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Cole Kushna
Welcome, everyone, to a special episode of Dissect. I'm your host, Cole Kushna. We will be resuming the Mr. Morale season in two weeks from today. Been working hard on the latter half of the album. Thank you guys for your patience. There's just some big songs on the latter half of the album that I need to get right. I need to take my time. So we will be back soon. Thanks again for your patience. Today's episode is one that I have been, let's say, avoiding for some time now. It is my thoughts on the current state of affairs of all things Kanye West. I say avoiding because I've been a big proponent of Kanye's music in the past. I've been on the record saying that Kanye west is the most important and most influential artist of our lifetime. I don't think that has changed. I think our relationship to Kanye West's music has definitely changed for some of us. But him as an artist, historically, this is something that we are just going to have to confront. We're just going to have to live with the fact that this guy that made incredible art is also extremely problematic, Increasingly problematic. And I'm hoping today's episode is going to be therapeutic for some of you out there whose relationship to Kanye west music has disintegrated over time. Mine certainly has. I'll say up front that I have not listened to Kanye West's music in years. I have only skimmed through his more recent projects. I have not returned to his past music because I simply just do not enjoy listening to it. I can recognize the greatness. I will hear the song in a store or in a coffee shop, and it evokes just a ton of feelings, both nostalgic. There's just an undeniable feeling that you get when you hear some of those songs. At the same time, I also feel disgust, disappointment, sadness, almost like a feeling of mourning, as weird as that is to say about my relationship with an artist. But Kanye west has been a very important figure in my life in. In many respects. For those that don't know, Kanye west literally changed my life. My season two on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the breakout hit season of dissection. It is the thing that transformed my life. I am able to do what I do now as my career because of that season. And so I am forever indebted to Kanye west and his art. Outside of that, Kanye west is undeniably the most influential artist of our generation, of our lifetime, the most consequential artist of our generation and lifetime. And I think part of the process of the last couple of years, at least for me, has been getting used to the fact that the reality that this great and important artist is going to be forever entangled in controversy. That has always been the case to some degree, of course, but the latter couple of years and the extremes to which he has taken his rhetoric have been different. I think we all understand that. I don't really want to rehash what he has said over the last couple years, and most recently in the last couple of months. I'm not sure that's productive at all. I think anyone listening to this understands how problematic his words, his actions have been over the past few months. And really, part of me avoiding this conversation has been around the fact that what he has been doing is so blatantly in search of attention to keep his name in the conversation and the headlines by any means necessary. And he's been having to go to further and further extremes in order to make any noise at all. It feels like most of us have just kind of tapped out at this point. I've blocked him on Twitter. I'm not interested in his new music. I don't listen to it. And that is just such a wild thing to say. If you told me even five years ago, that would be the case. Well, maybe not five, 10 years. Let's say 10 years ago that a new Kanye west album would come out, and I would not listen to it. I would not be interested in it. I just wouldn't have believed you. Right. Yet. We are here, and part of me doing this episode today was inspired by a conversation that I had with a friend of mine who I ran into at a coffee shop. She's a huge Kanye west fan, or was a huge Kanye west fan. She's also fully Jewish. And so we got to talking about all things Kanye. It kind of ended up being this kind of grieving session. I don't mean to undermine the use of that word here. Obviously, there's more important things to grieve than our relationship with an artist. But I assume anyone that's listening to this also had, you know, an important relationship with the art and with the artist. And it is meaningful. If you're passionate about music, it's something. Music is something that you care about. Culture is something that you care about. I do think these have an effect on you at a core emotional level, whether we like it or not. So the impromptu conversation that I had with my friend ended up feeling pretty therapeutic, I think, for both of us. And I'm hoping That's what today's episode can be. For some of you guys out there who have a similar relationship with Kanye west and his music. The first thing I wanted to talk about was the idea of separating the art from the artist. Obviously this is something that some of us have had to do with Kanye for quite some time now, depending on your thoughts and feelings about his past kind of antics, whether it was donning the red hat, whether it was slavery was a choice, whether it was name your controversy, right? All those, at least to my mind, kind of pale in comparison to what has been recently occurring. But in any case, I think there's always been some of that dynamic at play. And I think a lot of us were able to tolerate the antics because the music was not only good, but it was also very emotional and expressive and vulnerable. I think for me personally, what I've always been attracted to in Kanye's music is the vulnerability. It's the dichotomy of vulnerability and bravado. But you think about albums like Donda, you think about the period of Jesus as King and Ye, the self titled album, the bipolar album, and you really felt a man trying to be better, trying to be good. And that was always the redemption for me was the music and the vulnerability in the music. And so when we're talking about separating the art from the artist, that was always a critical element in my relationship with Kanye west, the person, not just his art, because I felt the person was in the music. That's still the case, of course, with the later works in Vultures, Vultures 2 Bully, dawn of Two Projects. I have not admittedly spent really much time in with at all Bully. I have not listened to at all. I've heard clips online, I've read some lyrics, but I'm just at the point where I'm totally lost interest. And I have reached the point where I cannot separate the art from the artist in my experience of the music, as much as I would want to from a critical aspect, I just can't do it. And so my relationship has. Has been ruined in that way. And I think this is a consequence of living with the artist, that we are trying to separate from the art in real time. Right. When we do this historically, it's a lot easier because you have context, you have social context, you have historical context to place these things in. I always think about Richard Wagner, who was a German composer, who was the most revolutionary composer since Beethoven, changed the course of operatic music, changed the vocabulary of tonality, took music at that time to places that have music at that time have just never been. He was a true, true visionary. And he was also a huge anti Semite. You could read essays that he has written, terrible things said about Jewish people. But he is still studied today because his work, his musical work, is just undeniable. You cannot study the history of music without addressing Wagner. And I think it's just easier when you have distance from the artists themselves and you have the historical context. It's much, much, much easier to separate the art from the artist when you have the luxury of time and distance. Again, the problem with doing that when you're so close to these artists, specifically with Kanye, is that we don't have the luxury of time. We don't have the luxury of distance. We are. We are witnessing and experiencing the tragedy in real time. And so for me, it has been impossible to separate the art from the artist to the point where I can't listen to this past work in the same way or at all without having this weird, complicated feeling underscoring the entire musical experience to the point that I just don't find it enjoyable, and I would rather just. Just rather listen to something else. So I think for a lot of us, we're experiencing in real time the reality that separating the art from the artist is really, really difficult to do when we are living it, when we are so close. I think, no doubt, historically, Kanye West's legacy is pretty untouchable at this point. He will be studied as a major figure of this era of musical history, and they'll have the luxury of distance and time, and they'll be able to compartmentalize the problematic elements of his life and character and behavior much more easily than we can. I think another reason why the relationship is so complicated is because the thing that makes Kanye great is also what is making him terrible. I don't know, acting terrible, having terrible views. Because Kanye, historically has always been drawn to the line. He has always been someone that is willing to go further than anyone else. For a long time, that was mostly musical. Right? That's exactly why he's important and why we fell in love. Because his music was so different. It was so visionary. He was willing to take risks and do things that no other artist could do from a talent standpoint, but also weren't willing to do. And yet we could see how that same tendency, that same intuition to push boundaries is the exact thing that is leading to his behavior now when his talent is declining, or at least his focus is in decline, mixed with mental health issues, which we'll talk about more later mixed with what clearly seems to be an addiction to nitrous, mixed with a divorce, mixed with visitation rights of his kids seemingly being taken from him. I think all of these things factor into his behavior. They don't excuse any of it. Of course, mental health issues don't make you anti Semitic. That's just an obvious fact. But my point is that the thing, the same intuition that makes him great is also the thing that we are finding so disturbing because he's not able to funnel it fully into the music anymore. And the ego in him and the insecurity in him have reached, at least to my perception, an all time high of desperation. He is scratching for relevance. He is willing to say anything to keep himself talked about. And it doesn't seem to matter to him what is being said about him as long as we are saying things about him. And for me, it all kind of feels like the football star in high school at 50 years old talking about how great he was when he was 16. That has that same kind of underlying desperation that a man who is aging, a man who clearly isn't at the top of his talents anymore. And rather than figuring out a way to age gracefully, to mature, he's now attacking the current guys at the top. Most, most recently, he's been attacking Kendrick Lamar because he's the guy at the top. Before that, it was Drake, who is clearly at the top. And the jealousy, the ego, the desp, the. The insecurity in him still just can't seem to stomach that he, he's no longer the guy. Even though all the guys after Kanye are all indebted to Kanye. I don't think anyone is disputing that fact. Every artist that we hear now is a child of Kanye in some respect. His influence is that strong. That is not an overstatement. The current state of music has been shaped by Kanye West. And because we're not saying that all the time, because we're not praising his name all the time, it seems like he's taking that as some kind of disrespect. Although at least in my mind, I think it's all just extreme, extreme, extreme insecurity. Which is kind of wild to say about someone who is so accomplished. But that's what I see under underneath all of this is desperation fueled by insecurity. And again, the redemption for me was always in the music because that's where he was the most vulnerable. And you see shades of that now. You know he has that song that came out Cousins, which I did listen to just once in preparation for this. Because it was the one thing out of this recent tirade that was the most artistically interesting to me in terms of concept and someone addressing something very serious that seems to have decades worth of consequences on his psychology. If you guys don't know this song Cousins is about his relationship with his cousin. When he was younger. He had a tweet kind of explaining what the song was and the circumstances around his relationship with his cousin, which was he found pornography, his dad's pornography stash, when he was five, and showed it to his cousin. They then found, I think, what is gay pornography that his mom had and that him and his cousin at a young age acted out what they saw in those magazines. He tweeted that he gave his cousin oral sex until he was, I think, 13 or 14. And that cousin went on to murder someone, a pregnant lady, and is now in jail for life. And Kanye feels responsibility there because he ended the relationship with his cousin. And whether that played a part in his cousin murdering someone, obviously, who knows? But Kanye feels the guilt and the shame attached to that relationship, I guess. And again, I'm armchair psychology all this. But this is what the tweet said. This is what the song reflects. And so that, to me, is someone trying to get to the bottom of his trauma. But at the very same time, I. At the. Just the next week, we get a clip of a song that you hear on one of these streams that he's been doing. And it's like, I think it's called Hail Hitler. And he says all of his n words are Nazis. Hail Hitler. They can't understand. So simultaneously, he's doubling down on the anti Semitism. And that's where I just. I just totally. I'm out. And so again, the redemption quality that I always found in the music, to me, is just lacking. It's not there anymore. And that's a big part of the reason why I'm just not interested in the new music. Because the music itself is being infiltrated with the problematic viewpoints. The anti Semitism is funneling its way into the music. It is then attached to the imagery of the swastika that he's been wearing and promoting online, which is also directly tied to anti Semitic remarks that he's been consistent on. I think this is where things really diverge because Kanye has always been someone that has attempted to reappropriate certain symbols. I'm talking about the swastika. Now there's a world in which I could see him trying to justify repurposing or reclaiming the swastika in some artistic way. Right? Not to say that I would agree with it or that it's effective, but I could see a world in which his perspective is that he is reclaiming or repurposing something that was hateful. He tried to do this with the Confederate flag. If you guys remember in the Yeezus tour, he had a bunch of merchants that was. Had the Confederate flag. I think he even sold some version of the actual flag itself. To me, that's much different as. As a black American. Kanye, for me, has a right to reclaim a symbol attached to the hatred of his specific people. Whether you agree that's the right approach or that he was even doing that, that's obviously all debatable, especially in retrospect. But at the time when there was no hate speech attached to the flag and his repurposing of the flag or his artistic interest in the flag, it all seemed more symbolic and artful at that time. Again, in retrospect, maybe it's. It's different, but what he's doing now is obviously much different because it is directly attached to consistent years of anti Semitic remarks now. And I think one of the worst parts for me has been how hard he's been leaning into it with no remorse. And it's not just the anti Semitic stuff. It's also his consistent use of the f slur online, calling people directly the f slur. It's his blatant misogyny online, posting hardcore porn online, saying just the most horrible things about Beyonce and Jay Z's children that you can imagine. And it feels like he's just actively doubling down on being like he's choosing to be bad, like he has a choice and he's choosing evil at this moment. And I just don't understand. I just can't understand it. I don't understand what's happening there psychologically. Because part of the human experience is the fact that we all contain tendencies or intuition toward hate, towards. Towards evil. In some, I think it's stronger than others. And I think that has to do with our upbringing, maybe genetics, I'm not sure. But obviously upbringing, environmental conditioning has a lot to do with how those things manifest in us. But we all, as human beings have the potential to be evil. And part of the human experience of what it is to be human is that we can choose. That we can choose to fight the evil in us. And what I see from Kanye right now is someone choosing to be bad. I just don't understand what is fueling the choice? And I think that gets us into his mental health issues, his drug abuse. I'm not sure if he's still abusing nitrous, but he clearly was for a time. His sex addiction, that he has been very vocal and upfront about for over a decade now. And obviously I'm not a psychologist, but clearly Kanye west is not well. And I think that's where at least my mind always ends up going, is that we are witnessing someone who needs help, that is not getting help, is not helping himself. It seems like he's on a path to an early death. That is something that I've thought about Kanye west for a long time. The potential. If you study history, you study musicians, you study these powerful, larger than life figures, particularly the ones that are as extreme, that work in the extremes that Kanye does, that. That also clearly has some mental health stuff, they tend to die young, you know, and that's just kind of the reality with some of these figures. And they end up being these real tragedies. And I don't want to see that for him, you know? You know, as I've been thinking about recording this episode, one of the questions that comes up time and time again in my mind is like, is redemption possible for him? The idea of redemption to me, transcends his musical output. I'm not talking about redemption of the artist. I'm talking about redemption of the human being. And I've thought about that a lot, and I think where I landed is where I land with essentially every human being that is still alive. And the answer is yes. To me, I don't think any human is beyond redemption. Is it likely? I don't know. Doesn't seem like that that way in this moment. Time will tell there, but, you know, I am able to see the pain beneath his behavior, which is my same feeling about everyone that does or says horrible things that. That outwardly hates is beneath that is fear and pain. It's so clear to me. Again, this is. This is beyond Kanye. But I see it in Kanye. You get underneath all the. It's always pain and fear. It's always insecurity. Same with ego. Ego is just the flip side of the coin. On the other side is insecurity. And so when someone is so outwardly boastful, usually underneath that they're just really insecure or otherwise, why they. Why do they feel the need to say it? Right? And so that's what I see. I think that's where I always end up landing as much as in the moment I'm angry or disgusted. Again, this is all. This is kind of beyond yay. But that's usually what I see is just troubled human beings possessed by ideology that gives their underlying pain, hurt, resentment. It gives it a place to go. And as for any human being that's infected with that, that mindset that we all have the potential for, again, and that's usually where I try to universalize things and empathize with people, you know, is that we all have the same DNA, so to speak, and that life circumstances can bring that out of us. But I think at the same time, it could be expunged. It could be if. If it's treated. I think all that stuff dissolves, and I think that's what I hope for him. And I think what makes Kanye such a visceral, I guess, example of this, in terms of, like, our feelings about him, is that we've seen the human being behind all that before. That's. That's the mourning part of the conversation. To me, again, we're using mourning loosely here, but because, yeah, we've all experienced that human being. We all fell in love with that human being. Sure, he was eccentric, but again, that was part of the reason why we loved him, too. And do I think that human being is still there somewhere? I think I would say, yeah, I do. I want to believe that. I want to believe that for his children's sake. Me as a father, as something that's always top of mind when it comes to anyone that is a father. I am rooting for them to heal for the sake of their children. And maybe that's where I end the episode, because that's where I end up mentally and emotionally is usually I go through a cycle of. Of emotion, and I always end up right back here, which is hoping for redemption, trying to have empathy, trying to have compassion. Still disgusted, still disappointed, still saddened. But beneath it all, I still do see a man hurting. And I hope he gets.