A battle for Kanye West is happening live
Speaking truth to power has long been central to how Kanye West navigates his art and his business. He lambastes the executives who don’t grant him full creative and financial freedom. He calls into question the empathy of a president on live television. He lays bare his emotions in ways that disrupt tidy narratives about celebrity comity. He is a lit match in search of a fuse, setting fires that people (largely) cheer for.
But in the last couple of weeks, as West has begun his return to public life after a quiet year, the roles have switched: He is the power, and speaking truth to Kanye West has become the norm.
This has manifested in many forms. T.I. recorded a song with him directly challenging West’s embrace of President Donald Trump, including wearing a Make America Great Again hat. Radio personality Ebro Darden pushed back forcefully against West’s support of black conservative pundit Candace Owens. On TMZ Live, Van Lathan, one of TMZ’s producers, berated West full-throatedly for his recent behavior, including his statement on the show that slavery was “a choice.”
These are behaviors, statements and sentiments that potentially pose the largest existential threat ever to the West empire. And so what’s played out over the past two weeks is a kind of psychological tug of war, with West reinforcing his most unsettling positions while, all around him, what amounts to a collective global rescue effort for his mind and soul (and, in truth, his legacy) is playing out in real time.
The seeds of this moment are traceable to the final months of 2016, the last time West was so public, and one of the most troubled periods of his life. Within a period of weeks, his wife was robbed, his tour was canceled and he was hospitalized. On TMZ Live, he said that during those months he developed an addiction to prescription opioids.
That year concluded with his Trump Tower meeting with the president-elect, a vexing public position for someone who’d always agitated on behalf of the dispossessed.
But in Trump, West recognizes himself: a natural disrupter; a person so secure in his gifts that he doesn’t trouble himself with facts (or much believe in them); someone who sees generating passionate dissent as a sign of success, not as an indicator of a shaky premise.
“I can tell you that when he was running, it’s like I felt something,” West told Charlamagne Tha God in an interview posted Tuesday. “The fact that he won proves something. It proves that anything is possible in America.”
But that kinship mistakes cynicism for earnestness, volume for accuracy, popularity for morality. Not all disruption is the same.
In two interviews released on Tuesday, with Charlamagne and TMZ, West emphasized the importance of “free thought” and “free love,” trying to contextualize his acceptance of Trump as part of a broader philosophy.
But what really emerged throughout the day were other, more vulnerable notions: “unsettled pain” and “HSP,” which stands for highly sensitive person, a term he returned to several times with Charlamagne. West was defiant in defending his positions, but he also presented as someone fragile and in need of protection.
West’s recent commentary, from the absurd notions about slavery to what feels like parroting other people’s talking points (“Obama was the opioid to our pain — he pacified us”), has left fans to parse what difference if any there is between aligning with hateful ideology and merely speaking without much forethought (or sometimes post-thought). In West’s telling, these provocations demonstrate a willingness to think and say something that others wouldn’t dare. As ever, he finds glee in believing he knows, and can say, a thing no one else does.
But for West, that untethered glee is jumbled up with untethered hurt. Earlier Tuesday, he posted on Twitter, “We need to have open discussions and ideas on unsettled pain.” West has always been an artist who deals with pain in primal fashion. It’s not a coincidence that, in the middle of his TMZ Live performance, he announced, “This is the most confident I’ve been since my mom passed.” (Donda West died in 2007, a day after multiple plastic surgery procedures. On Twitter, West announced that his forthcoming album cover would be a photo of her surgeon.)
Is this the manifestation of love or something more sinister? Only West knows. Though his methods may undo him, he is striving to bring people into conversation on terms of his own comfort.