Hip-Hop's Hamlet
The fascinating contradictions of Kanye West.
By Hua Hsu
Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 12:04 PM PT
While making good beats may net you some fancy jewelry, it rarely lands you
on the cover of Time. But Chicago rapper Kanye West's quick ascent has been
littered with such improbabilities. He's gone from the minor distinction of
being Jay-Z's favored producer to releasing two of the most inspired records
of the past decade, last year's College Dropout and the new follow-up, Late
Registration. As a lyricist, West has lingered masterfully in the gray area
of contradiction. He pokes fun at his (and everyone else's) materialism
while celebrating his riches. He writes brash club hits about Jesus. He acts
like a rap star and then rhymes about his insecurities. His appeal is
slightly mystifying: He's found a large and loyal audience despite a
comfortable background short on hip-hop's roughneck signifiers. What,
exactly, is propelling his success?
Besides his musical gifts, West skillfully exploits the vantage point
provided by his middle-class upbringing. Consider the wardrobe he chose for
the Time cover shoot: a turtleneck and sports coat. Always careful about
self-presentation, West uses his appearance as a reminder that he's anything
but a thug; he's a man of refinementa dandy, even. In 1957, the sociologist
E. Franklin Frazier published the seminal Black Bourgeoisie, a harsh but
enduring profile of this emerging community. His conclusion? The black
middle class inhabited a world of "make-believe," where "glitter and gaiety"
obscured the ennui of their lives. In their pursuit of material comfort,
they had cut their ties with the more authentic working-class experience of
most African-Americans. West doesn't exactly fit the profile of a black
bourgeoisiehis mother is an English professor; his dad a former Black
Pantherbut he, unlike some of the rappers he's made beats for, appeals to
the values of that world. The finely dressed, churchgoing West exudes an air
of clean-cut conformity. He corrects his own grammar during interviews and
details his by-the-bootstraps journey toward superstardom.
Most important, West seems safe. After all, one of last year's biggest hits
was West's "Jesus Walks," a gospel-tinged, feel-good uplift anthem that was,
at core, about a very middle-class subject: self-help. Jay-Z might possess
more street clout, and there are plenty of rappers with more interesting
flows or story lines. But West is the one who gets invited to mime alongside
movie stars for a live NBC hurricane telethon. As he proved last Friday
night, when he strayed off-script to blast the federal government's
slow-footed response to the swells of black suffering, West isn't as polite
as his image would suggest. "George Bush doesn't care about black people,"
he quivered, ending an impromptu ramble that teased the censors and shocked
the executives. Anybody familiar with the Kanye canon, though, shouldn't
have been surprised. Underneath it alland often at odds with his cool and
occasionally arrogant demeanorWest has always been a vulnerable and
eternally overwhelmed person fascinated by ugly questions.
Because of his background, West sidestepped hip-hop's ready-made,
rags-to-riches narratives. His debut, College Dropout, was distinguished by
the breadth of its critique. While hip-hop's default mode is to assume a
healthy disdain for the powers that be, it rarely turns that righteousness
against the self. A true narcissist, West spent every song either
broadcasting his own excellence or beating himself up for his shortcomings.
"Always said if I rapped I'd say somethin' significant," he shrugged on
"Breathe In Breathe Out," "but now I'm rappin' about money, hos and rims
again." These self-conflicts fascinated him. "Play MediaAll Falls Down"
encodes a Frazier-esque concern with patterns of consumption ("We shine
because they hate us/ Floss because they degrade us/ We tryin' to buy back
our forty acres") inside a gorgeous, radio-friendly twirl. Having been
seduced by hip-hop's twin functions as righteous, conscious uplift (the
wage-labor anthem "Spaceship") and anything-goes materialist apologia ("We
Don't Care" and its drug-dealing-as-protest subtext), West split the
difference. He made an album obsessed with contradictions.
His follow-up, Late Registration, works over the same thematic ground as his
debut, only with much less humility. In the overblown "Play MediaDiamonds
>From Sierra Leone," West scrutinizes the around-the-world consequences of
his own taste for diamonds. It's a classic West-ian marriage of material
hunger and moral confusion: "Over here it's the drug tradewe die from
drugs/ Over there they die from what we buy from drugs," he spits after
bullying a jeweler about conflict diamonds. As is West's wont, he can't
broker a way out of this conflict between the shiny and the righteous. It
may be "in a black person's soul to rock that gold," but it doesn't feel so
good after you see the pictures of the kids with no arms.
What makes these moral soliloquies all the more provoking is that Late
Registration is one of the best-sounding records of the year, thanks largely
to the help of the producer Jon Brion. Better-known for his quirky,
pop-baroque soundtracks (I Heart Huckabees, Punch-Drunk Love) and his
collaborations with Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple, Brion adds his melancholy
touch to the gracefully lilting "Play MediaHeard 'Em Say" and the spaced-out
orchestration of "Celebration." Beats are not enough, of course. Few rappers
or producers have West's ear for detail; even fewer could get away with
peddling his college-educated C.V. over and over. The festive "Play
MediaTouch the Sky" samples the ultimate striver's anthemCurtis Mayfield's
"Move On Up"as West once again recounts his past: packing a U-Haul and
setting forth for the big city, pinching pennies and splitting buffets, and
verging toward tears after mounting rejections. The precious "Bring Me Down"
and "Addiction" shade these story lines in a bit more, while the
hospital-room drama of "Roses" and "Hey Mama" purport to trade all his
success away for the comfort of family. Like College Dropout, Late
Registration is an amazingly intimate album, at once funny and sad and
self-obsessive.
Still, a slight change in West's attitude is detectable. First, West was the
middle-class beat-maker who made his name working with Jay-Z and the tough
guys; now, he's the one-in-a-million rap superstar telling everyone they can
do it, too, no matter where they start. "He got ambition baby, look in his
eyes/ This week he mopping floors, next week it's the fries," he raps on
"Play MediaGold Digger," describing an Everyman scrimping and saving his way
to the top. West's expansive empathy and pendulumlike swing between
arrogance and insecurity have made him into something more than a rapper.
He's become a pop star, in the fullest sense of that term: He's someone whom
people use as a guiding light, with whom they identify, and whose
experiences and ambitions seem universal.
With his could vs. should monologues, West has shown he can be all things to
all people, from the nouveau riche who shares his thirst for diamonds to the
janitor earnestly working his way up. He possesses a pathological need to
ask the impossible, important questions, even if he is the first to confess
that he hasn't a clue about the answers. This has worked for two albums, but
one wonders if the novelty will dissipateif his routine of rhetorical
posturing, eternal contradiction, campus humor, and middle-class self-doubt
will grow tiresome. At some point, he will either have to figure out a way
to answer his own questions, or just restart with some completely different
ones. For now, though, West's presence restores something that pop music has
lacked for far too long: a conscience.
Hua Hsu is a writer and student living in Cambridge, Mass.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2125296/
Tracey deMorsella, Managing Producer
Convergence Media, Inc.
Home of The Multicultural Advantage
Phone: 215-849-0946
E-mail: tdemorsella @multiculturaladvantage.com
http://www.multiculturaladvantage.com
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