How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(23)
Unusually though, there are lots of downward-turned heads bobbing as familiar static came from a few headphones. Different tracks from Kanye’s twisted fantasy compete for space and time on that train.
Literally.
For the sleepy-eyed woman across from me, it’s “Runaway.” For the man two seats behind me, it sounds like “Gorgeous.” For a kid I know who got on at Beacon, it’s “Power.”
I get into a dollar cab at 125th and I’m shocked that the driver looks like he could be one of my students named Jacob or Seth. I’m even more shocked that JacobSeth is bumping “Blame Game.”
“This Kanye shit is unreal,” JacobSeth says.
“Yeah,” I tell him, more weirded out that JacobSeth is driving a dollar cab than the fact that JacobSeth just assumes I love Kanye West, too. “It is kinda crazy.”
By the time I get to the law school, Chris Rock is asking the voice formerly known as that of a real woman, “Who reupholstered your pussy?”
I get out of the cab, Yeezy’s reupholstered pussy behind me, wondering if this is really still Harlem and thankful that I’m from little ol’ Jackson, Mississippi. I make my way upstairs.
Kim’s class is beyond gratifying. We break. We listen. We build. We wonder. I bounce.
On the way out, Kim asks two of her students, one a Korean-American woman and one an Iranian-American man, to hail a taxi for me. It’s a loving, pragmatic gesture, she assures me, because cabs ain’t got no love for black men going uptown.
Once we’re out on 116th, Kim’s students decide they can be more effective if each goes to either side of the street. I think about “Blame Game,” “Runaway,” and “So Appalled,” and I ask the woman what side I should go to. I’m wondering if she thinks my talk was typical academic bullshit. I’m hoping the woman remembers the comment I made about packaged misogyny being more lucrative than rhyming about slanging dope if you’re a rapper, and nearly as lucrative as uncritically using guns, gunshots, and criminal tactics to sell movie tickets if you’re not.
The woman tells me to stay on her side of the street. I can’t tell if she’s giving me rhythm but I’m leaning toward maybe. I look across the street at the Iranian-American cat, then look down at her one more time.
“I should probably wait over there with him,” I tell her.
It feels so good to walk away from this woman, believing not only that she thinks I’m slightly dope, but that she also thinks I’m unlike all those other men when it comes to spitting game.
Across 116th, the Iranian-American cat and I wait. And the taxis pass. And we wait. And I wave and smile at the Korean-American woman. I act like it doesn’t all sting and feel so good at the same time.
Finally, I’m in a dollar cab headed back to 125th and ultimately back to Poughkeepsie, wondering how to explore with colorful profundity the absurd privilege and policing that exists around the delicate shadows of grown American black boys. It isn’t until the next day in front of a computer screen that I realize that intentionally and unintentionally, just maybe, Kanye has done that and so much more with his beautiful dark twisted fantasy.
Instead of standing up and saying all that to Les that night, I continue looking down on him, watching his chest heave in and out. I want to tell him that if he really listened to Kanye West, he would hear that Kanye wants maligned folks to get what they deserve.
Poor black folks from New Orleans deserved more, so Kanye said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Beyonce deserved more, so Kanye said, “Taylor, I’ma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the greatest videos of all time.”
Queer brothers deserved more, so Kanye said, “I been discriminating against gays…and I wanna come on TV and tell my rappers, just tell my friends, Yo, stop it, fam...”
Black kids in Chicago deserved more, so Kanye said, “Man, killing’s some wack shit.”
Listeners of American popular music deserved more than formulaic noise, so Kanye West offered us eight years of GOOD music. In those eight years, Kanye managed to collapse, carve, and distort disparate sounds rooted in the black musical traditions into newly shaped inescapable musical experiences. His work did more than challenge conventional composition. Whether it’s College Dropout, Late Registration, 808s and Heartbreak, or Watch the Throne, Kanye’s work literally dared us to revise our expectations of sound.
Precisely because Kanye is able to give us so much more than we actually deserve, I need to tell Les that Kanye West, that box-jawed American virtuoso who told the white man the truth, is eons better at his job than Les is at lying, and I am at writing, but when it comes to exploring women (you know, “females,” “cats,” “bitches,” “hoes,” “pussies,” “Kelly Rowlands,” “hood rats,” “good girls,” “sluts,” “light-skinned girls,” and now “Perfect Bitches”), Kanye West ain’t really using his voice or his art right.
This actually makes him just like almost every other virtuoso and mediocre American man I’ve ever read, watched, or heard.
Kanye West is better than those jokers, though.
He has proven himself good enough, brave enough, conceptually genius enough, compassionate enough, and now rich enough to use his voice to explore, with prickly honesty and dramatic irony, what black women deserve—as well as the ways he is encouraged to obsessively dismember, soulfully mutilate, and straight dis the fuck out of women in order to move units and feel like a manlier man.