In 2005, shortly after the release of his album Late Registration, Kanye West participated in NBC Universal’s “A Concert for Hurricane Relief” to solicit donations for the purpose of assisting those affected by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. While comedian Mike Myers stuck to the script, West did not, and went rogue on live television:
Clip from NBC presentation segment of the
"Concert for Hurricane Relief", 2 September 2005. |
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The Huffington Post reported that various co-stars had approached the executive producer to say that West’s comments were significant as well as correct. They also added that rather than ruin the show's legacy, they would ensure that it had one.
The Huffington Post reported that various co-stars had approached the executive producer to say that West’s comments were significant as well as correct. They also added that rather than ruin the show's legacy, they would ensure that it had one.
This “interruption” in 2005 set the scene for similar instances to come, including Kanye West’s infamous impromptu appearance at the Video Music Awards in 2009. During Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech, West came onstage to say: “Yo Taylor, imma let you finish but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time” (West 2009). Among the other nominees (P!nk, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, and Lady GaGa), Beyoncé was the only female artist of colour nominated in the category.
Clip from the Music Video Award, Radio City Music Hall, 13 September 2009.
Just as his interruption was later deemed valuable by calling attention to Beyoncé as the deserved winner, West revealed meritocracy as being nothing more than a fantastic lie obscuring the oppressive racialized social realities of America. In both the NBC and the Video Music Awards cases, West refused to comply with the standards of the entertainment industry by rejecting the maintenance of a status quo, thereby challenging white America’s comfort, dominance, and the silencing of black Americans.
“I Hate The New Kanye/The Bad-Mood Kanye/The Always-Rude Kanye/Spaz-in-the-News Kanye”
West’s interjections on NBC and at the Video Music Awards are only two examples of numerous instances in his career of blunt and often aggressive disruptions of the status quo. Through his particular uncensored mode of behavioural and sonic address, West “interrupts” the flow of normative practices, and in doing so unveils a social system that is innately flawed, violently asymmetrical, and racially exploitative. Through what I refer to as an “aesthetics of failure,” I examine the ways in which West’s interruptions disrupt the American social reality of the new millennium. I draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s work in Crusing Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity to frame West as a utopian artist, not because he dreams of a better America in which black Americans are equal, but because his interruptions cast alternate realities. “The critical work that utopian thought does in its most concise and lucid formulation,” Muñoz writes, is that it “allows us to see different worlds and realities. And this conjured reality instructs us that the ‘here and now’ is simply not enough.” (Muñoz 2009, 171). By re-staging the past and present, West allows us to imagine new temporalities—ones that interrupt white America’s dominant cultural narrative while revealing the blueprint for alternate realities of black utopias.
The aesthetics of failure, and how to interrupt the sonic status-quo
West’s aesthetics of failure (his interruptions of sonic and behavioural expectations) are rejections of the dominant order and its corresponding systematic racial violence. His critique of white America is linked to utopian desire, and thus his aesthetics of failure become the contributing conditions for the possibility for political transformation. As Muñoz writes, “Utopia’s rejection of pragmatism is often associated with failure […] utopianism represents a failure to be normal” (172). Importantly, West’s aesthetics of failure is present both in his public persona (the literal and figurative interruptions in public arenas that openly reject America’s white privilege) as well in his music production. West employs a “rejection of pragmatism” through his anti-genre sonic experimentation (a refusal to maintain the status quo within hip-hop) and his use of sampling (constructing new temporalities and narratives that challenge racialized notions of authorship and re-appropriation).
West’s sonic expression can be understood as an aesthetics of failure primarily through his rejection of generic boundaries and his refusal to adhere to the norms of American hip-hop. The first example of this generic “failure” is his use of auto-tune, most evidently employed in his album 808s and Heartbreak. Regina Bradley notes that this album was “more personal and introspective than previous releases […] 808s and Heartbreak is West’s sonic experimentation with emotions deemed unavailable to black men, especially black men in hip-hop” (Bradley 2014, 106). Prior to the album’s release, West incorporated introspection and self-awareness of his “failure” to adhere to the hip-hop status quo. For example, in the lyrics of “Everything I Am,” he raps:
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People talkin’ so much shit about me at barbershops |
This stanza presents a self-aware and self-criticizing perspective on his own failure—a failure of fitting in within the pre-established mould of hip-hop culture (i.e. the normative, hypermasculine black identity). Significantly, these lyrics are rapped over a slow R&B style beat over which, at the beginning of the track, West raps, “Common passed on this beat / I made it to a jam,” pointing out yet another level of failure and rejection within the hip-hop industry. Bradley also maintains that West’s “arena sound,” which she writes has “the ability to attract and move a large crowd,” was essential to West’s integration arena sound and presence.
After a conversation with lead U2 singer Bono, West began to favour “an aesthetics of simplicity that can easily transfer to massive European stadiums” (Bradley 2014, 104). This situated West within a larger European rock narrative and set the foundation for his success as a popular artist. West’s “simplification of hip-hop,” as Bradley suggests, and his rejection of the status quo in hip-hop is exemplified by a sonic technique that West began using in his later albums: the use of heavily distorted and overdriven vocals, which make West’s vocals sound like an electric guitar. He uses this technique in several songs, including “Runaway” and “Gorgeous,” creating a hybrid between hip-hop, pop, and rock music.
After a conversation with lead U2 singer Bono, West began to favour “an aesthetics of simplicity that can easily transfer to massive European stadiums” (Bradley 2014, 104). This situated West within a larger European rock narrative and set the foundation for his success as a popular artist. West’s “simplification of hip-hop,” as Bradley suggests, and his rejection of the status quo in hip-hop is exemplified by a sonic technique that West began using in his later albums: the use of heavily distorted and overdriven vocals, which make West’s vocals sound like an electric guitar. He uses this technique in several songs, including “Runaway” and “Gorgeous,” creating a hybrid between hip-hop, pop, and rock music.
Sampling to re-write History
West also uses sampling in order to disrupt white America’s temporality by re-contextualizing forgotten or disregarded work, thus narrativizing an erased and neglected black American history. There are many examples of this in his oeuvre, notably in the songs “Mercy”(which contains samples from “Dust a Sound Boy”, “Tony’s Theme”, “Cu Oonuh”, “Lambo”, “Dance (A$$)”), “Bound 2,” “Famous,” (which contains “Bam Bam” by Sister Nancy among others), and “Power.” A website, that reveals the “DNA” in music estimates that over 626 works that have been sampled in his various songs (WhoSampled).
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A pertinent example is “Blood On The Leaves” (released in 2013), which samples “Strange Fruit,” a song most famously performed and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, originally written by Abel Meeropol as a poem that protested the lynching of black Americans. West samples the vocals from Nina Simone's "Strange Fruit" in his track - rapping lyrics that seemingly do not relate to the sample’s content at all (he raps about Instagram and cocaine). Here, the aesthetics of failure exists in the tension between West’s lyrical content and the cultural implications of the sample. The dissonance actually forces the listener to contemplate progress. While the sample overtly speaks to the violence of lynching, it exists in the background of West’s lyrics about fame, women, and capitalist power.
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Here another version of "Strange Fruit" as performed by Jill Scott for the Shining A Light: A Concert for Progress on Race in America. Recorded at The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, CA on Wednesday, November 18, 2015.
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This re-construction, or “musical collage,” frames the sample as the looming systematic racism that continues to persist in American society despite white narratives of racial equality. The dissonance between the lyrical content and the cultural implications of the sample points to the persistence of oppression despite an acquisition of capitalist “success” and thus rejects the dominant white American narrative according to which the fight against racism is “over.” As Kanye raps in “Never Let Me Down” (on his album Graduation), “Racism’s still alive, they just be concealin’ it.”
In fact, West directly speaks to this effort of re-writing the white narrative in “Gorgeous” (which samples “You Showed Me,” from 1969, by Enoch Light and the Glittering Guitars) when he raps:
I was looking at my resume |
Here he quite literally speaks to the inequality of the black American narrative of success in America. West’s sampling is a means through which he “re-writes history,” reclaiming power in the form of black authorship and superimposing past and present, thus breaking open positivist understandings of time and history.
West’s utopian blueprint
“Utopia [...] is always destined to fail. Despite this seeming negativity, a generative politics can be potentially distilled from the aesthetics of […] failure. Within failure we can locate a kernel of potentiality. I align [the aesthetics of failure] with a certain mode of virtuosity that helps the spectator exit from the stale and static life world dominated by […] exploitation.” (Muñoz 2009, 172) |
What is the utopian potential of West’s aesthetics of failure? As Muñoz suggests, the aesthetics of failure and utopia are linked insofar as they are about doing something else. Through his various sonic and behavioural “failures,” Kanye West reveals white America’s narrative and social reality as being flawed, in addition to being constructed and controlled by white America. West’s refusals of society’s ideals and conceptions of value reject the here and now. Instead, West’s anti-normativity points to a then and there, encapsulated in the last lyric of “Power” when he raps/says/sings: “You got the power to let power go?”
Kanye West and the Trump Administration
Clearly, West has long been a paradoxical figure. He rejects the hyper-masculinity and gun violence associated with hip hop culture, yet he explicitly objectifies women in his music. He endorses a gluttonous life imbedded in capitalist delights, while also critiquing its cultural and socioeconomic effects on Black America. Surely, the most significant recent contradiction in the West ‘brand’ is his recent public support of the Trump Administration. West’s public statements on Twitter supporting President Trump, and his meeting at the Oval Office to “discuss” American manufacturing and prison reform severely complicate his earlier anti-racist music and public statements.
Rather than attempting to make sense of this contradiction in the context of West as an advocate of anti-racist politics, I suppose that this unsettling sponsorship must also be understood in terms of West’s aesthetics of failure. As reported by CNN, the meeting’s preview sent by the White House indicated that the discussion would be centred on:
President Trump's historic work to benefit all Americans such as urban revitalization, the creation of Opportunity Zones, new workforce training programs, record highs in African-American employment, the creation of manufacturing jobs, ideas from his meeting with African-American pastors, potential future clemencies, and addressing the massive violent crime surge in Chicago (Henderson 2018) |
As the CNN quipped: “Shorter readout: This was Trump's black people meeting.”
Many understood West’s engagement with Trump as a textbook example of tokenization. The CNN reports that this was Trump’s chance to show that he cared about Black people (unlike Bush), exploiting Kanye’s endorsement as proof. This reading assumes that Trump holds the power in the situation, and West is the figure that is powerless and ignorant to this exploitation. However, I credit West with more intentionality and self-awareness than this reading credits him with. This “summit” and endorsement is consistent with West’s pattern of doing the inappropriate and the untimely. Given West’s history of anti-racist politics, why would West openly support a president that is supported by white supremacists?
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When we look at West’s history of behaviours that are out-of-sync with what was expected (i.e. the Taylor Swift speech example), I suggest that we examine what his actions/words are interrupting, rather than the latent content of the interruption itself. Taking his Taylor Swift interjection as an example, the impact of this interruption was less related to his call to recognize Beyoncé’s superiority than as active resistance to the whiteness of the awards. His interruptions are more than his own failure of public comportment; they also reveal institutionalized failures.
At the summit, West took the space to ask of Trump to, “make the dopest… no, the ‘flyest’ cars,” and discussed the idea of an “iPlane” (Henderson 2018). Clearly, West interrupted “politics” with nonsensical statements, revealing that not much is truly interrupted by his nonsense. In other words, a politics that allows for nonsensical interruptions is a nonsensical political ecology in itself. |
"Kanye West" © ST-GERMAIN FABRIQUE, 2019
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I wish that I could neatly resolve my thoughts regarding these recent events, but I cannot. Each morning, North American society rises with new ludicrous social media statements, agendas, or legislation from the Trump Administration boomeranging around the news. Trump has made an aesthetics of failure the norm of society. So perhaps in these dystopian times we should strive for an aesthetics of success.
Whatever that is requires a separate paper altogether.
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N.L.
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Sources
BRADLEY, Regina. 2014. “Kanye West's Sonic Cosmopolitanism.” In The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, edited by Julius Bailey, pp. 97–107. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
HENDERSON, Nia-Malika. 2018. “Why the Kanye West-Jim Brown Lunch with Trump Was a Disaster.” CNN, Cable News Network. 12 October 2018.
KREBS, Nicholas. 2014. “Confidently (Non)cognizant of Neoliberalism: Kanye West and the Interruption of Taylor Swift.” In The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, edited by Julius Bailey, pp. 195–208. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
MUÑOZ, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press.
STRACHAN, Maxwell. 2015. “The Definitive History Of ‘George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People.’” HuffPost Canada. 9 September 2015.
TERRY, Josh. 2015. “10 Years Ago Today, Kanye West Said, 'George Bush Doesn't Care about Black People'.” Chicago Tribune. 2 September 2015.
WEST, Kanye. 2009. “Kanye West Ruins Taylor Swift's VMA Moment 2009.” YouTube. 15
September 2009.
WHO SAMPLED. “Kanye West - Samples, Covers and Remixes.” WhoSampled. Exploring the DNA of Music.
BRADLEY, Regina. 2014. “Kanye West's Sonic Cosmopolitanism.” In The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, edited by Julius Bailey, pp. 97–107. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
HENDERSON, Nia-Malika. 2018. “Why the Kanye West-Jim Brown Lunch with Trump Was a Disaster.” CNN, Cable News Network. 12 October 2018.
KREBS, Nicholas. 2014. “Confidently (Non)cognizant of Neoliberalism: Kanye West and the Interruption of Taylor Swift.” In The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, edited by Julius Bailey, pp. 195–208. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
MUÑOZ, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press.
STRACHAN, Maxwell. 2015. “The Definitive History Of ‘George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People.’” HuffPost Canada. 9 September 2015.
TERRY, Josh. 2015. “10 Years Ago Today, Kanye West Said, 'George Bush Doesn't Care about Black People'.” Chicago Tribune. 2 September 2015.
WEST, Kanye. 2009. “Kanye West Ruins Taylor Swift's VMA Moment 2009.” YouTube. 15
September 2009.
WHO SAMPLED. “Kanye West - Samples, Covers and Remixes.” WhoSampled. Exploring the DNA of Music.