Opinion: Kanye West is running out of platforms

Over the last two weeks, Ye has unleashed a string of racial provocations and antisemitic statements at a fashion show, on social media and in interviews. Photo / AP

Opinion

OPINION:

The act of grabbing public attention has been a centrepiece of Kanye West’s art for two decades. Will audiences still tune in if his only outlets are on the fringes?

We may not yet have hit the nadir of the current debacle of Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, but Monday night’s interview with Chris Cuomo certainly felt like some kind of bottom.

In the back of an SUV heading to a meeting with the CEO of the conservative social media app Parler, Ye jousted with Cuomo for 20 minutes, largely rehashing the provocations he’s been harping on for the past two weeks: his anger with Jewish executives; his desire to think freely, independent of the expected Black celebrity narrative; and his belief that all Black people are Jews, and therefore he cannot be deemed antisemitic.

During one of a few fraught exchanges in which Cuomo pushed back on bigoted statements, Ye replied testily, “Are you gonna give me a platform? Are you gonna give me a platform?”

Throughout his career, Ye has gobbled up platforms — sometimes others’, sometimes ones he has built himself. The very act of consuming public oxygen has been a centrepiece of his art for two decades. And even though in recent years Ye has, time and again, expressed sentiments that have been uninformed, ill-phrased and profoundly concerning, he has routinely found ways — whether through the success of his business ventures, or by strategic disappearance and recalibration — to paper over the disturbances. He remains a tendentious superstar, but a superstar nonetheless.

But in this moment, following two straight weeks of offensive chatter — “I’m going death con 3 on Jewish people”; “the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that” (on George Floyd); “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering”; “Bernard Arnault killed my best friend” (on Virgil Abloh); and more — it’s challenging to imagine a future for Ye in which he bounces back as crisply as he has in the past. Alienating people, even loyalists who hope he’ll return to old form, has always been part of Ye’s cost of doing business, but now it is threatening to become his core achievement.

Call it what you will — a heel turn, a villain arc, a worrisome descent into reactionary politics, a manifestation of what Ye has described as mental illness, a gruesome side effect of extreme wealth, an embrace of true hate. What it does not appear to be is a performance. Instead, it is a new, brutal and detrimental iteration of the sense of grievance that has been Ye’s essential animator since even before he signed a record deal and released his debut album, The College Dropout, in 2004.

It is one thing, however, to lash out from feeling excluded — a music industry that isn’t quite ready to accept your gifts, a fashion industry that isn’t sure how to handle an interloper with vision and a sense of entitlement. But Ye is a mogul now, an entrepreneur in the clothing and sneaker business who wields levers of power, influence and authority.

And yet still he lashes out, resulting in the most troubling stretch in his career since the series of events that led to his hospitalisation in 2016.

The domino effect began early this month, when Ye and Black right-wing commentator Candace Owens appeared at Paris Fashion Week wearing T-shirts that read “White Lives Matter.” What he may have been presenting as an offhand gimmick quickly became emblematic — when Ye is questioned or attacked, often he doubles down. (Just a couple of days ago, his associates were giving out the shirts to homeless people in Los Angeles.)

The discourse quickly became unruly, spreading across social media — in one example, Ye began posting texts between him and the Supreme creative director Tremaine Emory, who had formerly worked for him. The exchange was callous and stern, a tug of war between righteous indignation and indignant self-righteousness.

By now, battle lines had been drawn. Ye took refuge in an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in which Ye suggested that the “White Lives Matter” shirt was “funny,” and that the Clintons had been attempting to control him through his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian. Later, Motherboard posted unaired leaks from the interview, including one in which Ye posited that “fake children” were planted in his house to improperly influence his children. On Twitter, he lodged a litany of complaints about Jewish people.

Over the weekend, he returned to Drink Champs, the rowdy and usually uproarious podcast hosted by rapper N.O.R.E., only to reemphasize his hateful stereotyping. However, egging Ye on, or giving him the space to ramble unchecked, is beginning to have consequences — for others, at least. On Monday, N.O.R.E. apologized for not rejecting Ye’s hate speech in real time, and the episode was removed from the internet.

Later that night, Ye videoconferenced in to Cuomo’s programme on NewsNation from the back seat of a vehicle, with no light. The content of the conversation toggled between coherent and worrisome, and the staging felt haphazard and desperate. He was largely unable to meet the camera with a firm gaze. He appeared like a man being conveyed to nowhere.

Perhaps crucially, it gave the image of a man truly untethered — from other people, from loving counsel, from shared social ethics.

“The common understanding,” he told Cuomo, “more oftentimes than not nowadays, is not the truth.”

Early in Ye’s career, his loudest complaints were often followed by his most ambitious achievements. But in recent years, the balance between volume of grievance and level of achievement has become destabilised. Photo / Julian Berman, The New York Times

And yes, sometimes that is the case. But the antisemitic sentiment that Ye has been espousing is gross, and also gross in its casualness — familiar, tiresome tropes that serve only to incite hatred. (On Wednesday, in an interview with Piers Morgan, Ye appeared to apologise for some of his comments. “Hurt people hurt people, and I was hurt,” he said, in a short clip released in advance of the interview’s airing.)

If this run of interviews and social media bursts feels familiar, it’s because there is a certain cyclicity to how Ye has navigated his public life. Early in his career, his loudest complaints were often followed by his most ambitious achievements. But in recent years, the balance between volume of grievance and level of achievement has become destabilized. This recent time period feels like a callback to 2016, when Ye cut his Saint Pablo tour short and was briefly hospitalized; not long after, he publicly embraced Donald Trump and questioned whether slavery was a choice.

In that era, like the current moment, Ye would not, or could not, turn off the faucet. Sometimes it seems that he wants words to mean something other than they do. He has burned through several cycles of trying out ideas in real time only to recalibrate when he found — intentionally, or more likely not — the outer bounds of acceptable discourse. But there is no apparent fail-safe in place now.

Which leaves the responsibility to others. So far, there have been a handful of efforts to hold him to account. After Ye’s tweets, Elon Musk — soon to be the owner of Twitter — tweeted, “Talked to ye today & expressed my concerns about his recent tweet, which I think he took to heart.” Influential radio DJ Funk Flex called out rappers and industry executives over their silence, suggesting they still hoped to work with Ye down the line. A few celebrities have expressed their exasperation; others, like Diddy, have attempted to intervene directly, only to have Ye target them publicly.

And yet people still tune in, perhaps out of schadenfreude, but also perhaps because Ye is drawing upon a cultural bank account so vast and deep and long-running that he is difficult to disentangle from our modern understanding of celebrity. For years and years, he has stepped out over the line, then crafted work — music, fashion or otherwise — that appeared to justify, or at least partially excuse, his baser impulses. Whether that dynamic can continue is the remaining question. It is also worth considering at what point outrage morphs into concern — if Ye needs help, who would be in a position to provide it to him, and from whom would he accept it?

The media outlets giving Ye airtime in this moment are riding the border of responsibility and irresponsibility. He has already been suspended from Twitter and Instagram for his incendiary behaviour. He has terminated his partnership with Gap. His Adidas partnership is “under review.” Soon, he may have no mainstream partner platforms of any kind to speak of.

Which may explain why he reached an agreement in principle to purchase Parler, the faltering right-wing social media app. (The parent company of Parler is owned by Owens’ husband. Perhaps Ye is, among other things, a recurring victim, witting or otherwise, of right-wing grift.)

For decades now, Ye has been building new worlds and waiting for people to populate them. But even if he does make Parler his megaphone, it’s unclear whether he will simply end up doing anything beyond shouting into the void. Speech may be free, but attention is not.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Jon Caramanica

Photographs by: Julian Berman

©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES