Kanye West: The Monster
___
By Jack Turner
Kanye West: Bully (Album Cover)Kanye West aka ‘Ye’ has spent the decade intermittently self-immolating online. His madness is gradually moving in concentric circles until we get to today, where his cultural footprint – that once loomed so large over the zeitgeist – now appears merely an afterthought.
Get Jack Turner’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
When the general public used to talk about Kanye often his music would appear close to the top of the list after a quick rallying match over his litany of controversies. However now his music is rarely mentioned.
Lou Reed called him “on a different planet to anybody else musically” after the release of West’s Yeezus in 2013. Paul McCartney called him a “monster” referring to his ability to create the beat of 2016’s All Day from recording McCartney playing an acoustic riff to him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. High praise indeed from two cultural touchstones of the 1960s.
Now the aforementioned monster seems to arrive in a different guise; ugly and naked, spitting and striking at the world around him, daring any and all oncomers to attack. West seems to invite on his own destruction over and over again, pleading in recent days for someone to kill him since he feels suicidal since the tragic passing of his mother in 2008.
He’s been homophobic, sexist, anti-Semitic, proudly paraded a swastika chain, decried most of his peers, and told his ex-wife Kim Kardashian she must kill him if she wants to keep him away from his children.
Over the two evenings West has poured himself into his phone, tweeting bile after bile after bile. He released half an hour of music merely a few hours ago, something recently that would have stopped the world in his tracks, everyone rushing to dissect and review the work of one of our century’s greatest artists. But now, nobody cares. It passes without incident, a small lull between the flashpoints of his tweets.
Beauty, if it exists, remains untouched and unnoticed – all anybody looks at now is the monster.
