I didn't think one man could do it, but he has managed to embody the absolute worst aspects of Jay-Z, Nas, Pac, Ice Cube, and Common while distilling any of their valuable qualities from the mix.
He's a diva and a demagogue, a bratty fashionista, a shameless opportunist, a convenient social critic, a man who will cum on the blouses of hampton spouses while simultaneously wifing up a beverly hills socialite who embodies whoredom in nearly all possible aspects of the word. He's the ultimate black limousine liberal, the college nikka talking in coded academic language about inequity, black self-love, black owned business, leading pointless "black out" days in front of the campus library, then joining a Fortune 500 company as soon as he graduates and marrying a white chick first chance he gets.
The leader of the meaningless new world in which complexity has been reduced to Che Guevara wearing bling, where 40's the new 30 and nonsense is the new complexity, where inchoate juvenile temper tantrums are the new grist for the mills of revolution.
A man who's mother's death is tied to the ultimate act of vanity and insecurity, who gets riled up after bumping his head on "wrong way" signs like a weak, spoiled, confused child, whose pursuit of the mother of his child was inspired by her online sextape.
He who shall speak truth to power, our great provocative, populist artist, thugging it out with the Gwyneth Paltrows of the world referring to him as her "nikka." Ghostproducers, ghostwriters, shallow lyrics that tap into the emptiness and disconnectedness of the black middle and upper middle class, cliche takes on interracial dating, consumerism, sex, and blackness that would shame the most tired slam poet. The type of black person who doesn't feel a sense of authenticity in the white or black world and feels the urge to align himself with whichever one fits his mood for the day, as he tries on philosophies, indignation, and societal outrage like one of his funky leather outfits or a pair of designer shades - what will look best this season, and to whom? As even activism and justice become just another name brand or champagne, something so bathed in capitalist ethos that it rates and resonates as a buzzword or a quip.
Our great prophet of megalomania, the attention whore who resents the trappings of attention, Mr. anti-Hamptons with his Beverly Hills family, the man who hates to be a celebrity so much that he impregnated a woman who is a celebrity for the sole sake and reason of being a celebrity. You gonna just snap my photo while I'm on my way to a shi shi lunch? Well then I'm gonna expose the prison-for-profit system! The master of substituting empty, over the top rhetoric for insightful or meaningful thoughts, buffoonish gestures for truly defiant acts. Kanye ain't a celebrity, he for the people - which is why his malformed chipmunk face was the main image he chose to project on a bunch of big ass buildings across the country, and why he's calling his album Yeezus.
And he's crack for a lot of black people, the same way Ayn Rand is for a certain lot of whites, because both appeal to a warped sense of persecution while confirming their most basic, shallow notions of how the world is and how it should be, a world in which contradictions empower rather than hinder a person's character or message.
I never thought I could find anyone in hiphop more vile and reprehensible than Puffy, but Kanye has surpassed him at this point for the simple fact that a lie disguised as the truth is always worst than an outright lie.
