KANYE: MASTER OR DISASTER?

Unless you've lived under a rock for the past decade, you are probably aware... Kanye West is either a trainwreck-level disaster none of us can look away from, or he's the world's greatest clown. Wait wait wait, before you roll your eyes and cast this off as just another article with a beef for Yeezus: I actually mean that as a compliment. Let's get into some back story.

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Like most people, my introduction to Kanye was with 2007's "Stronger". [Edit: Some of you may have got on the bus in 2005 with "Gold Digger" but it was a bit of a nonstarter for me.] I didn't know much about him when I heard it but I was a fan of Daft Punk's "Harder Better Faster Stronger", where the song pulls its catchy hook from, so I was content to give it a listen. Back then I hated it when artists "ripped off" other artists and it kinda annoyed me that more people knew who Kanye was than Daft Punk. I get it now though.

He helped to push Daft Punk into the spotlight, and nobody got ripped off.

But much as I wanted to hate "Stronger" because it was different from the Daft Punk track that I loved, I had to admit... It's a great song. Kanye felt hungry on this record. Just look at him trying so hard to be a pop star in that Stronger video. It's charming... Kanye's productions are always amazing. And it had some great lines like "they don't make 'em like this anymore / I ask, cause I'm not sure / Do anybody make real shit anymore?".

When I later did a little bit of looking around I found an artist that actually had established some decent hip hop street cred with older tracks like "Two Words" off 2002's Get Well Soon... It's a pretty typical hard-times song backed up by Mos Def at the peak of his career. Kanye was someone back then. He was fighting to get respect and he had some moxy.

Look at all that film grain. Such rugged. So hip-hop.

"Stronger" was getting stronger. When you look at Kanye at the time in the context of hip hop he was trying to distance himself from the tropes of a rapper that goes on about destruction and be someone who raps about empowerment. Stronger is a cheesy pop song but it's also not a tired old yarn about a thug coming up in the game.

In 2007 there was some real buzz around Kanye, for really good reasons.

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But then this happened.

Kanye! You motherfucker!

And a whole bunch of people who had never heard of this guy suddenly saw him take the mic out of a sweet young Taylor Swift's hands and effectively take a shit all over her greatest acheivement. I mean fair enough. Beyonce Knowles deserved some praise too... but she was a pretty well established artist at that time and Swift was just a newcomer, all doe-eyed and star-struck. Kanye was taking candy from a baby and shrugging about it.

This was a high pressure moment. What for him was a revolutionary expression in defiance of the man, became a defining moment. Grandmothers who were still listening to LPs from the 30s suddenly knew who Kanye was, and they didn't like him. And that made him INSANELY popular with the young crowd. The rebels, naerdowells and misfits. There was so much buzz about this incident it's entered into the popular lexicon as a faux pas called Pulling a Kanye.

Kanye even pulled a Kanye at the 2015 Grammy's.

And maybe that was the beginning of a downward spiral for him that's been going on for a while. He's apparently been been getting crazier and crazier, stringing zany antic after zany antic, and always in the public eye. It's mastery or disastery. Even the casual observer can see this guy is going off the deep end. He might really have some serious mental problems; it certainly appears that way at times.

From the "I am God" incident...

(Seriously how high is he in this interview? Compare it to this one from 2002)

...To the "Listen to the Kids, Bro" speech which is simultaneously sublime and completely insane. It's a longwinded ramble that's supposed to be an acceptance speech for an award, but really it's just a soap box for Kanye to unload. Yeah that's right. Kanye punked the fuck out of the 2009 VMAs and the net result is that they gave him 20 minutes to say whatever the hell he wants. And he said it. He said it all.

During that same speech he also confronts his bad reputation and expresses his frustration and perhaps regret at the perceptions that moment at the 2009 VMAs created around him.

Kanye at the VMAs in 2015

Interestingly enough, T-swift called Kanye her friend during her introduction, a big symbolic public forgiveness of that defining moment six years earlier. We see something human in the way he comes across here. But it's just a brief glimpse in an otherwise disjointed marijuana-inspired ramble.

Dawwh, Kanye!

Half way through this speech he says "I’m not no politician, bro!" but in an act of brilliant-if-unintentional irony, he finishes the same speech by saying, "And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020 to run for president.”

He is ruthlessly shameless, openly admitting to the world during the speech that he was high while he making the speech he would announce his candidacy for president. "Ya’ll might be thinking right now, ’Did he smoke something before he came out here?’ The answer is yes, I rolled up a little something. I knocked the edge off!" It's like watching order coming out of chaos. If he's planning this stuff out, It's next-level meta.

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His music is also not the same as it once was. It's a lot more experimental and... weird. Don't get me wrong! His production these days is still brilliant, but his songwriting is just...off the beaten path. "Black Skin Head" off his 2013 release Yeezus is a great song that gets you going but it's nothing short of insane, lyrically and in terms of production. Probably the most popular track off that record is "Bound 2" and man, it's a bizarre song with a bizarre video that rides the line between late-night cable TV erotica and b-grade public access art nuveau.

All this video needs is David Duchovny and it would be an episode of Red Shoe Diaries.

The video is so pointedly lampoonable that Seth Rogen and James Franco famously did just that. To be honest, I prefer their version of the video, just because it really makes me laugh. Like a lot. Where the original comes off as pretentious and taking itself too seriously, the lampoon is irreverent and fun. But something happens. There's a chemical change when you see Kanye that way.

When you watch the original again it seems like it's still taking the piss out of Kanye. But it's Kanye taking the piss out of Kanye. And that's funny! And you know what? I find myself laughing at Kanye all the time. Those ridiculous gifs where he "frowns" for the camera to appear more thuggish... I always laugh. And his Twitter account is a rambling stream of consciousness that is pure comedy. Just Watch this video from ETC news about his recent twitter battle with Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose.

#FingersInTheBootyAssBitch

There's something schdenfreude about it all. (That means taking pleasure from someone else's misfortune, if you don't know how to use Google.) Watching him crumple from the inside out is oddly satisfying. You're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. The sadistic punch line that makes you groan and giggle. The train-wreck effect. Rubber-neck in full effect.

But then so many of my younger friends are always telling me how Kanye is an influential genius and it wasn't making sense to me. I'd always thought of Kanye as kind of a middling pop-star that got famous using other people's music and his only real claims to fame were his own crazy antics... I wondered if his fans aren't just empathizing with his extremely brazen and reactive nature. After all, if someone that famous and rich (or not so rich?) can be that flawed... maybe we all have a chance after all?

Or... maybe not.

But then I was browsing through Youtube and I found this video of Dave Chappelle on the Jimmy Fallon Show talking about the first time he met Kanye. Simultaneously, Dave describes him as a master freestyle-artist and also someone who inspires laughter.

"My life is dope, and I do dope shit!"

And that got me thinking. Maybe that's really what Kanye is all about. Maybe Kanye is not just an amazing producer/middling pop-star with a few good hits, and maybe his life isn't the flaming inferno of madness that it is made out to be. Maybe all of this is really just planned out. Maybe Kanye loves that people can Pull a Kanye. Maybe he and Taylor Swift were always friends and they both wanted to give a shout out to Beyonce. Ok... maybe that's pushing it.

But maybe Kanye actually is a genius but not for the reasons most people think. Kanye knows, like no other, that the world loves to watch a trainwreck, and that being a class-clown is a great way to get attention and make friends. And that's who Kanye is. A bystander who had the moxy to interrupt a private CD of Jay-Z's new album, and answer a cell phone in the middle of a private screening of unreleased artistic material by Dave Chappelle at the height of his game and say "My life is dope, and I do dope shit!" without giving a fuck - all while inspiring laughter from those around him.

That was Kanye in 2002. That's still Kanye in 2016. The college dropout. The class-clown. And as far as clowns go, Kanye just might be the world's greatest.

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