(Even-Handedly Smarty-Thinky Stuff about) KANYE’S NIGHTMARE

 

To be frank: how many “average” Jews could the West Formerly Known as Kanye actually know?

The Jews that Kanye generally knows have a contractual relationship with him, or they know him via Jews who do, and the power dynamic, in most of these relationships, confound Kanye in a way that has confounded many Pop/ Rock/ R&B Stars before him.  Prince complained about these things and so did Michael Jackson. Talented musicians are rarely gifted negotiators. As I’ve said elsewhere: if you can’t read Postmodern Literature, you can’t read a contract. To be under contract is not the same proposition, necessarily, as merely having a contract. “Under contract” implies a power dynamic that flows decidedly down from the designer of the contract to the person naive enough to have signed it. There usually comes a point when a musician who has become world famous,  after (or because of) signing such a contract,  grapples with the vexing disconnect of being the World Famous X who is also little more than the hireling of Conglomerate Y. I’m sure it’s a jarring moment. I’ll never know. I don’t go around signing show biz contracts (though I did once: close call!).

The problem with Popular Culture being that it is not structured (by design) to react to spectacles with deep analytical zeal. Popular Culture does not hunker down on the premises of a fresh spectacle and patiently investigate that spectacle’s details and emanations. It doesn’t do the spectacle with an archaeologist’s brushes and forensic analysis and  months of digging. Popular Culture is a very large but monocellular blob that feeds on bright lights and loud noises and it hurries from one such event to the next, stupidly hungry for flash bulbs, spotlights, invective and ruckus. If Popular Culture were a more evolved blob it might be able to separate bullshit from justice. It might be capable of holding on to the component of Kanye’s wounded out-lashings which actually make sense… long enough to digest and metabolize them. Long enough to understand. Long enough to bring the thing to some sort of interesting moment of Enlightenment for all involved, including the audience.

Ha.

Kanye is the Talent but all these people (regarding whom his rants bristle) seem to have some degree of power over him. The mechanism driving Kanye to lash out is not mysterious. The increasingly bizarre (or merely OTT) nature of these lashings-out strikes me as being less about “mental illness” than understandable anger multiplied by bad information. The questions become  (A) why is Kanye angry and (B) where is he getting his information? Neither question is unsolvable nor restricted to the halls of the sinister study of aberrant psychology.

Why is Kanye angry (beyond the matter of his stunningly misbegotten relationship with a Kardashian and serial decisions to mint celebrity children with same)? Well, not least because: Kanye had begun to think of himself as a “billionaire”  (the very symbol of highest achievement , in Popular Culture, especially for the lower-middle reaches of that culture) for so long that it shocked and offended him that he wasn’t accorded the respect, by his contract-designers, he presumed a billionaire deserved. So he spoke out and then he lashed out and then his “billionaire” status was summarily revoked- It turned out he had only ever been a “billionaire” on paper (and in headlines). Causing him to lash out harder and with increasingly iffy rhetorical barbs.

So there’s that. I mean, if you had been in the habit of assuming that you were “at the top of the social pyramid” as a  “billionaire” and had that rug snatched, in public, overnight, and Twitter existed, and people stuck mics in your face, after your de-rugging,  what would you say? Whatever you said might very well feature pejorative ethnic descriptions of the people you felt had robbed you of status. You can’t assuredly say what you would say; how you would react;  in such circumstances, though, can you? That would be like making big claims about how cool you’d behave in a nuclear explosion.

You can’t know. Only certain people know the answers to such questions appended to such a thought experiment about living through a nuclear explosion and some of them actually still walk among us, such survivors,  but you rarely ask them for input, right?  You don’t super care. Firsthand experience is nothing compared to your internally-nurtured hypotheticals of wondrous self-description. Fine…  but that doesn’t change your status as someone who couldn’t possibly know how it actually feels , or how actually feeling that way would make you behave. How does TWFKAK  feel? My guess: somewhere on a spectrum between “shitty” and “unhinged”.

TWFKAK actually has some firsthand experience,  to relate,  which is nearly unfathomable to the majority of Earth’s inhabitants. He is angry. He is saying mean stuff. He is getting precisely zero gulags built. 

So cut Kanye some slack on his rantings and assume that he’s being fed misinformation by The Internet. This information is being loaded into his angry quiver of what-he-thinks-as-being mic drops. Old hands at similar flame wars (fought on far less world-stagey battlefields) know they aren’t. TWFKAK sounds to me like a N00B to the parapolitical debate game. One doesn’t lead the charge with luridly unverifiable bullshit, whether or not one suspects an iota of Truth is nestled therein. A certain amount of circumspection is required.

Like too many musicians (especially famous ones), Kanye was not lavished with the heavy, tool-making machinery of a world class education before he became a household word. This hampers his ability to build information-vetting systems for the “data” he comes by via The Internet (or via some shadowy confidante who is an habitué of the Internet’s most lurid 8-bit precincts). For example: Are “Blacks the real Jews”? Well, which “Blacks”? Which “Jews”? The claim is too broad/ fuzzy to even be controversial. It’s clearly, I think,  a red herring. It’s a little too déclassé, this theory, for my particular taste. I find it embarrassing at best, like those “celebrity clones” theories people were circulating c. 2017  (and which were actually “celebrity clone and rapid-maturation tech” theories but most people who circulated them weren’t bright enough to… etc).

This embarrassing  “Blacks are The Real Jews” theory may… please hear me out… in fact,  be deliberately seeded to make newly-energized parapolitical researchers (of Color) look stupid when they adopt and spout it (like “Flat Earth” and “Mandela Effect” makes many Whites look perfectly batshit, despite how correct they are about The Vote(s) being rigged). Kanye is still worth a few hundred million (I assume) but although he can afford to track down and purchase rare books and pore over them by candle light, he is, like most citizens of Now, self-imposedly Time Poor. He doesn’t have the voluntary time or temperament to read widely and deeply for a couple of years. It’s easier to access the 8-bit precincts where Dumbfuck Arcana is hawked in easy bites beside Free Energy Devices and Vitamin Supplements and vintage ’50s racism / misogyny. He has fallen for that trap or he is being fed gobbledygook by a confrere who has and, to be fair, the gobbledygook is not much worse than things lots of “Normies” are walking around believing and even saying casually in public… in crowds of two or three.  Ie: who cares?

If you’re nobody, nobody cares.

Also, and very importantly: Jews and Blacks suffer from the same socio-philosophical problem:  you can’t co-sign the positive stereotypical generalizations (Blacks have Soul and Big Dicks / Jews have High IQs) while refuting the negative generalizations as “generalizations”. It’s one or the other, High Profile Minorities! You can’t have it both ways. Give up the presumption of Big Dicks or High IQs and we can begin to dismantle the “hardwired Black criminality” or “parasitic world-dominating Jew cabal” memes. It’s a necessary compromise without which no progress is possible. Accept it: you’re all, on average… average.

I was a word-mad, bookish, scientifically-literate Black kid who grew up in the 1970s. Many of my pals (at my all-boy, college prep High School) were Jewish. The woman to whom I lost my “cherry” was half-Jewish and she teaches at Georgetown today. All of these chums were just ordinary Jewish kids who were bookish and under pressure to go to law school or study medicine and otherwise distinguish themselves … for socio-psychological reasons too complex to go into here. They were all bright (that’s why we were chums and attending that school), bright enough to apply themselves to their mandated respective career-arcs (while I was bright enough to diverge and prosper anyway)  but not a one was a genius or even what I would call brilliant.  Diligent and stressed: sure. I didn’t consider them to be especially gifted. They were average kids.  They were my pals. They were/ are certainly not members of cabals. My slender deflowerer’s parents were just about the loveliest people I ever met and I miss them all these years later. I wished I’d been mature enough to tell them I loved them. 

Having said that: I believe it’s patently obvious that the people to whom The West Formerly Known as Kanye once naively (ignorantly) signed over so much of his “power” (such as it was) are probably Control Freaks who will tolerate ZERO back-talk.  But, listen: Kanye deliberately sought out and signed unbalanced contracts with blatant cabal-members… if they hadn’t been cabal-members, what would have been the advantage of signing with them?… and now he  (A) regrets this and (B) average people who wouldn’t know a cabal if it signed them to a John Fogerty contract snicker and eye-roll and think he’s making it all up and (C) he’s lashing out with futile barbs of erratically-varying accuracy.

Too bad the IQs on every side of this fleetingly sensational kerfuffle aren’t quite up to making sense of it, eh?  America really isn’t in the business of high IQs, it’s in the business of power and money. Know this well before you get yourself under contract, kids!

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*Belated Disclaimer: I can’t take Kanye’s name change any more seriously than I take your self-proclaimed pronouns.  Because I identify as someone living in the 1990s.

SPECIAL CLAUSE IN YOUR READERLY CONTRACT WITH ME: Even if TWFKAK has a psychotic break sometime soon, or becomes “The Late…”,  my points will not necessarily have been rendered invalid. 

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