there is always the possibility of entirely new worlds. That is the power in his iconography.
But right now, as an image, he is almost dead.
There is a lot that Kanye says these days that, to me, displays a level of cunning wacko wisdom. I tend to see where he’s coming from, even if only the very seed of the idea in his head, despite him insisting it’s a pretty flower. It all functions on the level of incisive zeitgeist commentary with which he’s always been the poster child for. He knows America unlike anyone else, and will speak on it.
But… that’s just not enough.
It’s not enough, ironically, in the landscape for celebrity expression that he pioneered. And what’s most weird is that it’s a confusing exercise for me personally to criticize my Messiah of Self-Awareness for having a sincere deficit of self-awareness in this moment.
In some sense, Kanye showed a generation how to maintain a human essence underneath the bright lights and in front of the nosey cameras. He performed truth quite beautifully under the weight of industry. And without pinpointing any of those people he inspired, the sons and daughters of the Kanye era — all hiding their faces in such a turbulent moment — I at least can say that this knowledge of self, on the biggest stages, is how he will be remembered for the rest of time.
But now, those bright lights have inevitably overpowered him. They always do. He tried his best.
Because, in this moment, the “image” of Kanye West is almost entirely washed out.
There’s an uncanny correlation between Kanye and the way I grapple with the image of Michael Jackson. The King of Pop, too, became washed out in his own ways. The bright lights did something to him not unlike what they have done to my beloved Mr. West.
Some weeks ago, an AI-based picture circulated of Michael Jackson if he were to have still been alive today. And I was initially like ah, cool… there go the internet doing its thing again. People just doing shit lol. But then I sort of stopped when I saw all the other important figures the series chose to imagine, folks who died earlier than we would have liked. And I realized that one of these things is not like the other. Michael was not going to look like a soulfully-weathered, babyfaced black man — the natural evolution of a young, bright eyed and big-nosed Jackson sibling — regardless of the abruptness of his physical death.
He was already something else.
His image as the literal king of music had been rasterized, filtered and repurposed through so many levels of the machine of celebrity that he was never going to stay a little black boy. The twinkle of his stardom could never be sustained as long as the color of his skin absorbed the light.
And so I think the same things of Kanye West now, the heir to the throne of pop music in the modern era. And seemingly the heir to a deterioration as public and iconic as the rise to stardom was.
And I wish it saddened me more than it does. But I feel like I’ve been preparing for it.
I feel like I’ve been bedside at the hospital, sifting through old photos, cherishing the old written letters, archiving old memories, for at least 5 years now. I’ve been running my fingertips over the image of my Kanye West, tracing its frayed edges. The essential image of black american self-esteem. With a such deep catalogue of iconography, at so many different points of his life, these “moments” have all been circling in my mind violently.
But it’s hard to act like we don’t see where this is going. I’ve had people go on me before. I’ve had inspirations of mine — images from above — flame out and disappear from my night sky. But this time, I see it clearly. This time, I won’t flail, I won’t fight. I won’t meander. I hate that it’s coming to an end… but I think I understand how to move with it this time.
The pain comes more in waves. The pain comes more in the texture of that old memory and knowing you’ll never quite touch something like that ever again. I have many of my own longings, but I get a little lightheaded realizing how many of them were introduced to me through Kanye’s expression of his longings. Many of my own fears I met through his expression of his. That is, ultimately, the power of Kanye West. His image — his memory — will always be of someone who showed me myself before I ever knew it.
And as of recent, it’s clear he still wants to be at the helm of this ability. It’s clear he can’t let go of this power.
But it’s just as clear he has no grapple on the self with which to do it. The selfhood that was the battery pack for decades of inspiration has been pulverized to incoherence, and everyone knows it except him. I’m sure the musical part of his mind will never deteriorate — the part that enables all his creative flights — and will be studied by scientists for years to come. But I know now: it is not this part of his brain that will help him to create the world he desperately wants to see. Because for all the great ideas he has, he no longer has any idea how to connect.
Kanye, for all his ambition, has confined himself to a life of cogency on the track alone.
No longer will he be a shining image of truth against the tides of American life, but instead a ghost that maintains relevance only in our earphones and airwaves. He is no longer with us.
I don’t know what happens next. My mourning process — and my fatigue from doing somersaults back and forth between Kanye now and Kanye then — was at its public end a while ago. Now, I think it’s at its private end. The world turns.
But I guess the only thing left to wonder is what AI image processing software would be able to imagine of an aging Kanye West who didn't believe himself an eternal underdog, barking incessantly. The Kanye who chose to lay low every once in a while. Of a Kanye that didn’t enjoy the bright lights trained on him, and chose to avoid the radiation. I wonder if the program could push the image — the image of the creative icon of a generation — through an algorithm and show us exactly what it would’ve been like for him to live, with dignity, in the spotlight, for just a little bit longer.
— bgs
