On Kanye West, Part V
Opposed to the sunny, idealistic unity of ‘Touch the Sky,’ Yeezus marks the limit of the ambivalence threaded through Kanye’s prior work. Before the bipolar apotheosis of Yeezus, 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy contained the most explicit dramatisation of this ambivalence. Twisted Fantasy’s title alone presages Yeezus’ blend of self-disgust and self-fixation. On ‘Power,’ this tension reaches a tragic climax. A manifestation of Twisted Fantasy’s central conflict, the song expresses Kanye’s distaste for the authority he craves and fears. ‘No one man should have all that power’ goes the chorus, rapped by a man whose whole life signifies his desire for fame. Narcissistic tension builds in the third verse—‘I embody every characteristic of the egotistic / He knows, he so fuckin’ gifted,’ he vehemently raps—leading us to the song’s suicidal finale: ‘Now this will be a beautiful death / Jumping out the window / Letting everything go.’ Maniacal laughter and a rhetorical question then punctuate the song: ‘You got the power to let power go?’ Kanye asks. The track has revealed power’s darkness. Yet nobody can answer with any certainty. The narrator’s death-vision may have remained fantasy. The dream could also have fallen into reality.
On ‘Power,’ Kanye shows he has a tragedian’s understanding of power. Ambition and empowerment, he knows, aim almost teleologically at suicide: the ultimate act of self-mastery and self-liberation is self-destruction. Absolute power and freedom unbound demand that you also claim the right to end your life. Authority remains partial until we master life and death—the beautiful and the dark. If Kanye’s God-wish eventually terrified him, it is perhaps because the power would deliver him to freedom’s abyss. True godliness would give him the right to leap from life into death. A death he may both resist and crave.
The will to greatness often implies a contrapuntal self-violence. Several things ensure ambition’s connection with death. First, guilt, terror, shame and insecurity exacerbate our thirst for both power and suicide. The superego may also issue death threats when it demands ambition as reparation for a broken world. We might sentence ourselves to die if we fail its commands. Suicidality can also represent a rebellion staged by the part of us that refuses its orders. A bid for authority can also reveal a need to repress uncertainty, death anxiety and feelings of disintegration. Lastly, an ashamed man who considers suicide might seek power to secure his life by proving its worth. In many cases, then, self-annihilation pairs with a lust for authority. Power, guilt and suicide, Kanye knows, are frequent bedfellows.
Kanye’s knowledge of power is sophisticated. I doubt that it is merely abstract or literary, though. In 2009, Kanye claimed he is a ‘proud non-reader’ who learns by ‘talking to people and living real life.’1 An empiricist at heart, experience informs Kanye’s understanding of ambition and suicidality. In songs and interviews,2 he has said he sometimes contemplates suicide. Suicidality appears as a theme for the first time on Kanye’s second record, Late Registration. There, it is already tied to ambition and success. Mocking one of his detractors, he raps, ‘Dawg, if I was you I’d kill myself!’ Aside from Twisted Fantasy, suicidality reappears on Ye’s ‘I Thought About Killing You,’ where he raps: ‘The most beautiful thoughts are always besides the darkest / Today I seriously thought about killing you / I contemplated, premeditated murder / And I think about killing myself / And I love myself way more than I love you… I don’t joke with no one, they’ll say, “He died so young.”’ It is also present on Donda’s ‘Jesus Lord,’ where he raps: ‘Suicidal thoughts got you wonderin’ what’s up there.’
Kanye famously harbours a deep sense of guilt, too, as he believes he was responsible for his mother’s premature death. For a time, Donda West was Kanye’s manager. Pressing her to conform to celebrity standards, Kanye financed elective cosmetic surgery for her on November 9th, 2007. She died the following day. After her death, Kanye immediately assumed responsibility for the tragedy. According to Pitchfork, he ‘blamed himself for his mother’s death, singling out his own vanity, wealth, and pursuit of glamour and celebrity.’3 In Kanye’s eyes, his moneyed, celebrity life led to her death. ‘If I had never moved to L.A.,’ he said in 2015, ‘she’d be alive.’4
To Kanye, Donda’s death was an avoidable tragedy he provoked in his pursuit of success. A terrible thought for a son to bear. Yet the sadness is only heightened by Kanye’s belief that he is indebted to his mother for his successes. In the preface to Donda’s book on Kanye,5 he writes that ‘because of who she is, I am able to be who I am.’ Pages later, Donda then credits herself for his excellence. ‘Undoubtedly, who Kanye is today has a great deal to do with the way he was brought up, his exposure to the world, his relationship with his parents,’ she says, and we wonder which of them first had this thought. A biblical element further inflects this debt. Donda also claims she often prayed that God would make Kanye ‘brilliant.’ Her son’s theological narcissism was not born ex nihilo, then. Kanye’s divine egotism was originally Donda’s.
‘After I lost my mother,’ Kanye said in 2013, ‘there were times I felt I would put my life at risk. I felt like sometimes I didn’t have something to live for.’6 If we combine this with his other statements about guilt, suicide and debt, it seems that Kanye thinks his mother and her faith were not only responsible for his talent, personality and drive. By implication, he believes the attributes she cultivated killed her. First, Donda prayed for Kanye’s success. Eventually, her wildest hopes for Kanye’s character came true. Both she and her son agreed she was partly responsible for his personality and success. But then, the attributes she nurtured in her son destroyed her. Driven mad by loss and guilt, her surviving child finally started pining for death himself. It is a truly tragic, near-literary narrative Kanye apparently accepts. Words like ‘guilt’7 or ‘shame,’ then, seem utterly insufficient for the ambivalence he must feel towards his gifts.
Impossible guilt requires unfathomable reparation. Kanye’s grandiosity, ambition and ambivalence swelled in the years after Donda’s death. His crushing sense of responsibility may have catalysed their growth. No matter his striving, achievement and repentance, though, Donda’s death has apparently burdened Kanye with a debt he cannot repay. An endless stream of tributes has followed her death. Kanye’s content creation company, charity and two albums would eventually bear her name. Her spirit also haunts his music. Kanye says he channelled her voice on 2015’s ‘Only One.’ Rage lingers, too. ‘This is my album cover. This is plastic surgeon Jan Adams,’ he wrote on Twitter in 2018.8 ‘The person who performed my moms final surgery. Do you have any title ideas? I want to forgive and stop hating.’ For over a decade, Kanye has harboured trauma, guilt and anger within. Predictably, suicidality and grandiosity emerged in his work and life in these years.
By 2013’s Yeezus, Kanye was a corrupt God. This, it seems, was no accident. In a dramatisation of what Nietzsche called ‘active nihilism,’ Kanye’s ‘highest values hitherto’ devalued themselves when Donda died. Her death made his heaven hellish. His money, talent and drive became sources of evil. Mirroring this inversion of his ideals, he became Yeezus, a warped, distorted Christ figure whose crass displays of grandiosity and wealth were exceeded only by his rapacious, dangerous hedonism—all signs, it seems, of his rage, guilt, suicidality and despair.
Cracked by ambivalence after Donda’s death, Yeezus was a logical progression for Kanye, the hedonistic Christian warped by guilt, narcissism and suicidality. Though it may not seem obvious, Yeezus might therefore be a doomed bid for reconciliation. As on ‘Jesus Walks,’ Kanye tried to synthesise his ambivalence on this record. At once he became the shadows and desperately tried to achieve identity with his ideals. Yeezus aims at godly idealism and total impurity. Splayed between extremes, Kanye sought unity. Yet in the Yeezus persona’s repulsive freedom there was no safety or salvation. Tainted, his ideals offered frustration in place of redemption. The darkness thriving within forced him to run away screaming. Yeezus is one of Kanye’s most repugnant creations. Yet within it, we also detect a glimmer of optimism. There’s a hope that, with creativity, he could reconcile the warring sides of his mind and become whole once more.
A strange courage animates Yeezus, then. Yet the tension between theological narcissism and biblical guilt proved unstable. Guilt, suicidality and bipolar ambivalence form a crucible whose heat we cannot endure forever. The pain is too extreme; it drives us to resolve the forces at play.
Shrouded in steam, a self-revolution occurred where both everything and nothing changed. Kanye’s egotistic ambitions suddenly became a mode of apostolic service. Negating the negation of Yeezus, he realised he could become a fount of salvation while his desires remained the same. Serving God, he could again be something good and uncompromised. Beneath the water, his negativity began to wash away.
In the heat, Kanye became pure. The Apollonian burned away Yeezus’ Dionysian excess. After his revelation, he quickly realised he could not fill the ‘ultimate service position’ as a mere artist. Instead he had to be ‘the leader of the free world.’ In a fit of divine obsequiousness, and after 48 hours of careful deliberation, Kanye announced his intention to run for president.9 Afterwards, his grandiose ambitions rapidly intensified.
Endnotes
See Raising Kanye: Life Lessons from the Mother of a Hip-Hop Superstar.
Kanye West: God & Monster, p.340.
This guilt may also explain the Taylor Swift incident: after he interrupted her speech at the MTV VMA awards Kanye was condemned by almost all popular culture institutions for his actions. Unconscious guilt, Freud famously argued, leads us directly to crime precisely because we desire the punishment and the recognition of our guilt.
The tweet has since been deleted. See