Hey Wisecrack.
Jared here.
Today we have a special episode on an artist who forces us to think about our own mortality,
among other things-
"What's the point of thinking?"
Kanye West.
Following Kanye gives you the feeling of watching a train filled with $300 sneakers crash into
a guy dressed as Jesus.
But at the same time, he projects a certain sincerity that seems to contradict his otherwise
impulsive image.
"I'm really happy for you and I'ma let you finish..."
There's no doubt that Kanye thinks Kanye's a philosopher.
I don’t think we should go quite that far, but Kanye does share at least one concern with 19th century
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: death, Like, a lot of feelings about death.
Welcome to this Wisecrack edition on the Philosophy of Kanye West and Death.
Kanye has never been shy about mentioning death.
"We're all gonna die one day."
In his 2005 Grammy Award speech, he spoke about his experience with a car accident
and his discovery that:
"Nothing in life is promised except death."
Kanye has repeated similar sentiments throughout his career.
"Only luxury is time. Only thing promised is that you gonna die one day.
"So we just gonna live it to the maximum."
“Through the Wire,” recorded when Ye’s jaw was still wired shut from his 2002 car
accident, describes his narrow miss with death and his “triumph” over the situation at
the hands of a guardian angel.
Frankly, I’m surprised he gave the angel any credit at all.
This interest in death is pretty explicit starting from his first album, The College
Dropout, where we hear:
On one of his most recent tracks, Waves, he keeps it short and simple:
Waves don't die.
In "Power" Kanye
fantasizes about a "beautiful death" And his 30 minute art film Runaway opens with an excerpt
from Mozart's Requiem- which, is, of course, a mass for the dead.
Okay, so Kanye has some strong feelings about death.
So what?
Kierkegaard’s philosophy tells us that despair over our mortality is pretty inevitable unless
we embrace our relationship with the big guy upstairs.- the notorious G.O.D.
Jesus is pretty key to coping with our worries about death because having faith in him means
that death isn’t actually the end for you.
For Kanye, this despiar is revealed in his fixation on mortality, his desire to live in the moment, and perhaps, his desire
to evade death altogether.
You know the saying, that a man may die but an idea will live forever?
Kanye has bought into that big-time, except the idea that will preserve Kanye is…
Kanye.
"You don't think I'd be one of the characters of today's modern bible?"
By positioning himself as musician, producer, fashion designer, reality star, and
frequent commentator on… everything and whatever he next pursues.
"I have decided, in 2020, to run for president."
Kanye is doing more than just expressing himself.
Maybe he's trying to cultivate a kind of celebrity that is so ubiquitous, that he achieves some
kind of immortality.
Like Kierkegaard’s works, Kanye deals with mortality in three ways: distracting himself
with cool sh*t, trying to be a good person, and striving to somehow make himself eternal
so he doesn’t have to worry about all that sh*t anyway.
Or in the words of Kierkegaard, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
Kanye is a walking contradiction: private and radically public, meticulous and spontaneous,
"Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!"
So why can’t he live the contradiction of embracing his inevitable death and also trying to
live forever? Bear with me for a second.
Kierkegaard tells us that in order to be cured of the despair that arises from this contradiction-
one must understand his or her own self and the nature of that self, and to get there,
they can progress through three consecutive stages of existence.
Kanye does all three.
Is the similarity to Kierkegaard a total accident born of too much cocaine and a god-complex
bigger than Kim Kardashian’s, uh, personality?
Possibly, but we’re here to figure it out anyway.
So let's get to it.
The hedonistic spectacle of Kanye is pretty much exactly what Kierkegaard would define
as the “aesthetic.”
We can see this in Kierkegaard’s 1843 philosophy text.
Either/Or: “grab a drink, grab a glass, after that I grab yo ass.”
Kidding; that’s definitely Kanye.
But Kierkegaard does tell us that the aesthetic man lives his life in the pursuit of desire
and pleasure, often interpreting himself as though he were always on stage.
Sound familiar?
To get a better grasp of Kierkegaard’s stages, think about a corndog.
When you’re young, corn dogs are really delicious, and that’s pretty much all that
matters.
You don’t think about the stomach ache you’ll have in the morning or about the future of
your bowel movements. Corn dog= yum.
That’s the aesthetic stage.
It’s easy to find examples of aesthetic debauchery in Kanye’s work although that’s
not exactly unique among rappers.
What’s more interesting is the way in which Kanye’s aesthetic embodiment is so over
the top and enduring.
As seen most vividly in his music videos, Kanye takes the typical sex and drugs imagery
of a hip hop video and draws out the obscenity, makes it self-aware, and really crafts it
into a kind of art.
This is the video for “Famous,” off his most recent album, and while it doesn’t
shy away from controversy, it’s also a pretty interesting social and political statement.
"I'm motha f*ckin Kanye West."
But for someone who lives on a stage, both metaphorically and also kind of literally,
Kanye has a lot to say about his privacy.
Kanye has said that one of his biggest concerns with paparazzi is the effect that they have
on his family, especially his daughter.
This is a different side of Kanye than the one we see yelling about being Shakespeare,
"I am Shakespeare, in the flesh."
but it’s certainly not an altogether different character.
Far from it, Kanye’s sometimes-outlandish aesthetic serves as a kind of frame to his
familial and ethical considerations.
And we know Kanye loves frames.
Kanye’s relationship with his wife and children is one of his most clearly humanizing characteristics.
"Family time. It's what Kim gave me. She gave me everything."
Using one of his many pseudonymous characters, Kierkegaard argues that the transition from
the aesthetic stage of self-discovery to the ethical stage is exemplified in marriage.
A person in the aesthetic stage is focused only on the momentary pleasures of the erotic,
and marriage forces them to commit to something long-term, which changes their priorities.
We see evidence of this in Kanye’s most recent album, The Life of Pablo, the first
he has released since marrying Kim.
Pitchfork describes this album as “the moment… that the artist finally settles down” after
years of turbulent affairs and, uh, probably one too many pregnancy scares.
Let’s go back to our corndog —at some point, you might discover that corn production
requires a tremendous amount of water and has a lot of potential to do economic and
environmental damage.
Then, even your own personal health concerns might take a backseat to your commitment to
something higher than yourself: the welfare of the planet.
That’s Kierkegaard’s ethical stage.
Besides his relationship with his family, we see Kanye most actively engaged in the
ethical sphere in his advocacy for racial and class justice.
"I care about people!"
Kanye has been vocal in addressing inequalities since the very beginning of his career,
"Everybody in hip hop discriminates against gay people."
this hasn’t changed as he’s gathered more fame and different projects.
"George Bush doesn't care about black people."
And he draws much of his musical influences from soul music of the civil rights era.
We also see consistent mentions of racial and class justice in his own lyrics.
The message that we hear on “Crack Music” from 2005 is a similar one to the messages
in “Murder to Excellence” in 2011 and “New Slaves” in 2013.
Kanye's work often speaks to the ways in which deeply- entrenched power dynamics within our
society can perpetuate the oppression of people of color and the working class.
His commitment to certain moral ideas about justice outside of just what benefits him
or his family is the mark of someone operating in the ethical stage of self-discovery.
Or just, you know, common human decency.
"Half the time, sixty, seventy percent, I'm not saying the popular opinion. I'm saying something I believe."
Remember that Kierkegaard says that the whole reason to even talk about these stages is
because they help you to escape despair.
To escape despair, you must accept your true nature (which means realizing that you are
bound to Christ) and then you can basically just chill the fuck out.
Kierkegaard is 100% on board the Jesus boat, so he’s not actually worried about his own
death, but he knows you probably are, and he just wants to throw you a big ol’ Christian
lifesaver. Kanye has one leg in the Jesus boat, and one leg in his own boat.
On one hand, he has been consistently vocal about his relationship to the big J.C. Remember
that one of his first big hits was “Jesus Walks,” and that theme of religious devotion
has stayed in his music even up through his latest album, which samples Gospel tracks and opens with the lyrics:
But on the other hand, Kanye is pretty insistent that he is God and he doesn’t seem to
be too concerned about blasphemy.
We could really spend an entire day dissecting just that one song.
He calls himself a god, he acknowledges his connection to another god and he is extremely
insistent on the timely delivery of his baked goods.
That’s not the only time Kanye has referred to himself as a God.
I mean, the guy named himself “Yeezus.”
In “See Me Now”, a bonus track off My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he says he
is Lord and refers to his GDs, which Rap Genius tells me means “gangsta disciples.”
He’s also spoken about his apparent divinity on stage and in interviews, where he gives
a somewhat more nuanced approach:
"I just told you who I thought I was: a god."
Wow, I really can't argue with that. Alright Kanye you win...you're a God.
"Jesus wept... I know"
Angelic language and imagery appear all over his work.
The presence of angels is especially strong in his music videos: “No Church in the Wild,”
“Power,” and the 30-minute film “Runaway” all feature winged women.
He also just released a trailer for a video game which focuses on his dead mother’s
ascension to heaven.
No, really.
That’s a thing.
The game itself hasn’t been released yet, but we’re guessing that the player gets to guide Mama West
up to the pearly gates, which is basically leaving the fate of his mother’s eternal salvation in the hands of gamers.
Not sure Kanye thought that one through.
Kanye’s tense relationship between himself as God and the Christian God might be representative
of the despair that he is trying to evade.
As previously mentioned, despair is characterized by a tension between a desire for the temporal—the
right-now-on-Earth—and the eternal.
As a God, Kanye hopes to achieve earthly immortality through the legacy of his work, while as a
believer in another God, Kanye gives over his life to someone else.
For Kierkegaard, religion is the highest stage of existence and self-discovery.
It’s where you realize that the corndog actually belongs to someone else, and oh damn,
where did this corndog come from?
How did it even end up in my hand?
Where am I?
Who are you?
What are you doing with all those corndogs?
Yeah, now you’re the corndog, and you belong to Jesus.
In the religious stage, you recognize that reason and belief can only get you so far
Rather than belief, which can be grounded in proof or in reason, you need faith, which
is totally beyond the bounds of logic.
Kierkegaard describes faith as a “passionate inwardness,” which is also probably a pretty
good description for Kanye.
That “beyond logic” part is important since coming up with rational arguments about
death has never made anyone feel more okay about death.
When you look at it scientifically, rotting in a hole isn’t all that great.
I suppose one way to no longer care about death is to believe in your own godliness.
The immortality of his work isn’t important at all unless he knows it, so the performance
art trainwreck that is Kanye West’s public persona really just exists as a conversation
with himself.
But does that surprise you?
"I will die for the art, for what I believe in."
So Kanye is trying to turn himself into a God at the same time that he believes in the
God of Christianity, and he’s doing this because he’s really confused about death.
But how much of his aesthetic, ethical, and religious action is just a matter of him saying
whatever pops into his head and how much is intentional?
It’s impossible to say for sure, but maybe it’s worth some thought.
He’s a lot smarter than people are sometimes willing to give him credit for.
Can Kanye really escape his anxieties about death by creating an artistic legacy to leave behind?
Forget the sick beats or the VMA antics—maybe the real reason Kanye has such a massive following;
he gives voice to a certain dread that we all have in common.
Or maybe he’s just really good at Twitter.