Is Kanye West’s Artistry Tied to His Medium?

Today, creating something and releasing it into the public allows an artist to connect with fans with an immediacy never imagined decades ago. Technology allows us to reach audiences across the globe, but an artist can also be subject to criticism and ridicule on a larger scale, and risks falling into a loop of external validation to substantiate their value.

Enter Kanye West’s latest effort: The Life of Pablo, a star-studded album continuing the starkly minimalist trend of his previous release, Yeezus. This time around, Kanye has introduced the idea of continual revision, tweaking tracks even after they’ve been released into the wild.

Unfortunately, Pablo also continues the trend of Kanye’s public meltdown. It seems that with each album, Kanye tries harder to achieve critical acclaim, but his efforts seem only to frustrate him. This likely has the positive upside of feeding his artistic impulses even more, but his social media ramblings only dilute his substantial artistic output. Decrying that he’s in deep debt, that Silicon Valley should listen to his brilliant ideas, and that his next album will be named after a 90’s video game console, we’re unable to really determine which are serious, which are jokes, and which are cries for help. Even months after Pablo’s release, the Internet simmers with think pieces. It’s Yeezy’s bootleg rant on not achieving the status of Picasso, Kubrick, and Einstein on a later date, that deserves the most scrutiny.

It’s odd for Kanye to be frustrated by what he sees as a critical snub of recognition, because Kanye has achieved the status of his artist contemporaries by many measurements. As an artist fully able to support himself through his craft – itself no small feat – he’s had the luxury of having his ideas heard by millions. He’s sold out Madison Square Garden in ten minutes. He’s performed in venues all over the world, including Pollstar’s 2015 International Venue of the Year, England’s O2 Venue, twice – once for his solo project and once for the Watch the Throne tour with Jay-Z. He’s garnered dozens of awards, including accolades from the MTV Video Music Awards, the Grammys and the BET Awards ever since he was named BET’s Best New Artist in 2004. His album sales rival any rap star at the top of his game. While his skills as an MC polarize fans, his lyrics are often inventive, but one cannot question his production technique, which has elevated the rap form beyond an MC backed by a minimal, tedious beat. Many of his tunes feature distinct sections that develop musically, which seem standard in other genres exhibiting fuller instrumentation but tends to be absent in rap. 2010’s Dark Twisted Fantasy and 2013’s Yeezus are his most critically heralded efforts, but each album prior has included several catchy songs, garnering hits that soared on the charts.

So what on earth is Kanye on about?

Let’s analyze the very medium and genre in which he works. Before the release of Yeezus, Kanye produced popular, radio-friendly rap music, the most ubiquitous sound of what’s current in the genre. However, the charts tend to diverge when considering quality (in the form of critical reception) and quantity (as number of plays). A sampling of Billboard illustrates how low the bar for quality is truly set. I call out Billboard precisely because this is where Kanye’s game is at. There are various interesting trends occurring within rap, but these are the small ante tables. Kanye’s playing with the biggest stakes, with the most radio plays and the most exposure.

What more perfect a rap song at number one than “Me, Myself & I?” The song’s title itself is a beautifully succinct illustration of the narcissism inherently plaguing the form. In the song, G-Eazy raps about such exhausted genre tropes that one wonders why they aren’t yet stale:

 

A Stella Maxwell right beside of me (trope: beautiful girls, here represented by a Victoria’s Secret model, indicate male sexual prowess)

A Ferrari, I’m buyin’ three (trope: indulgence in expensive material goods, product placement)

A closet of Saint Laurent (trope: haute couture used to flaunt wealth and overindulgent lifestyle, product placement)

 

And so on. Many rap songs bring the lavish lifestyle down to more plebeian levels with references to recreational drug use, and “Me, Myself & I” is no exception, throwing in a weed reference for good measure:

 

A whole lot of tree,

Fuck all this modesty

 

If “Me, Myself & I” is the rap mindset, “Fuck all this modesty” is the mission statement. Even this relatively introspective song, about someone wanting to spend time alone, is awash in self-aggrandizement, the sturdy hook that much of rap has hung its hat on for decades, transforming the genre into its own pastiche. It’s the Hollywood model: Recreate what worked before. It’ll work again.

Drake, one of the most polarizing figures for rap fans who find him “soft,” dominates the next three of the four spots. The other spot in the top five is “Down in the DM,” a song about social media which features the lyric,

 

I tell her,

Snapchat me that pussy,

Snapchat me that pussy, if it’s cool

 

The track features Yo Gotti rapping like a narcotized Kid Cudi, backed by a minimal beat which sounds like it was salvaged from Lil’ Wayne’s cutting room floor. Kanye this ain’t. If Beyonce can raise Red Lobster sales by singing about the restaurant during the Super Bowl, then it’s not a stretch for Yo Gotti to name-check Snapchat, Facetime and Instagram in “Down in the DM” and take a cut on the side. The obsession with money, in fact, is the most enduring of all rap tropes.

Change is slow in rap. A Billboard survey for the week of March 12th includes the same songs except for a new entry at number 5 from Kevin Gates, “2 Phones,” a song about the hustle of dealing drugs and dealing with women at the same time. The same self-aggrandizement is here, with lines like “Oh my God I’m gorgeous” coming out of nowhere, but thankfully these are outliers in a song mostly concerned with interfacing with technology.

Kanye is no stranger to rap tropes, and yet, he’s able to add nuance to the staleness. A great example of Kanye’s alternation between adulation and deprecation  is found in “Monster:”

 

Profit [prophet?], profit, nigga I got it

Everybody knows I’m a motherfucking monster

….

The best living or dead hands down,

Less talk, more head right now,

And my eyes more red than the devil is,

And I’m about to take it to another level, bitch

No matter who you go and get

Ain’t nobody cold as this

 

“Best living or dead hands down” may be the origination of comparing himself to the world’s best artists. In this stanza though, Kanye exhibits a playfulness and self-awareness in his lyrics. He knows he’s an ego-obsessed maniac, and he’s unapologetic about it, while making fun of himself at the same time. I don’t see Yo Gotti walking this tightrope with such finesse.

The contrast couldn’t be more apparent in comparing the music videos for both songs. Kanye’s “Monster” is shot with a horror movie aesthetic, complete with comatose and beheaded models and a fiendish Nicki Minaj who torments another version of herself. Few need a reminder to recall Kanye’s thirty-minute Runaway video released less than a year earlier, the crowning visual achievement of the Fantasy album and one of the more audacious music video efforts ever conceived. Yo Gotti’s overacted comedy video for “Down in the DM” will be home to anyone who’s seen any of Tyler Perry’s Madea movies.

Kanye is one of very few kings, but what good is ruling over a kingdom when its subjects are content with recycling the roles of dealer/pimp/hustler/gangster, glorifying themselves like a comic book or Hollywood wish-fulfillment fantasy?

It is within the pop music context of the Billboard charts, and the artists it epitomizes, that rappers like West, who have genuinely taken their game to the next level, find themselves. If Kanye as a pop megastar is challenging artists at the top of the charts, there simply isn’t a lot of competition. By applying a dose of originality, Kanye has easily separated himself from the pack.

Art is, in one respect, about taking risks. Would Picasso’s achievements stand out individually and become less meaningful generally if painting as a medium was exploring little territory, thereby being taken less seriously as a medium? If painting was relegated to the level of, say, the craft of basket weaving, would we care how well Picasso threw acrylics on a canvas? Perhaps Kanye realizes that rap doesn’t take that many risks, which diminishes the artform. Rap’s conservatism leads to Kanye’s frustrated, cathartic social media vomit.

One thing any truly great artist, living or dead, has absconded from is notifying the public that they’re the greatest. The public prefers to let the work speak for itself.

Kanye lives in a privileged bubble, and Twitter rants may come as standard operating procedure from any celebrity that has let their entitlement go to their head, but his level of egomania and bravado are unparalleled, even in a genre that subsists on them.

Kanye portends that no matter how successful we get, that restlessness never goes away. It’s disheartening for us to learn through him that we’ll get used to the level we’re at, that we’re doomed to experience a deep level of dissatisfaction. Most of us will never see the kinds of money he’s already spent – and squandered – which is why we want to shake him and tell him to snap out of it all the more. He doesn’t even provide us with our wish fulfilment. He’s tasted the ambrosia, and it is rotten.

If Picasso were alive today, he’d never tweet that “Guernica is about the horrors of #worldwar2,” blabbing his artistic intent in less than 140 characters. After releasing another artwork into the world, his next move was to pick up his brush and start again.

Let us be the curators, Kanye. Let us write the contextual cards next to your paintings in the gallery. Pick up your brush, the microphone, and start again. Send us more of your music, for the fans, for the haters, for the critics to mull and argue over. Channel that rage into your work, but never think you’re not being heard. Don’t take the impact out of your music with the ravings of a frustrated artist. Social media is the new currency of the viral, clickable lowest common denominator. Channel your disaffection into your songs. Don’t waste your breath on social media. You, and your music, are better than that.