THE CHATTER
Why we love the good-mood Kanye
If a television series isn’t on Netflix, does it really exist at all?
The week — nay, the new era – is off to a great start, because Kanye West has returned to Twitter after dramatically deleting his account last summer.
Following a relatively short Twitter rant, basically cementing his return, Kanye gained seven-million followers overnight and, as always, is only following one user — his wife Kim Kardashian, natch.
In the batch of new tweets, which feel like dispatches from the ether, Kanye not only waxes sentimental with a photo of himself and former brotherin-law Lamar Odom (who was previously married to Khloé Kardashian) when the two walked into Madison Square Garden together, but also shares early sketches of some new shoe designs and potential tattoos featuring the name of his two-year-old son Saint.
More poignantly, however, Kanye shared some philosophy, writing, “Some people have to work within the existing consciousness while some people can shift the consciousness . ... Often people working with the existing consciousness are jealous of those who are more in touch and they become hard-core capitalist in hopes of creating the illusion that the value of money is worth more than the value of time and friends.”
It’s a safe assumption Kanye is referring to himself, with some wondering whether this could be considered his statement on capitalism and that one time he was seen hanging out with Donald Trump.
Either way, it hints at new, new Kanye and music on the horizon.
One thing we can be sure of — maybe — is that Kanye is writing a philosophy book entitled Break The Simulation, because obviously. So if he does up and decide to delete his entire Twitter yet again, which let’s be real, is inevitable, we can have Kanye-isms in our pocket at all times.
In a recent Hollywood Reporter interview he conducted with designer Axel Vervoordt, Kanye elaborated, “I’ve got this philosophy — or let’s say it’s just a concept because sometimes philosophy sounds too heavy-handed. I’ve got a concept about photographs, and I’m on the fence about photographs — about human beings being obsessed with photographs — because it takes you out of the now and transports you into the past or transports you into the future. It can be used to document, but a lot of times it overtakes . People dwell too much in the memories.”
He went on to add that, as a fashion designer, he wants to be able to bring high quality to more affordable prices for everyone to enjoy: “I don’t wish to be number one anymore, I wish to be water,” he told Vervoordt. “I wish to be closer to UNICEF or something where I can take the information that I have and help as many people as possible, not to just shove it into a brand.”
If he’s suggesting he would like to be a substance humanity needs to survive, dare I say, he’s already achieved that goal.
Afew months ago I was overcome by an acute craving to hear a particular piece of music: Bill Callahan’s folk-rock masterpiece Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, a delicate and sophisticated record and one of my favourite albums of the 2000s.
When it came out, nearly a decade earlier, I must have listened to it a hundred times over the course of a single summer — but I don’t think I’d given it a spin since sometime before retiring my iPod classic. Now, I hankered for it. And I couldn’t find it to listen to it at all. Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, it seemed, was not available on Spotify, Tidal, or Apple Music; it wasn’t available anywhere to stream, nor were any other Bill Callahan albums. An eager Callahan fan would have to buy the songs à la carte on iTunes or else make a trip to the store.
Now, I am not so brainwashed by the major streaming services that I can’t comprehend forking over cold cash for music in a less cloudborne form, and I do indeed make regular trips to the record shops for afternoons of enthusiastic crate-digging. But what this experience made me realize is simply how much I’ve come to think of my Spotify library as the full breadth of the music available to me — and how readily my mind seems to abandon all memory or not, are now the same. Streaming has prevailed as the norm. And so the non-Netflix HBO classics have effectively disappeared. “These shows, arguably the most influential of the last decade, can’t be teaching tools unless I screen seasons of them for my students.”
Film critic Matt Singer went on to address the repercussions of Petersen’s crisis on the landscape of movies for The Dissolve: “Even with thousands of titles available instantly, Netflix’s selection of canonical cinema isn’t particularly comprehensive,” he worries. “And if students aren’t looking elsewhere, that’s troubling.” Of course since the publication of these articles, streaming itself has evolved: several boutique services have emerged to fill the gaps left by their mainstream competitors, with sites and apps such as Mubi, Fandor and Filmstruck making a more generous buffet of classic content available to the prospective streamer. The only problem is that many viewers, and especially younger ones, may not venture much further than the status quo — and if Netflix represents the complete range of the films and TV shows someone has on hand to watch, their knowledge of their mediums will be severely limited.
This puts creators in a difficult position. On the one hand, the major streaming services can