“Today, I seriously thought about killing you” are the opening lines of Kanye West’s latest album, Ye. But should we care about the rest of it? Should we listen to a man who says slavery was a choice?
The short answer is yes. He is an idiot for saying that, I’m in no way trying to defend that or agree with it. The album is good give it a listen.
My take away from the album is that Kanye is reflecting on himself, he has had a rough couple of years with his mental health and is learning how to live with it, and he is requesting, sometimes forcefully – “That’s my bipolar shit, nigga, what? That’s my superpower, nigga, ain’t no disability. I’m a superhero! I’m a superhero!” – that we learn to live with him too.
His last album , The Life Of Pablo, was about him beginning to adjust to family life, being a dad a few times over and deciding which Pablo he was going to be. This new album in no way feels like Kanye settling but it feels like Kanye is comfortable being Kanye. He addresses some of his mistakes, most obviously on Wouldn’t Leave, where he is essentially thanking Kim Kardashian West for not leaving him when he messes up: “For any guy that ever fucked up, Ever embarrassed they girl, Ever embarrassed they wife, She told you not to do that shit” (where “that shit” is spouting racist rhetoric on TV).
As a boy and a young man I learnt very quickly how to apologise in a convincing enough way so that no one was allowed to be angry at me anymore and I could carry on doing what I wanted to do. All of the events in my life I consider to be the cause of genuinely life changing personal growth have been when I have apologised and truly meant it. If I hadn’t learnt how to properly apologise and know when to, I wouldn’t be the person I am today, if I had had more male role models apologising in and around my life I may have learnt how to quicker and therefor needed to apologise less. I think an unfortunate number of problems in the world are because men fuck up and refuse to admit (to themselves as much as to anyone else) that they have indeed fucked up. We do not need people like Kanye fucking up, but they will because they are people and we need them to apologise publicly for it when they do. When the TMZ interview happened the general consensus was that Kanye was cancelled, I even shared a meme that suggested I was in mourning and he may as well have passed away that evening. Redemption is a big word and I’m not sure if Kanye is redeemed yet for all the shit he’s been doing recently but without the prospect of redemption we would have no need for apologies and solutions. In Kanye’s own words from possibly the most beautiful song of all time, Only One: “you’re not perfect but you’re not your mistakes”.
Kanye’s change of attitude towards love and forgiveness has coincided with his family life and that is by no means a coincidence, even his erratic tweets have had a common theme of love and forgiveness. He recently tweeted a video of his daughter singing along to the lyrics “Make no mistake, girl, I still love you, Take the top off, let the sun come in (Believe it or not, the Lord still shines on you)” from his No Mistakes. This theme of unconditional love in spite of mistakes (which I would equate with familial love) has come to the forefront of his philosophy recently and has been as contentious as anything else he has done in his career. He has been ridiculed for colluding with the white-supremacist president when everyone else is concerned with simultaneously ignoring him and trying to defeat him politically. The way Kanye talks about it reminds me of this video about Reverend Wade Watts treating the KKK with love in the face of genuine threats. I know the world does not always work out with a happy ending, it takes incredible amounts of bravery to act like that and we cannot expect everyone to do so for some people have more to lose than others. The story in the video is as inspiring as it is scary and if you watch enough Kanye West interviews you might interpret his recent behaviour as similar to that of Reverend Wade Watts.
I think our best insight into who Kanye is and how he is going to act from here on in is his intro to the whole album:
“The most beautiful thoughts are always besides the darkest
Today, I seriously thought about killing you
I contemplated, premeditated murder
And I think about killing myself
And I love myself way more than I love you, so…
Today, I thought about killing you, premeditated murder
You’d only care enough to kill somebody you love”
I see it as his confession that he loves himself (more but) the same way he loves anyone else, he will sometimes irrationally do bad things for other people just as he might do for himself, but at the end of the day love is the motivating factor. It’s a reflection of something I have believed for a while, that we should treat ourselves with the same kindness we would treat our loved ones with and then eventually we can extend that out to people we do not love yet.
“I love myself way more than I love you
And I think about killing myself
So, best believe, I thought about killing you today”