Just as sure as September brings a chill to the air in Chicago, another Kanye West-induced pop culture drama has played out in the media, this one in the wake of his Twitter rant pointed at Jimmy Kimmel. He doubled his Twitter output in ten minutes, coming off childish and innocuous. It’s become the norm for West, who has had a double major in music and media relations in the years since his dropout made him famous.
Since the passing of his mother Donda in 2008 and break up of his longtime relationship with fiancée Alexis Phifer soon after West has been strikingly different in his actions and music, beginning with his pilgrimage to Honolulu for three weeks while recuperating and crafting 808s and Heartbreaks. He left the mainland with a heavy heart and arrived back with an attitude and auto-tune. What followed was a cacophony of public relations missiles that would have derailed most any other career. In a story for Pitchfork this week, Ernest Baker noted that Kanye has been in the game, at the top of the game, for just nearly a decade. In that time his career has intertwined itself into our daily lexicon. Hurricane Katrina, Taylor Swift, the Kardashians: it all feels like a big charade. But, as West displayed this week, it’s a charade he’s willing to throw anyone under the bus for.
He named his first album College Dropout and used soul samples and clever hooks and bars to capture America and an entire generation that would grow up with seminal Kanye records every few years. College Dropout came out in 2004 as I was entering high school, figuring out what music was after binging on 2pac and Biggie for my middle school years. Graduation was released in September of 2007 as I was preparing for exactly what the title inferred. Standing in Union Park on Sunday at Pitchfork festival this year watching R. Kelly do what seemed like his entire discography, I felt as though each song represented a different grade, life experience, etc. West is certainly in the same rarefied air, although I’m still not sure I connect to Yeezus the same way as the rest of his body of work.
“Lock yourself in a room doin’ 5 beats a day for 3 summers, that’sA Different World like Cree Summer’s, I deserve to do these numbers/the kid that made that, deserves that Maybach.” Listening to “Spaceship” now it’s obvious that a young Kanye is predicting the future. He has had his eye on the throne on which he is currently perched for a long time. To him it was and is deserved and perhaps helps explain some of his erratic behavior over the years, a sense of entitlement that existed since the early days of ‘Ye.
To be sure, it was the car accident that inspired the now-iconic “Through the Wire” track that gave the artist the kind of passion and drive that only near death experiences seem to provide. It’s maybe why he feels the need to go bigger, feeling as though he cheated death. In his phone conversation with Kimmel the other day he allegedly referred to himself as ‘Pac. 2pac, West is not, but a parallel can certainly be drawn between both artists actions after near-fatal experiences. Pac’s surviving being shot five times, lead to the East/West rap feud and, ultimately, two caskets for the artists involved. In West’s case the ability to cheat death has served as a launching board for everything that has come after. Where ‘Pac pushed an agenda, talked militant, and ran with Suge Knight; Kanye rants at listening parties, fights paparazzi and dates a reality-TV star. In Ye’s tweets to Kimmel he mentioned that Kimmel doesn’t have to worry about people jumping over fences to take pictures of his daughter. Maybe not, but it’s also a simple fact that those intrusions are a product of the life West has chosen for himself.
At the end of the day, none of this really matters to the subject of this article. Because, as he told us on Graduation, “Everything I’m not made me everything I am,” the inverse may also prove to be true.