My uncle, before he grew up to buy his son a pair of child-sized Jordans to match every pair of grown-up sized Jordans every time he copped a pair himself, practiced proselytizing on me first. So, from a young age I was carefully cultivated as a flowering shrub of reverence for Playstation over Nintendo, books over boys, and “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” over just about everything else except “Aquemini.” With a teenaged proselytizing — or enabling — uncle’s help, I was able from the jump to sink myself into blackness and learn to love how it tasted. Because regardless of how many Mac Millers break the Earth’s crust from the depths of Tartarus, rap music is first and forever black music — the music of those who may swim near the bottom of socioeconomic ladders but assert themselves as the sharks of cool, the moon that yanks the waves of popular culture, even though it’s dismissed as darkness. That is the hidden fruit of being raised a poor black child by poor black mothers, not quite unwoven from childhood themselves, and their cousins and siblings — you get to grow up listening to cooler things, sexier and deeper and bloodier things than the Beatles. And the music you hear is yours, made by you, and for you, and you rap and sing along during the pain and the parties, and it’s beautiful.
I’m just saying, it’s pretty good. You should listen to “Spottieottiedopalicious” if you haven’t already.
So when my uncle Chevy — like Chase, not Chevrolet — handed me a woefully censored copy of “The College Dropout” on my 11th birthday — nine days after its release, which meant nine days of hearing it bumped in his Impala as he took me to school every morning — I not only had my first rap album of my very own, but my very first love. And I committed.
Capitalism is evil, but I stay buying stuff, needing stuff, and needing stuff to be affirmation, and Yeezy knew that, too, and so “Spaceship” was the anthem. Before I was pretty in pink and gorgeous with green hair, Yeezy decorated his mask of frustration and loneliness on the college scene with pretty words about Black Greeks, and I knew the isolation, and “School Spirit” was the wave for me. And as Kanye grew up, so did I. I swallowed arrogance as an elixir, and “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” was my Chemical X. I learned how to fall in love with black men, learned the wet way my body fit with theirs, wept in frustration when they rejected the medicine of my soul to lick their self-inflicted, self-sustaining wounds and used the flimsiness of male ego to fortify themselves against me and spit me out as poison. I played “Runaway” about it for months.
The same man who I thought was brilliant, the bellwether for pro-blackness and change, has lost his depth, his gift of narrative within narrative that complicated his message within his music and made his speech marble. Now, he’s a fake-deep idol for Twitter ashies promulgating himself as some type of visionary with a social consciousness that could stand to be way more woke, with words that are ultimately empty. The same man who can sample Gil Scott Heron’s Comment No. 1 over a beat that ends with sparse clapping in an empty room — a surreal track symbolic of the beauty of a black man affirming his existence and the oppression of living black in America, and being unheard — can stand a negligible amount of years later and say that racism is an “outdated concept,” echoes the post-racial delusions of 21-year-old who’s only ever met one black person in his life.
Long story short, I’m not voting for him in 2020. Probably you shouldn’t either.
Normally, as it involves rappers doing more than rapping, and, in certain cases, trapping, I wouldn’t care. A musician’s job is to make music, after all, not act as an academic or public thinker. It is not a musician’s job to be correct. But when musicians place themselves in the role of social leaders, then their statements deserve criticism, especially when they’re problematic. Gassing up Kanye West is part of a general epidemic of reckless rappers who call themselves activists but in their arrogance can’t hold themselves accountable for the holes they punch into real progress. He’s undoubtedly a clever man, undoubtedly insightful, but that’s the frustrating part; a person of his intellect should not be regressing. A person aware of the social institution of racism and the way that it intersects with class can’t call black people greedy slaves to materialism while indulging in that same materialism himself.
Most importantly, he cannot call himself an ally to black progress while contributing to misogynoir. Misogynoir and misogyny are commonplace in rap music, after all — and as a black woman, the fruit of enjoying rap music is oftentimes sour, especially when its popularity comes at the expense of violence against our identities. But that misogynoir is especially insidious when it comes alongside participating in black male exceptionalism, whose paleolithic ideas usually make villains of black women when we speak about oppression, and jams black men in positions of power in America’s patriarchy, rather than achieves justice. And no true allegiance to the advancement of blackness comes at the price of the privileging of the experiences of straight black man as normative, or central to the black experience; this is the same outdated thinking that asks society to pardon Bill Cosby because he’s done “so much for the black community” while sexually assaulting black women and enforcing respectability politics on the black community. This is the same excruciating intellectual laziness that forms the basis of Kendrick Lamar’s “For Free?” interlude which, in its cartoonish depiction of black women’s mythical expectations of black men as contributive to black men’s oppression, places Lamar deep in fake deep ashy Twitter waters — but still intellectually revered on black issues, like Kanye West is.
The remaining Yeezy stans who kept listening after 2010 — I don’t anymore, for self-care — need to ask more from their fave than MTV and Kardashian shenanigans. Loving someone means holding them accountable, and challenging them to be better, and to do better, even when it hurts. I have. I always do. And Kanye West keeps failing me.
So in this period for him, whether it’s mere transition, or what I hope isn’t his dreaded downfall, I have to let him go. I can’t keep my heart invested in this, only for it to be broken time after time.
You can’t deny his musical genius. But this is where I get off the ‘Ye ride.
Sierra Mannie is a Classics student from Canton, Miss.
