YE, BE GONE!
SAYING IT LIKE WE MEAN IT
It’s painfully boring having to write this column today. But it’s what everyone is talking about. Kanye West – now known as simply Ye – visited Trump at the Oval office in front of a herd of cameras and press. I couldn’t watch the whole thing. I had to stop and go back to it or watch short clips. When I was in art school we had a weekly exercise that I loathed. They were called constructive criticism sessions or “crits.” During a crit, we would all stand in a group of twenty or more around one other student’s work and dissect, discuss, critique it with the aim of trying to help said student improve upon any issues they were facing – whether they were aware of them or not. Sounds like a good idea? Kind of. I think it was cringe worthy especially when (and this was often the case) a student was sensitive about their work and couldn’t handle anything but a compliment. More often than not one of two reactions would occur.
First reaction is said student would sit there in strained, seething silence while the whole room criticised their work. The other reaction is, in my opinion, worse. Super sensitive student artist would go into a full length, over the top, defensive rant about their work and the incredibly complicated, sophisticated theories and techniques behind what might be a crumpled-up piece of paper sitting on a wooden box. That was someone’s piece of work once by the way – no jokes. Said student artist would be so annoyed that we weren’t getting what their work was about that they go into tangent after tangent of incoherent sentences using unnecessarily complicated jargon to defend their work. Most of us would be listening waiting, hoping that the rant would be over because we were a) hungry B) over it and c) none of us actually cared even a smidgen as much as said artist student cared about their own work. It was entertaining though to watch them – sort of like watching a confrontation on a reality show.
Ye, looked like one of those overindulged, delusional students going into a tirade of pseudocomplex ideas to a roomful of people who didn’t seem interested in what he was actually saying but enjoying how he was saying it. I’m not a mental health expert so I can’t say whether or not Ye is unhinged, unbalanced, off meds or needs to go to a mental health professional now. I will say that he isn’t sounding or acting normal, that his narcissism is sickening and that it doesn’t matter if he’s trying to make a difference or if he’s simply an opportunistic celebrity who is utilising his wife’s techniques - as to how she manipulates media.
Speaking of which, where is the Kardashian machine? Is Ye really that uncontrollable? It’s been publically stated that Ye has been diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. People are also talking about the fact that it’s always this time of year that Ye goes off the rails as it’s around the time his mother passed away. I have no idea if any of those things are affecting him. But what’s obvious is a lot of people are taking advantage of what’s happening and he isn’t helping himself or the causes he cares about. Someone needs to keep him indoors and away from the media for a while and make sure he rests, eats, and stops talking for a while.
MAAN JALAL
Pop culture enthusiast, Willy Wonka Golden Ticket hunter and Hogwarts Graduate Class of 2001