Yeah, we all have our opinions on the disaster of Kanye’s recent, public turn toward Trump. But there are few of us who can really understand what might lead West to this point, and even fewer who could so brilliantly express it.
If you weren’t a fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates in the past, you might have to reconsider — at least acknowledge his ability to wind magically from the mundane, through the obscure, and gracefully lead to the profound.
If you haven’t read his Kanye West in the Age of Donald Trump in The Atlantic, do yourself a favor and take a moment to be carried away by Coates’ writing.
Here’s just a sample (or two):
...the gift of black music, of black art, is unlike any other in America, because it is not simply a matter of singular talent, or even of tradition, or lineage, but of something more grand and monstrous. When [Michael] Jackson sang and danced, when West samples or rhymes, they are tapping into a power formed under all the killing, all the beatings, all the rape and plunder that made America.
West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next
I hope you take the time to read and appreciate what Coates’ offers us in this brilliant article. He is clearly not forgiving what Kanye has done, far from it, but he condemns with compassion. And, IMO, that’s something we all need — especially today.