By now, anyone reading this likely knows about the feud between Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa, which started with Khalifa questioning what was then the working title of West's still-not-officially-titled album, expected Thursday, and escalated to include jabs involving Amber Rose — Khalifa's former wife and West's ex-girlfiend — and her child with Khalifa. As he often has in the past, West apologized.
But the incident raised a question that has come up repeatedly: How is one of the most creative and productive artists in his field capable of such oafish behavior? Is the guy a jackass, as an unguarded President Obama once suggested — after West interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at 2009's VMAs to deliver one of several unsolicited critiques he has offered at awards shows? Or might a fox be a better metaphor, given the rapt attention West has reaped from professional and social media with such outbursts?
Or is neither really the case? As Dion Summers, vice president of urban programming at SiriusXM, notes, West "has had Twitter rants before, when he hasn't been putting music out, and they've been passionate."
For many industry observers, West is at least partly a product and a reflection of his era. "We're redefining what it means to be an authentic artist," Summers says. "In 2016, authenticity means being transparent, speaking from your heart, and Kanye does that with his lyrics, too." Fans "may laugh at the tweets" — among them another recent one declaring his new effort (winkingly, perhaps) "the best album of all time" — "but they listen to the music."
Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis has noticed this pattern among the students who take his course on pop culture and arts criticism at the University of Pennsylvania. "When I ask them to write about a song, someone always chooses Kanye, and there's always a sense of him being misunderstood. They respond to the provocations but don't take them seriously. They may roll their eyes, but they're entertained."
Certainly, any Jekyll-and-Hyde comparison between West the musician and West the public figure would be reductive. Braggadocio is also an element in his music; Daphne Brooks, professor of African-American studies at Yale University, was unsettled by the contrast between "this mastery of sonic forms and the retrograde gender politics" on West's acclaimed 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
And West's extracurricular dabblings in everything from social media to fashion stand him in a long line of pop and hip-hop stars who have proven both impetuous and aspirational outside the studio. DeCurtis, like Brooks, feels that race has been a factor in reactions to West's ambition and chutzpah. "I hear the code words when adults talk about him sometimes," DeCurtis says.
For DeCurtis's students, in contrast, "Kanye is almost like their generation's Donald Trump. He does everything that would destroy most artists' careers, but for some reason it only seems to help him."
Brooks thinks of a very different icon, one greatly admired by West: the late David Bowie. "Kanye is probably the closest thing we've had to Bowie in hip-hop, with his constant experimentation and his ability to turn transgression into these compelling large-scale narratives." She concedes that West's antics can frustrate her: "How about being drunk on the MTV Awards (last year) and saying, 'I'll run for president'? Undermines your credibility, dude."
West "leads with his feelings," Brooks notes, "in a way that, unfortunately, can get written off in our sound-bite culture.
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