I unabashedly love Kanye West.
Mostly it’s for his brilliant ability to translate the bling-bling ego of urban hip-hop and translating it into a language that suburban middle-class kids can understand. Instead of hoops and glocks, Kanye’s fascinations include, if we are to believe the latest entries on his blog, “Dioni Tabbers by Masyuki Ichinose“, “Cavali Class 2010” and “Opera Houses.”
Think of it this way- Kanye’s the male Chlöe Sevigny, loopily unreachable as a result of living in only the most hermetic and self-reflexive corridors of high culture. Complaining that Kanye is a self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing narcissist mises the point. Of course he is. That’s the only thing that makes him interesting in any way at all.
Artwork for Kanye's upcoming untitled album.
His megalomania disguises the fact that at the end of the day Kanye’s dreams (I want to be Andy Warhol, I want to be Victor & Rolf) and Kanye’s problems (My girlfriend dumped me, my Mom died) are pretty basic, pretty boring, pretty middle-American. Instead of faking a ghetto upbringing as way too many hip-hop artists do, Mr. West revels in being Kanye from the Strip Mall.
His whole reason for being is to prove that the kids who didn’t grow up on the streets of Compton or Watts have had experiences as ‘authentic’ as those who did. In giving suburban life the hip-hop treatment, he not only wins himself over to the demographic who spends the most money on hip-hop (that’d be suburban white middle-class kids), he also demystifies ghetto culture, which West has always been blatantly critical of.
That Kanye West’s primary muse is Kanye West just makes the show all the more fun. In the age of Facebook, where we’re all constructing online personas, is it any surprise that our most interesting artists are all doing self-portraits?
