As long as Kanye is crazy, the rest of us are fine.
a theory of fame
It feels boring at this point, played out, but Kanye West has spent the past few days losing his mind on Twitter. He’s done this so many times, but the man is currently tweeting with the energy of somebody bouncing off the walls of a padded room.
Some of his tweets even managed to violate Twitter’s rules against “hateful conduct,” which you probably didn’t even know they had anymore. I certainly didn’t.
The tweets are vile, but also pretty typical of psychosis-era Kanye. Because it’s a cycle, isn’t it? A very public cycle. Our semi-annual humiliation. Kanye West does something bizarre — this time, he brought his wife to the Grammys and, while maintaining an aggressively sadistic pose, he had her strip naked on the red carpet — and then everybody condemns him for it and that sort of fuels Kanye. He needs more condemnation, so he logs onto Twitter and posts the most fucked-up sentiments he can conjure.
Kanye always seems to end these cycles a little sideways. He gets kicked out of a Sketchers store or brings a neo-Nazi to dinner with Trump. I don’t know where this one will end and obviously, I don’t care. But every time he has one of these public breakdowns, you wonder if he was born this way (batshit crazy) or if it was the fame that did it to him.
Because fame, I suspect, can do it to you. Fame is a hell of a drug, it can mess you up. Even temporary fame. Small, contained attention. Here’s what I’m talking about: last weekend we went to a concert and the opener was this reggae-rapper in his mid-to-late-thirties who never quite made it. I guess he recorded a song with Wiz Khalifa once but it was obvious that this guy was never going to make it big. And he began to have a mini breakdown on stage. At the beginning of the show, he was sipping a drink, by the end, he was shirtless and slugging vodka. He kept asking the crowd to put their phones in the air and only a handful of people acquiesced. The energy just wasn’t there for him like he wanted it; and you could feel him craving it, flailing at a larger ambition that he never realized (and will never realize).
I kept watching the raggae-rapper and thinking “you are seeing somebody in pain” and I looked at Katie and said, “it doesn’t end well for this guy.” Because so often, it doesn’t. And then the next band comes on, the headliner, and this guy is at the point of making it big. He’ll either blow up in the next few years or he won’t. But which is better?
Because if you make it big, if all your dreams come true, you can still disintegrate like Kanye West. Maybe it wasn’t the fame that did it to Kanye, maybe he was always like this, but somewhere along the line, his marbles fell out and you could hear them rattling around on the floor as he was praising Hitler on Alex Jones’ show. But then if you don’t make it, if you keep on keeping on, knocking on the door of your imagined success, you might end up like the reggae-rapper. Publicly flogging yourself in an attempt to go further.
It’s all about what happens to you under the microscope. And to be famous is to have a microscope on you at all times. But remember what we did to Britney? Remember how bad you felt when that documentary came out? You probably even felt a little bit guilty because we’re the other end of that microscope and we all, collectively, did it to Britney.
You and I on one end, the fame on the other, it’s a neat little moral-to-the-story. And here’s one more thing to ponder: Kanye West exists in opposition to Taylor Swift — who will be on your television on this holiest of days, Super Bowl Sunday — in her role as Ms. Americana. They’ve been linked since he stage-crashed her in 2009. But they now occupy far different spaces now. Why?