Yeezus

Bruce Lee is not my only hero. 

I talked in class about my experiences at a Kanye West concert the day I got back, but in light of my recent blogging experiences I realized Mr. West can serve to explain where I’ve ended up in my struggles to understand my perfectionism. 

I’m not going to beat around the bush; Kayne West is a total jackass. He is the definition of an ego maniac and embodies some of the worst elements of modern society: he’s money hungry, rude, arrogant, and has zero shame about any of it. One listen through of his music will make that very clear. 

So why is this man a hero of mine? Why do I seem him and instantly think of him as a role model? To answer that I’ll have to give you some background information. 

Right now, Kanye West is in the middle of a world-wide concert tour called Yeezus, which is a direct and intentional play on the name Jesus. In the tour, amongst other controversial material, Kanye performs a song called “I Am a God,” which is a song about exactly that; Kanye believes himself to be a god among men. The song alone is shockingly blasphemous, but his live performance of it took blasphemy to a new level; he sang much of the song while being held up on a throne of 15 women wearing only full body fishnet suits. In front of nearly 20 thousand people, Kanye was raised up in this way, declaring himself a god and getting a massively positive response. To witness this was mind blowing.

Kanye West was working on the clock while that was happening. That means not only was he making a claim of godliness in front of more people than ever could have seen Jesus do so, but he was getting paid almost a million dollars to do it. And that was just one show. He’s going around the world doing this. 

By putting his name alongside Jesus’s in such a public way, Kanye West is attempting to commandeer the icon that Jesus has become ( a white, bearded dude who spends all his time hugging lambs and children) and make it his own icon for radical honesty and self-expression. Jesus is easily the most important symbol of power for the much of the western world, so it makes sense that Kanye used it as a platform to demonstrate his own worldview that is so strikingly different than the one originally created by the symbol. But Jesus isn’t the only symbol Kanye is claiming; the concert merchandise sold after the show was entirely dedicated to this idea. A major theme on his t-shirts is Death wearing a robe made of the Confederate flag. I couldn’t believe how many white people I saw walking away from a rap concert wearing Confederate flag imagery, it was insane. Kanye chose the flag because it is in many peoples’ minds a symbol of racial oppression and inequality. By dressing Death up in it and being so public about its usage, Kanye is attempting to make the flag that once triggered memories of racism instead trigger images of him. And he is not subtle about it.  The other primary shirt design is the one I bought, depicting a skull wearing a Native American headdress. This is a clear commentary on the result of rampant cultural appropriation: by using Native Americans as mascots, we have killed any legitimacy they have as a culture. 

His re-appropriating of typically white-American iconography doesn’t stop there. In an intentionally terrible music video called Bound 2, Kanye sits on a stationary motorcycle in front of a green screen that depicts classic American imagery – the grand canyon, wild horses, open roads, etc. While these images are shown, Kanye and his naked fiancé Kim Kardashian pretend to be making love on the motorcycle. When the video came out, fans and haters alike were outraged, not because of the message (most had no idea of his intentions) but because of the low quality of the production style. It is clear though that this too was a conscious decision by Mr. West; he is taking the symbols and icons of white America and fucking them in front of everyone, making no attempt to take it easy on us while he does it. He want the experience to be painful, much like Conchis made Nicholas’s enlightenment painful by forcing him to watch Joe and Lily make love in front of him. 

So what does this have to do with me and my problems with perfectionism? Kanye West is going to be remembered for a very long time for what he is doing, and whether that’s right or wrong is beside the point. That goal is one I think a lot of people, including myself, desire to achieve, and Kanye’s method is the source of my inspiration: he is using all of his creative talent to expose the entirety of himself, taking his best qualities and using them to display all of his worst qualities. By doing so, not only is he being incredibly honest, but he is embodying contradiction in the process. As a result, his audience and everyone who hears his music is given an immense amount of insight into his mind, and simply by the nature of his medium, that insight is loaded with very personal details. That means that as long as his music survives, people will not only know that he existed, but they will know exactly who he was as a man on a far more intimate level than is possible through things like biographies or even retrospective autobiographies. They will know him as he was in the moment he recorded his songs. 

They say that if you know yourself, you will know the world. What they never say is what happens when the world begins to know a person as they know themselves: that person is held up and declared a god among man by thousands of adoring fans. 

But that’s not why I want to be like Kanye. I want to be like Kanye because of the best contradiction he has taught me: he has reached something that at the very least he considers perfection. But that perfection has nothing to do with being flawless. No, Kanye West has shown me that it is from the very same cracks and flaws in the structure of my being that the best of me can flow out. I may one day be capable of doing great things, but the reason my family and friends love me has almost nothing to do with that. They love me because I’m goofy, because I’m clumsy, because I laugh so much. Those may not be the characteristics that make a person great, but there will be no way for me to become great without embracing them. This is because they define me to my very essence; how could I be a perfect version of myself without them? 

It is liberating to see my flaws and recognize the power they give me to live my life as fully as I can. I still have a lot of work to do as a person if I want to do big things with my life, but thanks to Kanye West I know that to get myself there I will have to take all of myself; full of flaws, but full all the same.