It’s just hours before Paris Fashion Week and darkness is about to descend. The “joke” seems light, brazen even. Geeky, you could say, but there’s a better word for it: callous. The joker here, after all, is Kanye West.
West and his black, white-supremacist pal, Candace Owens, are pacing the lobbies of one of the city’s exclusive hotels.
When he and Owens arrived in the City of Light and posed for the media wearing matching “White Lives Matter” T-shirts, it was not out of character at all. But doing so was beyond insensitive; it was outlandishly bizarre.
The slogan “white lives matter” is a creation of white supremacists on the internet, not only as a reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, but like its foul twin “all lives matter”, as a provocative denial of history — the killing of blacks, racial inequality and the erasure of black voices and agency.
Everyone knows blackness has been, and continues to be, subjected to the most brutal prejudice. It’s a phenomenon that West (who officially changed his name last year to Ye), whose father is a one-time Black Panther and whose mother is a college professor, and who grew up in one of the blackest cities in the US, Chicago, is obviously aware of.
Looked at through the lens of the long history of Africans and “negroes” in Paris, West’s behaviour was nothing short of sacrilege. Think Josephine Baker, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Gerard Sekoto, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Zeke Mphahlele, and countless others.
Shortly after the T-shirt outrage, drama-boy was at it again. This time he went after a black woman, fellow-rapper Lizzo, referring to her weight in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
“The media wants to put out a perception that being overweight is the new goal, when it's actually unhealthy. Let’s get aside the fact of whether it’s fashion and vogue, which it’s not ... it’s actually clinically unhealthy, and for people to promote that, it’s demonic.”
This, West said, was part of a media conspiracy aimed at the “genocide of the black race”.
The philosopher king of Twitter’s nocturnal tribes, who was on Carlson’s show twice in a matter of days, also claimed that the fashion multinational Gap knew about the mass shooting in Uvalde in Texas before it happened. No evidence offered.
No, that was not enough. West’s got the microphone and all you sorry souls can switch off if you’d rather not be educated by this child of 1970s black intelligentsia. To Carlson, he insinuated that his friend Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his fellow Jews are invested in Middle East peace efforts “for self-enrichment”.
“I think that’s what they are all about. I don’t think they have the ability to make anything on their own. I think they were born into money.”
Blatant bigotry, but West was only warming up.
Young bucks of my generation found in him a salvation and compass, following Tupac’s death
When his fellow hip-hop zillionaire Sean Combs (P. Diddy) posted on Instagram about the insensitivity of the “white lives matter” stunt, King Ye shared a screen-grab of the conversation: “I’m selling these tees. Nobody can get in between me and my money … Ima (sic) use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me, that no-one can threaten or influence me.”
Not satisfied yet, West posted on his natural habitats, Twitter and Instagram: “I am a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”
I have always been suspicious of folks who abuse capital letters when lower case would do. And I am deeply irked by people who spout nonsensical homilies such as “Zulus are a warrior nation”, “Jews control the global economy”, “the South is the soul of America”, “gays are responsible for HIV/Aids”, and so on.
After these outbursts, West doubled down and emitted even darker fumes.
“Hollywood is Jew-land!” he announced to all and sundry before turning his attention on the “real causes” of George Floyd’s death. “Floyd was not suffocated by the racist men in blue,” he said in a podcast. “The cause, you see, was something else: they hit him with the fentanyl. If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that.”
When challenged to back up his view he challenged “the Jewish media” for silencing him.
The writing has always been on the wall. In 2004, Rolling Stone writer Touré got the measure of what would blow up into one of the biggest egos of the 21st century. He went to interview the then fresh-faced artist at his home in New Jersey.
“On the wall in the living room there’s a larger-than-life poster of West himself, evidence of a certain arrogance.”
The writer recalls his mother sharing an anecdote: “When Kanye was in kindergarten, the teacher said to me, ‘Kanye certainly doesn’t have any problem with self-esteem, does he?’”
Later on, his star in ascendance, the artist “worked consciously to downshift into humility”. Referring to that huge poster of himself on the wall, he explained: “I put me on the wall because I was the only person that had me on the wall at that time. And now that a lot of people have me on the wall I don’t really need to do that anymore.”
The inner sanctum within his head, we would later learn, is a mishmash of genius, mental illness and an insatiable monster ego.
His name translates as “No 1" or “Once” in the ancient Ethiopian language Ge‘ez and in modern Amharic, as well as in my mother tongue, Zulu. With a name like that, he was always going to go large: in the size of his ego, in his creativity, his dreams, his illusions, and, ultimately, his self-sabotage.
No-one in the 21st century comes close.
Not since the late Tupac Shakur, who was murdered in the 1990s, has a rapper had a comparable reign.
I have fond memories from two decades ago of the man whose music promised to give both Jesus and Caesar their equal due with hook, verse and a bouncy beat.
Young bucks of my generation found in him salvation and a guide following Tupac’s death. West’s compass led to a world we knew, one we already inhabited but were too coy to speak of out loud: geek-land. Bookish, nerdish young outliers in black society, our preference was to bury ourselves in Credo Mutwa’s Indaba My Children or James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name.
West’s style and art assured us it was cool to be ourselves. Writer Mat Johnson explains it succinctly in “The Geek”, an essay in Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, a 2012 anthology edited by Rebecca Walker. “Dorky? For sure. But we are not dorks.”
West saw himself in the teachings of Jesus Christ, wearing wore a silver medallion with a black Jesus engraved “L.O.V.E.”
Geeks posed an existential dilemma for the black race. Although they were instrumental in the campaign for liberation, no-one dared speak their name. So West arose from the ashes of gangsta rap like the second coming.
Kanye arrived on the scene armed with a Thesaurus and a Louis Vuitton rucksack
De La Soul and their daisy goofiness had been there before, as had the Fugees. But this was different. His music never wore blackness on its sleeve, yet it could only have been created by one of us. It was time.
“Black Geeks are of the ‘now’, in part because they never could have been before,” Johnson reminded us a decade after West made geekdom acceptable. “Without the movement of black folks into the middle class, black geekdom wouldn’t even exist.”
With brace-wired teeth, a love for Takashi Murakami’s goofy Louis Vuitton bomber jackets and encyclopedic devotion to Tin Pan Alley pop, West arrived as the unlikeliest black superhero.
With his black eccentricity he yanked back the look-book of preppydom from the tennis court and encoded a new pose: swag.
Braces? What kind of black are you?
Twenty years later they are a fashion signature.
As for anti-Semitism, we need to draw a line between it and valid criticism of the apartheid state of Israel. The two are far from the same.
I am beginning to believe what some on the Israeli Left used to argue: that almost all anti-Semites — West being a prime example — have no real political project. They are not interested in taking on the state of Israel and its enablers. Their anti-Semitism is nothing but vile posturing.
What then, to do with our Prince of Darkness?
Put it this way: if Muhammad Ali and Oprah had had a spiritual child, West would be it.
He arrived on the scene armed with a thesaurus and a Louis Vuitton rucksack and showed you need not be a groundbreaking rapper to be a game changer.
For a moment, West did not influence culture, like Outkast did; no, he was the culture. Whichever way we look at it, there would be no A$AP Rocky, no Pharrell Williams as we know him, no Chance the Rapper, without the world created by West. Solange would still be Beyoncé’s “eccentric” sister. Arthur Jafa would still be a powerful Afrocentric filmmaker, but not so “haute”.
There would be no curiosity about Naomi Osaka, and Tyler, the Creator, would be seen simply as an oddity. Elon Musk would be flying his battery-powered cars to the moon all right, but without the world West remade in his image he would simply be Richard Branson-lite.
People loved sneakers long before West arrived on the scene, but yo’ mama would certainly whip your ass before you would wear them to church. That was millennia Before Kanye.
He wasn’t handsome, but the core of his music radiated much more. We instantly fell in love. He was one of us. He was arrogant all right. But it was our kind of braggadocio.
His lyrics told us people like us mattered. He taught us that black literariness, and devotion to the esoteric instead of the flashy, was also part of our heritage. We derived succour from his conviction that it is OK to be a nerd and to look fly while you’re at it.
From the moment his debut album The College Dropout dropped, we knew not only that hip-hop could be saved but that West was the promised saviour. We adored him so much we ignored all the warning signs.
The daredevil sonic flourishes, the songs we believed were as epic and ambitious as anything Mozart composed, marked him as a genius of our age. We were devoted to West. We loved the idea of loving him. And yet we knew deep within ourselves no-one would love him more than he loved himself.
It was less a matter of unrequited love as loving someone more because you knew it would never be reciprocated
He oozes the ennui of someone who has never heard of anyone else, and besides his Oedipal devotion to his mother, is incapable of caring for and loving anyone. For a while this has served him well: here was an artist who judged himself by the loftiest, unattainable standards.
West’s right-wing, bigoted and heartbreaking self-immolation took place within the stretch of two weeks. In that time he uttered the most venal anti-Semitism and body shamed a black woman and tried to blame it on the media.
During those two weeks he defamed a dead man, George Floyd, swiftly got sued by his family, acquired a right-wing social media company, ran back to the black community and evoked the name of Lauryn Hill (the radical feminist rapper who was convicted of tax evasion), and launched another vile, surreal, attack on his ex-wife.
Oh boy!
We, the tribe, still love his music. The man is a genius, no doubt. But so was Hitler. West would do well to heed Audre Lorde’s counsel: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
West is no hero. He is no underdog, either. He cannot be anything but a hugely talented factory fault. He might have been a style god at a fleeting moment when black pop hungered for one. What a shame then, to see him so thoroughly defrocked.
• Madondo is an essayist, photography critic and filmmaker. He has written on Kanye West in 'Hot Type: Icons, Artists & God-figurines', and in 'Sigh the Beloved Country'.
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