On Kanye
(Nov. 23, 2010) I spent a surprising amount of my commute last week listening to the new Kanye. Surprising, as I’ve been familiar with the occasional song, but never really made a point of listening to him before. Shamefully far into the week, between Chicago and Grand, something clicked and I realized that somehow what I’d been listening to was actually the “clean” version of the album. Little blips of prophylactic silence saving the listener from the vulgar and profane. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s not the content. I have no objection to the words. It’s not about censorship qua censorship. But the album brought to mind a decade-old Joan Acocella New Yorker piece on Bob Fosse that I’d recently stumbled across. She characterizes the director-choreographer as a Freudian descendent: He was one of those people, often veterans of psychoanalysis, who feel that if they admit their sins they are somehow absolved of them. And why not? For—as this line of thinking goes—doesn’t everyone commit the same sins? He wasn’t so much a bad man as a truth-teller in a hypocritical world. On My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye’s self-presentation is fueled by a similar drive. The album visits a range of tones and topics, and its primary mode is loudly confessional. This is not a new place for Kanye. “Touch the Sky” on Late Registration features the lines “I’m trying to right my wrongs / But it’s funny these same wrongs helped me write this song.” [Yeah, I know, I didn’t get this together yesterday and New York cited that before I could.] But if it’s not new, this impulse is more pronounced and more central to the current album. In “Power” and “Monster,” he doesn’t hesitate to self-identify as an asshole and more, triumphantly wearing the various mantles that have been thrown at him. “All of the Lights” is a narrative of abusiveness and failed fatherhood, with a running refrain insisting that these shortcomings be made visible. The chorus of “Runaway” is a toast to all manner failure’s owners, Kanye eagerly lumping himself in with this set. And yet his only solution proposed is that we run away from his unchangeable nature. Sometimes these lyrics are expressly personal, other times they’re couched in a narrative setting, but in either case—him or “him”—this is the identity Kayne has chosen to thrust to the fore of the album. Kanye and Fosse, presenting their medleys of sins, appear to share the belief that shedding light on failings is sufficient to be justified in them. From “Runaway” he immediately moves on to a celebration of liaisons with another woman-object whom he’ll discard by the end of the track. With each confession Kayne’s swagger grows, confident that in owning his sins he finds his absolution. But, with Fosse as exemplar, this is fundamentally wrong. The honesty of casting Ann Reinking in All That Jazz as the girlfriend whom the Fosse-stand-in neglects and cheats on, doesn’t better Fosse’s neglect and cheating in their real-life relationship. Taking ownership of being a dick doesn’t in itself make Kanye into some kind of honorable dick. I don’t usually give much heed to the Church outside of Easter mass, but the sacrament of confession offers a good model for why the Kanye/Fosse approach to atonement is necessarily incomplete. Making confession involves not only the conversation with the priest, but the subsequent penance before sins can be absolved. Here, Kanye turns my iPod into his confessional box, but skips out on his Hail Marys. Yet, he continues on with the confidence of someone who has put himself in the right. What we’re left with is a surface appearance of resolution, masking an unfinished condition of the underlying state. It’s a well-produced and enjoyable album, but the disconnect within its presentation unsettles it, stops it from finding a center. The “clean” edit has the fortuitous effect of resolving this tension. It places an external impediment in the way of the confession Kanye is trying to make, those little blips of silence interrupting the litany of sins from completion. They inscribe little holes on the album’s face that allow its underlying incomplete nature to show through. Its surface appearance becomes the incomplete absolution.
