To the extent I even noticed Mr. West previously, he struck me as a talentless, ignorant buffoon, like many successful purveyors of "popular" music. His recent forays into anti-semitism and Nazi sympathizing have put this absurd person back into the news. One of the better commentaries on this grotesque display comes from John Ganz; an excerpt:
While all these far-right goonies play constant games, equivocate, make bad faith disavowals, or employ euphemisms, Kanye doesn’t have the time, inclination, or ability to do all that. He just says the underlying truth of this kind of politics: he likes the Nazis! Yes, he pretty much said this verbatim, “I like the Nazis.” It was too much even for [Alex] Jones.
But there are darker possibilities that need to be taken seriously. Not that Kanye West will necessarily mainstream Hitlerism; I don’t see things being that cartoonish, but what does it mean when an artist who for so long seemed to be able to channel or embody the zeitgeist takes this turn? Real fascism had Ezra Pound and Céline as its bards, I guess our second-time-as-farce fascism has Kanye West. I used to half-joke that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was real science because you could use it to predict what Kanye West was going to do next. (In a way, Hegel’s book is itself a kind of abstract, cartoon outline of all human history.) Having exhausted the possibilities of his pretensions to Romantic genius and finding his desire for recognition as an utterly free and self-creating individual frustrated, I believed Kanye would necessarily found a kind of insular, hippy cult to satisfy his desire for unconditional self-worship. I didn’t guess until very late he would go Nazi, but maybe I should have: Hitler still represents the fullest possible extent of the morbid distention of the ego that Kanye has been undergoing.
The real danger here, I fear, is precisely that Mr. West will, in fact, "mainstream" Nazism among his legions of fans, many of whom are no doubt as ignorant and ill-equipped for mature existence as he is.
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