I am back
Dropped Rachel off at the airport (a bald eagle cries a single tear, etc.) where I saw a story about the Kanye West thing—which I couldn’t see in real time since I’m only getting antenna channels for the next week—and I have witty and insightful things to say about it, but shit, it’s like midnight or something on the east coast now, isn’t it? You guys have probably already figured everything out at this point. It’s very disorienting. Well, there’s always tomorrow.
But were I forced to say something, I would probably say that, despite the obvious fakery of the whole thing (which even though I haven’t actually read the Internet yet today I’m going to assume everyone took at face value even though he’s already pulled the same stunt twice before), there’s an interesting aspect of sincerity to it. The form is a publicity stunt, yes, but the content is something Kanye probably sincerely feels, and feels strongly enough to jump up on stage to announce. If any of us music nerds had bigger egos and less self-confidence, wouldn’t we do the same thing? I mean, he’s certainly not wrong, and announcing it in so Kanye-ish a way is in part another aspect of his interest in becoming a rogue tastemaker, a drive most clearly displayed on his blog. This is not just Kanye displaying his ego, it’s Kanye displaying his taste, although of course those are kind of the same thing. It’s interesting that, despite being very similar to things he’s done before, this time he’s not sticking up for himself, he’s sticking up for someone else. It’s the same sort of move, in the abstract, that you might find Oprah or Karl Lagerfeld make, but in a different way. That makes sense—they make theirs in forms acceptable to their mediums (gregarious and sly, respectively), but Kanye has to make his in a pop way, which is big and splashy and rude and egotistical, not a coded message like fashion or a democritization of taste like with TV, but an invitation for everyone to engage in the discourse, to argue about something. This is maybe pop’s ultimate inclusiveness, and as pop music winds down as a broad, populist pursuit, it’s interesting to note that it still retains this power.
3 months ago
