Hand Up Wednesday: Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West)

I have been debating whether or not to post this, because I really don't want to give Ye more attention than he is already receiving, but I think it is important for me to use this as a reflection. As I said last week "Hand Up Wednesday" is recognizing where I have been wrong, and I think I spent way too much time defending Kanye in the past, and I want to accept the fact that he is no longer defensible. 

For most of my life I considered myself a fan of Kanye West. In fact for a while I would consider myself almost a "stan" of his. I still think My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Fantasy is one of the greatest albums of all time, and I think Kanye's discography from College Dropout to The Life of Pablo is arguably the greatest seven album stretch for any music artist ever. But it has reached a point where he has become indefensible, and I am no longer a fan. 

I know there are many people out there who are frustrated because they jumped off the Kanye train years ago. In all fairness I have disavowed many of his actions since 2017 when he started saying "slavery was a choice" and was pulling some other wild and problematic antics. But I also understood Kanye's desire to be controversial...while I didn't agree with him, and I thought his behavior was downright problematic, I thought it was all part of his artistic process and eventually he would "snap out of it" and apologize in his own way. 

He did this before, with the Taylor Swift incident at the Grammys. Kanye did some wildly controversial shit, albeit way less problematic than his 2018 statements, but still controversial for the time. He turned the public against him, and then essentially apologized with MBDTF with the culminating apology track Runaway. 

I'm not suggesting Kanye could have made an album to make up for his 2018 comments, but it felt like it was all part of his artistic plan, and somehow we would see his vulnerabilities, like we did with Runaway, and it would at least present the opportunity for empathy...but that never came. His music has all fallen off the deep end and there has been an inverse relationship between his talent (or recently lack-thereof) and his controversy (growing by the day.) 

Hand up...I was wrong about Kanye. He is not "working through the artistic process." He is not "a sick person who needs help." He is a problem that needs to be stopped. I feel bad for all the communities, and people, he has victimized through his behavior, and I even feel bad that I am giving him any attention by writing this blog. 

Kanye made a lot of music that helped me get through some really tough times in my life. There have been very few artists that I related to so closely as I did with Kanye from about 2007-2014, so it has been really hard for me to separate the art from the artist. It's been hard for me to look up to someone artistically for so long, and officially have to separate from him. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Dave Chappelle's bit about Bill Cosby and if you haven't had a chance to hear that joke before I strongly recommend checking out Dave Chappelle's 2017 stand up special on Netflix.