The Tragedy of Kanye West

My last semester of college1 was, in a word, miserable. Despite the fact that college students are all but invincible against the dreaded ‘rona, my school instituted such draconian “protection” measures that one of my roommates began referring to the school as East Berlin University. Aside from partying extra hard to compensate, being stuck in our apartment meant that me and my roommates had a lot more time on our hands, which we used to watch a lot of TV. One of the shows that made its way into our rotation was Homeland. For the uninitiated, the crime/legal drama follows CIA operative Carrie Mathison as she works to fight terror around the world and at home. For the most part, it’s pretty standard fare for a police procedural— but one aspect that sets it apart is that Carrie struggles with bipolar disorder. It was the first time I had seen bipolar portrayed on TV, and if the internet is to be believed it’s a pretty accurate depiction. Although she mostly controls her disorder with medication, there are points in the show where she goes off her meds, and we see her deal with the euphoric, manic highs and the crushing, depressive lows that characterize the disease. Portrayed by Claire Danes, Carrie Mathison makes for an interesting and nuanced character, and is certainly more compelling then the lead of your average police drama— one of the articles I read in preparation for this piece praises her character as having “strength and vulnerability in spades.”

Another bipolar sufferer has recently been thrust into the limelight— the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Ever since The College Dropout was released in 2004, West has been at the forefront of the rap scene, dropping masterpiece after masterpiece for well over a decade. His place at the top of the pack hasn’t been without controversies, though, from “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” to “I’mma let you finish…”. Rather than hurt his career, though, these sorts of antics helped turn him into a household name. Further cementing his celebrity status was his marriage to reality-TV mogul Kim Kardashian in 2014. In my opinion, his music career peaked with the release of 2016’s The Life of Pablo, an album that boasted an unprecedented array of production styles, genre influences, collaborators, and themes. It’s a true masterpiece of an album, and what I consider to be Kanye’s Kanye-est record. 

But what goes up, must come down, it would seem.

In mid-2020, gossip began to surface that Kanye and Kim’s marriage was on the rocks. In July of that year West began tweeting erratically, mentioning that the Kardashian family was “trying to lock him up” and referring to Kris Kardashian as “Kris Jong Un.” Having previously announced a bid for the presidency, he held his first rally that same month as well. He might be a musical genius, but his political talents are… lacking, to put it delicately. At the rally, he announced to the world that he and his wife almost aborted their first child, a move that definitely put more strain on an already stressed marriage.

Despite these and other antics, the rapper seemed poised for a comeback with the announcement and rollout of his tenth studio album, Donda, named after his late mother. Similarly to The Life of Pablo, West enlisted a slew of other artists to feature on the album and producers to make it happen. Adding to the publicity and hype around the album were a series of live “listening parties” during the summer of 2021, the first and second of which were held in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz stadium. In the interim between the two, he sequestered himself in a locker room in the stadium to work on the album. At times he even live-streamed his minimalist setup, and the near constant work that was going into the project. The last listening party was held on August 26th, at Soldier Field in Chicago. And finally, after well over a month of delays, the album was released on August 29th, 2021.

But what we got, in my view, was a bit of a mixed bag. I had held off on watching or listening to the live events that had been taking place, wanting to go into the album with no expectations. But coming in at nearly two hours long, it’s hard for the album not to feel a bit diluted. To be sure, tracks like the expansive, trap influenced Jail, the emotional, epic Jesus Lord, the hard-hitting drill-based Off the Grid, or the comparatively upbeat Believe What I Say stand comfortably amongst Kanye’s best work. In particular, Jesus Lord has been referred to as “Donda’s Runaway,” and I won’t lie, made me tear up the first time I listened to it. Kanye gives one of his most emotional performances to date on this track, and Jay Electronica goes toe-to-toe with Kanye here as well, contributing what I think might be my favorite feature on the album. But on the other hand, we have tracks like the boring God Breathed, the repetitive Heaven and Hell, and the uninspired and incomplete-sounding Tell the Vision, among other lackluster tracks. Additionally, Kanye included a number of “part 2” versions of songs at the tail end of the album, which were versions of the songs with different features. All these elements combine into an album that, while it certainly has lots of strong moments, ultimately feels unfocused, unfinished, and underwhelming.

This piece isn’t a review of Donda— the point I’m making here is that despite all the other artists involved, producers who worked on the album, and what seemed to be a grueling and intense schedule to get the album made, the finished product was a real grab bag. Overall, the album certainly isn’t a happy one; the only real upbeat song here is Believe What I Say. Scattered, in pain, meditating on loss— in a way, I think the album provided a window into the mind of Kanye West at the time. Seeing the album in this light lends a whole new level of meaning to it, and ultimately elevates it to a deeply personal work of art. He did name it after his deceased mother, after all.

While this context elevates the album, it also begets a new level of concern for the rapper and his already strained mental health. Something about this latest level of manic-type behavior felt different. Following the release of Donda in August came Donda (Deluxe) in November, which saw Kanye rearranging the tracklist and adding tracks to bring the runtime to well over two hours. The rearrangement felt pointless and the new tracks weren’t all that, in my opinion— not good signs. Next came Donda 2 in February of 2022. I’d love to give an opinion on the album, but to this day it remains incomplete and only partially available on Kanye’s “stem player” device. Sorry Kanye, but $200 for essentially half an album isn’t exactly a worthwhile investment to me. Most of the songs have been leaked online in various forms, and are mostly excellent, but it’s hard to know what’s “official” as far as the album goes.

Also undoubtedly contributing to Kanye’s downward spiral was his very public and messy divorce. Kanye’s marriage to Kim Kardashian always felt like… well, not quite a PR stunt, but somewhere in that ballpark. As with most celebrity marriages, I figured it was only a matter of time before the power couple called it quits. But when the couple had four kids together, I thought we might actually witness a happy-ever-after scenario. My optimism was premature, however, as the pandemic saw their marriage go from on-the-rocks to fully divorced. Having wrapped Keeping Up With the Kardashians in 2021, I thought we might see America’s least favorite family move on from their reality TV days in a mature and graceful fashion, choosing to focus on more intrinsically rewarding pursuits like marriage and family, and/or their respective business ventures. All the members of the Kardashian klan are older now than they were 14 years ago, most with serious relationships and some even with kids! But I suppose I underestimated the narcissism of these people, because within a year of their previous show’s finale… they were back with a new show, simply titled The Kardashians. And what better way for Kim to boost the new show’s ratings than with new relationship drama?

“I was just thinking, like, heard about this BDE, need to get out there, like I need to just like… jump start my… I was just basically DTF.” - Kim Kardashian, The Kardashians, on the start of her relationship with Pete Davidson

Wow, okay Kim. I remember hearing this quote well before Kanye’s latest round of drama, and thinking to myself, man, poor Kanye. I imagine divorce is painful enough without your soon-to-be-ex wife telling the whole world the intimate details of her sex life. There’s a lot more in the episode I could quote, but you get the point.

So… given all this context, imagine my mix of shock and amusement when I saw this:

While shocking in that it’s a taboo and provocative statement, even if factually true, it was also vaguely amusing since Kanye’s always done what Kanye wants and I knew the chattering class would have a field day with it. And have a field day they did. But my amusement quickly soured with that fateful tweet, early in the morning on October 9th.

It was removed within hours, but that didn’t stop Kanye from continuing to spew anti-semitic talking points across various interviews, notably bragging on the Drink Champs podcast that he was un-cancelable even though he was making anti-semitic statements. Literally the next day, he lost a major brand partnership (I think it was Adidas, or something similar? Google isn’t giving me easy answers right now). Also around this time, Kanye appeared on Tim Pool’s Timcast IRL podcast, along with persona non grata Milo Yiannopoulos and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. But the appearance didn’t last long, as the moment Tim gave the slightest pushback on Kanye’s antisemitism, he abruptly got up and left. Finally, he hit rock bottom during an interview on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, on which he openly praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. For his part, Jones repeatedly offered Kanye opportunities to walk back his statements, but Kanye pushed ahead with his disgusting statements. As of this writing, Kanye hasn’t made many public appearances since, only emerging to go to church.

Many immediately dismissed Kanye as simply an anti-semite and a bad person, and moved on. But imagine this: you’re walking down the street, and you pass a homeless person muttering racial epithets under their breath. In this situation, my first thought would be something like, ah, a homeless person who’s probably mentally ill or on something. Or both.

I think this is closer to the sort of lens we need to apply to Kanye West.

Most people, myself included, find what Kanye said disgusting and abhorrent. But the waters get a little murkier when we discuss Kanye West himself. Many were quick to condemn Kanye, with the all-too-common implication that he should be cancelled and permanently banned from polite society. Nothing quite encapsulates this shit take quite like the refrain, “mental illness doesn’t make you an asshole!” The implication here being, Kanye might be mentally ill but he’s saying what he’s saying because he’s a bad person, not because of his mental illness. While I think the loosening of stigma around mental illness is a generally positive development, this line is far too sweeping and oversimplified to even begin to tackle an issue as complex as the disfunction of the human brain. “Mental illness doesn’t make you an asshole?” The simplest rebuke to this take is just sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. While it’s fair to say that high-functioning depression or general anxiety probably won’t turn you into an asshole, consider, say, a really bad case of schizophrenia. Or a really bad case of borderline-personality disorder. Or, hell, even a catastrophic case of depression. All of these conditions distort perception far beyond the baseline of a normal, healthy brain, resulting in behavior that can be annoying or irrational at best and downright threatening at worst. “Mental illness doesn’t make you an asshole?” There’s literally a diagnosis called antisocial personality disorder, which is defined by the Mayo clinic as “a mental disorder in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to antagonize, manipulate or treat others harshly or with callous indifference. They show no guilt or remorse for their behavior.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like an asshole to me.

This gets at a deeper, more complicated question concerning the relationship between fault and responsibility. If you have a mental disorder, it’s probably not your fault, but then the question becomes, how much responsibility do you have for your words and actions? In the case of someone with, say, a severe case of schizophrenia, the amount of responsibility we lay at the feet of the individual patient is slim to none. In the case of a more mild form of mental illness, we can afford the individual much more responsibility. There’s a few key takeaways here: firstly, the relationship between mental illness and responsibility functions on a sliding scale, so to speak. The more understanding and capability an individual has, the more responsibility they can and should be given. The other takeaway is that this isn’t a quantitative process. We can’t say, “If you have mental illness X, you have Y amount of responsibility.” Human psychology can’t be described with numbers, measures, and precision, it’s much more qualitative, meaning that we need to rely on imprecise, non-exact, and more nuanced measures. 

I think that sometimes modern society can get a bit caught up in the fact that we collectively know so much, and don’t always know how to handle what we can’t immediately categorize. So is Kanye simply a victim of his disorder, with no blame to be laid at his feet? Or is he an asshole, a bigot, a bad person, who’s simply hiding behind a mental disorder? Unfortunately— there’s no easy answer here. Having followed Kanye for some time now, and having picked up a general feel for his mannerisms, it certainly seems to me that he’s in the midst of a manic episode or otherwise lost touch with reality. And given the fact that he’s publicly announced he’s off meds, it almost seems like a foregone conclusion. I’d highly recommend his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience to get a feel for what he’s like in an extended interview setting, and to get a feel for the guy in general.

Society writ large is tasked with grappling with these sorts of heavy questions around mental illness and responsibility. Unfortunately, it would seem society writ large is woefully unequipped to have that level of a conversation, but that’s an essay for another day. My hope is that by laying out my own thoughts like this, we as a society can begin to move toward a more mature discussion of the topic. For a more thorough discussion of how mental illness discourse has gone awry in recent years, I’d highly recommend the essay that inspired this one, “The Incoherence and Cruelty of Mental Illness as Meme,” by Freddie DeBoer.

Mental illness is tough, messy, often complex, and a uniquely human experience— that’s not always politically correct. After watching one of my favorite musical icons absolutely implode over a few short weeks, I felt compelled to write about this not just because of his breakdown, but because the reaction from so much of the media was so immediately dismissive. When it comes to psychology and mental illness, a true picture can rarely be painted in a single sentence— hell, I just wrote a whole essay on the subject. Also, a lot of these dismissive takes were coming from people who you’d expect to claim to care about mental illness, which makes you wonder what exactly they really care about. I’ll close with this: When I look at Kanye West, I see a broken, mentally ill man in pain, whose life is falling apart, and I hope he gets the help he so desperately needs.