Man in the Mirror: the politics of Yeezus

Among the many outlandish claims made by Kanye West in his recent New York Times interview, the most implausible is the one that seems to have passed without comment. “I am in the lineage of Gil Scott-Heron, great activist-type artists,” he said. After hearing Yeezus, I’m more inclined to believe that he’s the black Steve Jobs or Henry Ford than to accept that he’s heir to Scott-Heron.

The second half of that quote — “But I’m also in the lineage of a Miles Davis — you know, that liked nice things also” — is relevant but it’s not news. Kanye has always been conflicted about his desire, as a black man, to acquire the trappings of wealth, albeit not to the point where he considers acquiring less of them. Go back to All Falls Down on 2004’s The College Dropout: “We shine because they hate us, floss cause they degrade us/We trying to buy back our 40 acres/And for that paper, look how low we stoop.”

Diamonds from Sierra Leone, in its remixed version, considered the human cost of luxury (“How could somethin’ so wrong make me feel so right?”) and I even like Good Morning’s “I’m like the fly Malcolm X/Buy any jeans necessary,” because it’s so palpably absurd. I read it as a generational cringe, a wry acknowledgement that African-American stars’ financial and cultural capital is a real achievement but one that pales next to the radical goals of the civil rights movement. In these songs, Kanye is both victim and perpetator: “I ain’t even gon’ act holier than thou/Cause fuck it, I went to Jacob with 25 thou” (All Falls Down). By being implicated in what he criticises he was more challenging and provocative than sanctimonious scolds such as Immortal Technique.

Ironically, back when he was addressing political themes in such a sharp, refreshing way he didn’t make a big deal out of them but the sloppier and more self-obsessed his lyrics, the more he wants to be seen as an important activist-star. “I was able to slip past everything with a pink polo, but I am Dead Prez,” he told the New York Times.

OK, but if you want to pose as a rebel provocateur you need to work a little harder. Hone your thoughts. Read a book or two. Apply some perspective. Don’t treat that lineage as a prop to be manhandled and discarded. The extended Gil Scott-Heron sample which served as a cold blast of reality at the end of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s claustrophobic narcissism felt like cheap imported gravitas, as if Kanye had to delegate the big-picture thinking rather than attempt it himself.

On Watch the Throne, it’s true, he and Jay-Z briefly acknowledged the world beyond hotel suites and gallery openings on Murder to Excellence, which made some unusually precise observations about black-on-black violence: “314 soldiers died in Iraq/509 died in Chicago.” But they segued uncomfortably into celebrations of their own ascendance to greater things. “In moments like these, Watch the Throne suffers from a perverse sense of perspective, entire histories invoked to justify two men’s fortunes,” wrote Hua Hsu in his terrific Grantland review. “‘This is something like the Holocaust/Millions of our people lost,’” Kanye announces on Who Gon’ Stop Me, offering himself as a reason to remain hopeful: ‘Bow our head and pray to the lord/’Til I die I’ma fucking ball.’”

I’d like to agree with the fair-minded assessment recently offered by stic.man of Dead Prez: “He looks at contradiction as the way things really are. He doesn’t want to fit in any one sided box. I think for him he has found his lane which blends a lot of points of view that are often polarized but with ye’s art it becomes one.” But you can only push a contradiction so far until it snaps in two. As Al Shipley writes in his City Pages review of Yeezus, the best I’ve read, “Increasingly, Kanye West’s lyrics feel like the result of a gross misunderstanding of the phrase ‘the personal is political.’”

Exhibit A is I’m In It, a porn-addled sexual fantasy which cites Martin Luther King (his lover’s braless breasts are “free at last”) and the Black Power salute: “Put my fist in her like a civil rights sign.” You could charitably read these lines as deliberately heretical tilts at black history’s sacred cows but to what end? They just sound like cheap jokes to me, especially in a week when the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

But it’s just a warm-up for the breathtaking crassness of Blood on the Leaves, which hijacks Nina Simone’s recording of Strange Fruit to bemoan the outrageous injustice of… alimony. Yes, he really does act as if celebrity divorce is a tribulation to be equated with lynching: he even keeps the line “black bodies swinging”, the original song’s dark, shocking heart. It’s lucky for Kanye that the formidable Simone is dead, because I can’t imagine she’d be overjoyed at being made to serenade a string of petulant misogynist stereotypes. To cap it off, he describes being forced to seat his wife and mistress on opposite sides of a basketball court and says, “I call that apartheid.” Do you, Kanye? Do you really?

At least nothing else on the album displays such colossally moronic tunnel vision. There are, blessedly, no attempts to compare the stress of an uptown limo ride in heavy traffic to the Middle Passage. Instead there are rough drafts of what one day might be fashioned into coherent thoughts. Haunted by the language of race, Black Skinhead sounds like a rebel yell until you crack open its shell and find that its real concern isn’t racism but Kanyewestism. His ability to slam prejudice against interracial relationships (“They see a black man with a white woman/At the top floor they gon’ come to kill King Kong”) only to offer a puerile racial stereotype of his own (“Eatin’ Asian pussy, all I need was sweet-and-sour sauce” — I’m In It) calls into question his alleged self-awareness.

More successfully, New Slaves addresses black stars’ addiction to white-owned luxury brands and the lucrative racism of the prison-industrial complex but doesn’t bother to join the dots between the two, let alone his mother’s childhood in “the era when clean water was only served to the fairer skin”. Whether Kanye thinks a poor black man railroaded into prison for a minor narcotics offence more or less of a “new slave” than a rich one talked into buying a Maybach is unclear. His playful tone on earlier albums made space for such problematic ambiguities about his beliefs and desires but New Slaves’ relentless raw-throated rage — the very thing that makes the track so sonically exciting — cannot accommodate it.

I’ve read enough glowing Yeezus reviews to wonder if I’m being priggish about all this. I’ve liked hip hop long enough not to finger-wag or expect every MC to toe the liberal line, and there are moments on Yeezus as bold and exhilirating as any music I’ve heard this year. I’m bored by rote misogyny but no longer shocked by it. I don’t want Kanye to turn into Talib Kweli. I just wonder when his free pass from critics will expire. Long after the likes of Ice Cube, Eminem and Tyler, the Creator were taken to task for careless or bigoted lyrics despite their prodigious skills, Kanye gets off lightly thanks to the conventional wisdom that he is “messy”, “contradictory” and therefore “fascinating”. But contradiction isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card: it’s a reason to ask tougher questions.

Complaining that Kanye is self-obsessed is like wailing that Sir Mix-A-Lot likes big butts — that’s the schtick — but when that self-obsession thwarts or travesties the language of protest it’s a problem, not an achievement. One absurd review goes so far as to call Yeezus a “confounding, uncompromising protest record” and compare Kanye to Curtis Mayfield, an artist whose almost saintly humility and generosity could not be more different. Even some of my favourite critics are bending over backwards to excuse Kanye’s lyrical weaknesses. “If West’s notions are half-baked, it may be because there’s no percentage in letting them get overcooked into earnestness (viz., three-quarters of ‘conscious’ rap),” writes Slate’s Carl Wilson, as if Kanye could easily develop his themes but fears that he might bore us because, God, coherent ideas, what a snooze.

The real issue, I suspect, is that critics don’t want to seem boring or pompous by subjecting Kanye’s political lyrics to close scrutiny. But go back and read Jon Savage’s review of the second Clash album or Robert Christgau’s complex critique of Ice Cube and you’ll find critics who believe that kind of scrutiny is their job — that if an artist purports to be saying politically important things then their songs should be measured against those claims. Lil Wayne’s boneheaded line about murdered civil rights activist Emmett Till may be worse than anything on Yeezus but at least Wayne never claimed to be a deep thinker. Reviewers who have expressed disquiet over I’m In It and Blood on the Leaves dismiss them as regrettable missteps rather than insights into Kanye’s colossal loss of perspective.

Since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy appeared to mark Kanye’s coronation as the reigning musical genius of our times, too many critics have seemed willing to assume that he knows exactly what he’s doing and us mortals just can’t decipher his cunning mixed messages. You think a particular line is dumb or repellent? That’s the point, apparently. And those sloppy half-thoughts, nonsequiturs and lame jokes, so different from the beautifully crafted ambivalence of songs like All Falls Down, are meant to be the price we pay for his uncensored honesty.

I don’t buy it. I think Kanye’s narcissism renders his political provocations at best toothless and at worst insulting. Compare the personal pronouns on The College Dropout or Late Registration to those on Yeezus and you can see a dramatic journey from “we” to “me” as his interest in the lives of others shrivels to zero. Kanye flattens the troubled history of black America into a vast mirror so that, when he considers the experiences of millions, all he can see is own face staring back at him. And he wonders why he’s not happy.