I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined)

  At the time of this writing, LBJ has played eleven seasons in the NBA. He has been named MVP four times; by the time this is published, he might have a fifth (unless the media decides hyper-efficient stickman Kevin Durant has sufficiently paid his dues). Yet those four (or five) MVP trophies still underestimate his merit. Even in the years when others won the award, James was unilaterally viewed as the player most coveted by rival general managers. For one game or one series or one season, no objective GM would ever trade James for Durant. It does not matter who gets the votes or what criteria is used — with a gun placed to the head, everyone knows who the best player really is. Over that same expanse of time, Kanye West released seven studio albums (assuming you count the collaborative Watch the Throne). The consensus is that two of these albums are classics, one is very good, two are pretty good, and two are boring. But those engaged with pop still talk about all seven of those projects, constantly and equally. As with Philip Roth, West’s latest work is obsessively compared with whatever he produced in the past; instead of seven separate albums, it’s more like he’s making one superlong album that will only be complete when he dies. Other modern musicians have made better records, but Kanye makes the unavoidable ones. He makes the records that require conversation. So within this new musical economy — within this attention-based economy, where music has almost no tangible value beyond the degree to which people discuss it — West makes the records that are worth the most. He is the MVP every season, even when he doesn’t get the votes.

  Now: Is this “news”?

  This is not news.

  This is, in most respects, the consensus opinion (not the only opinion, but the median view among the parties most engaged). “LeBron is unstoppable.” “Kayne is talented.” These points are not eligible for debate; even Armond White would consider them self-evident. But I still needed to define them in order to address the question I care about more: Why do I root for the man I like less, and why do I desire malfunction from the man I like more? It seems like such a stupid thing to want, in both directions. It seems like a synthesis of self-deception and self-loathing. But that’s not what it is. What it is, I think, is a strangely hopeful contradiction. The reason I don’t like LeBron James is because he represents the irrefutability of physical dominance. He has no corporeal weakness. Cheering for LeBron is like cheering for gravity. But I still (silently) root for him to dominate, because that is his function. That is his social merit and his historical impact. The banality of his dominance is precisely what makes him interesting (and that fascination will end the moment he seems mortal). My relationship with him will cease the moment he becomes average. ­Conversely, I’ll always follow Kanye West, regardless of what happens to his skill set. He is an intrinsically strange character, regardless of what he’s doing or the relative quality of his work. This is why I would like to see him fail at something: I believe a cataclysmic Kanye West collapse might be the most dramatic thing he’d ever create. It would be the musical event of the decade, and it wouldn’t make him any less vital.

  I want him to fail because I like him. Not in spite of the fact. Because.

  People accuse Kanye of taking himself too seriously. I think he takes himself about as seriously as necessary. Sometimes he’s flat-out wrong about how the world works, and I don’t think he has an accurate sense of self. He overestimates the depth of his creativity. But that’s not the same as overestimating himself.

  Here’s Kanye tweeting from an airplane: “I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me, like ‘Oh great, now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle.’” Obviously, he’s joking, much in the same way Mitch Hedberg used to joke (and the joke is funnier if read in Hedberg’s voice). But jokes without punch lines always mean something else. Even the most boring details of West’s existence are allegories: The flight represents his life. The water bottle represents the rewards of fame that feel both predictable and unanticipated. Kanye is now personally responsible for what his life generates automatically. This confuses him, even though he’d understand completely if it happened to anyone else. And he wants to complain about that dissonance, but he knows he can’t. So instead, he complains about free water. This, much like his relationship with Kim Kardashian, is a level of art.

  Here’s Kanye being interviewed on a San Francisco radio program, explaining his decision to have a bearded man dressed like Jesus Christ wander onstage throughout the Yeezus tour: “What’s awesome about Christianity is that we’re allowed to portray God. We’re allowed to draw an image of him, we’re allowed to make movies about him. Other religions aren’t allowed to do that. So that’s one of the awesome things about Christianity.” He concludes this thought by comparing himself to Michelangelo, a comparison we’re supposed to mock. But is this not an unusually profound statement to forward on a secular radio show that isn’t particularly interested in what the answer means? He’s arguing that the strength of Christianity is its willingness to allow every follower to interpret — and create — his or her own personal image of Christ. He’s arguing that not only is it not sacrilegious to place an actor portraying Jesus in the middle of a hip-hop show, but that it’s antispiritual to question the decision (since the actor is a manifestation of West’s own personal relationship with God, which is the psychological center of his own spirituality). He’s arguing that even Jesus can be reinvented.

  Here’s Kanye talking about literature: “Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud nonreader of books.” Where to begin? For one thing, he said this while promoting the release of his own (fifty-two-page) book. For another, Kanye is a rapper; he traffics in words. He’s also a narcissist; he traffics in self-absorption. He longs for elite intellectual acceptance while bragging about an unwillingness to read. It’s a bad strategy. But one must note that he’s not talking about a lack of interest in writers. He is talking about his lack of interest in books. He would never want a book’s autograph. So would he want a song’s autograph? What would that even mean? Does he see such a division between who a person is and what they create that he does not even believe they are partially connected? Wouldn’t that erase his entire career? Is he saying this just so I will ponder these specific questions in a book he won’t read on principle?

  Here’s Kanye, near tears, on television, standing next to Mike Myers, trying to raise money for victims of a hurricane: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” This statement is objectively unfair. It’s possibly — probably — untrue. It is preceded by an equally bizarre statement (also by West) suggesting the U.S. military had recently been granted clearance to shoot random citizens in the streets of New Orleans. It’s too much and not enough, all at the same time. Yet when we aggregate the celebrity reaction to Hurricane Katrina, this is the main thing we remember; for a lot of people, it’s the only celebrity response they remember at all. If Billy Joel wrote a sequel to “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” he would quote this statement in the lyrics. Despite its intellectual shortcomings, it emotionally explains everything (which translates as being historically right).

  The nucleus cannot be banal, even when banality is in the intention. The nucleus wins again.

  LeBron is not the nucleus. LeBron is a proton and an electron. He is positive and he is negative, which keeps him stable. [This, I will concede, is not a flawless metaphor. I’m not Marie Curie. But it’s tough to flippantly describe LeBron’s life: Things never work for him the way they should, even though they always work out for him in the end.]

  Return, for a moment, to the year 2002. James appears on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a junior in high school. He is declared “The Chosen One,” although it remains unclear who did the choosing (due to a tattoo, many believe it was LeBron himself, although my guess is the editors of Sports Illustrated). The subtext of the article indicates that LBJ’s potential is so immense that, in order to fulfill his b
aseline expectations, he must become the ­finest player of his generation. That is the minimum requirement for his career to be viewed as a non-bust, and it’s decided when he is seventeen, before he is old enough to purchase cigarettes.

  But it happens.

  He actually becomes the player he is supposed to become. He is not like his friend Maurice Clarett, the northeast Ohio peer who views himself as the gridiron equivalent of LeBron before ending up in federal prison. He is also not like Todd Marinovich or Freddy Adu or Felipe Lopez or any other modern American athlete shackled with this gradation of anticipation (discounting golfers with sex addictions). He was consciously set up to fail, and he did not do so. And it seems like that should be the whole story. When people discuss LeBron, this is what they should discuss: his unparalleled capacity at fulfilling unrealistic goals. But (of course) they do not. You can’t be impressed that someone merely completed whatever they were allegedly promising to do. As such, LeBron’s life must be mined for deeper meanings, in the hope these new meanings will engender alternative narratives. And it works about half the time.

  As a young pro with the Cavaliers, LeBron didn’t (or couldn’t) post anyone up. Did this mean he was immature, or perhaps selfish? Maybe. Later in his career, he became merciless in the post, more competent and more nuanced than 98 percent of the league. Did this mean he was now accepting professional responsibilities he had previously avoided? Maybe. Everything can always mean something else. In 2008, LeBron posed for the cover of Vogue with Gisele Bündchen, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. The image paid homage to King Kong, thus placing LeBron in the position of an ape. Pundits wanted to be outraged about this photo, but no one knew precisely who to be upset with. Did it somehow indicate that LeBron doesn’t care about race? [No. But pundits pose this type of misleading rhetorical on purpose. “In order to mesmerize the public,” wrote Morrissey is his Autobiography, “you must accuse someone of being the opposite of what you have believed them to be.”] That same year, LeBron donated $20,000 to a committee hoping to elect Barack Obama. Suddenly, LBJ is political! Of course, LeBron’s income in 2008 was $28.4 million. This means he was earning around $13,600 an hour; his $20,000 pledge was like an elementary school teacher giving Obama $22.50. In May of 2010, he and the Cavs collapsed in a critical playoff series against the Celtics; rumors insisted this was because a teammate had slept with LeBron’s mother. When James gleefully abandoned Cleveland for Miami that summer, he instantly became the most hated athlete in America. A book titled The Whore of Akron was published, violently undermining his character; its author expressed a desire for James to suffer a career-­ending injury as retribution for his decision to leave Cleveland. The book’s author, a Cleveland native, was living in New Jersey when the book was released. No one found this especially strange.

  Different rules apply to different people.

  [If you’re speaking in public and your remarks (for whatever reason) start to disintegrate, the one thing you’re never supposed to do is tell the audience that you realize this is happening. You’re not supposed to draw attention to the speech’s collapse, since it’s possible the audience has no idea anything is remotely wrong. But I always do this. If I’m speaking in public — and if the speech starts to unspool or hemorrhage — I inevitably stop the address and tell the audience that I’m fucking everything up. You’re never supposed to do this, but I do it anyway. And you know, there’s a similar rule about writing: If you feel like your point is muddled or ineffectual, you’re never supposed to expose your own recognition of that opacity; you’re never supposed to type, “This essay is not working out.” You’re just supposed to go back and rewrite it until it more effectively fools the reader.

  But this essay is not working out.

  Now, could I go back and fix it? Of course I could. If I didn’t care about the veracity of the result, I could fabricate a durable explanation for why I want Kanye (who I like) to fail and LeBron (who I dislike) to succeed. There are tricks to doing this, and I know them all. Some of them I invented. But here’s the problem: My confusion here is real. I’m not writing this to persuade you to agree with me; I’m writing this because I want to figure out why I feel the way that I do (and pondering in a dark room doesn’t seem to suffice). At the beginning of this essay, I gave the impression that I’ve been occupied with this problem for three days. In reality, I’ve been trying to figure it out for two years. I know the premise is true: I know that my feelings are incongruous, and that feelings come from thoughts, and that thoughts don’t happen without some outcrop of reason. But I still can’t explain it. I still can’t figure out why this dichotomy exists. I feel like I’m grasping at random threads and vomiting up facts arbitrarily, almost as if information by itself somehow constitutes an argument. After all this time, I still don’t know what I’m doing.

  So let me try again, one last time.]

  Every so often, Kanye West seems mentally ill. Periodically, he behaves like an adult on the autistic spectrum. On a few rare occasions, his sexual orientation scans as ambivalent. But the only time all three of those phenomena occur simultaneously is when he talks about clothes (which, in the winter of 2013, seemed to be the only thing he ever wanted to talk about). Whenever Kanye starts lecturing about elbow patches or retail basketball shoes or the hypocrisies of the fashion industry or his desire to be accepted by the culture of couture, he mechanically rattles off the names of six or seven esoteric European designers, often like a robot reading from a catalog. He expresses oblique outrage over Louis Vuitton’s unwillingness to contact him for a business meeting and insists his own aesthetics are ten years ahead of everyone else in the field. “I am Warhol,” he says, and then he casually demands that a multinational conglomerate adopt the role of the Medici family in order to finance his dreams. [The Medicis were the Italian political dynasty that financed Michelangelo and Galileo during the Renaissance.] Kanye’s hottest fantasy would be for his wife to start designing high-end bow ties so that he could complain that they’re not popular enough. He remains shocked that no one is paying him millions of dollars to design leather tracksuits and works from the position that this oversight should be shocking to every reasonable person in America. He believes we should all find this crazy. And we generally do, but generally for different reasons.

  Now, we all have biases, and here’s mine: I think fashion is idiotic. And this bias has nothing to do with its relationship to advertising or consumerism or anything socio-heavy — it just seems silly and overvalued. I can understand how a person might find fashion interesting, in the same way I understand how a person might be interested in calligraphy. I will concede that Jimi Hendrix and Audrey Hepburn looked cool in scarves. But the notion that fashion is somehow important makes me want to throw up. The central definition of “superficiality” is the act of caring about how something looks on the surface (as opposed to what it actually is). This being the case, it’s hard to argue that fashion is anything less than the single-most shallow obsession communally shared by most of the free world. Clothes literally represent the most surface element of any human. So when I hear Kanye talking about clothing — and especially when I hear him talk about brand-name clothing — I instantly grow bored. And I also grow disenchanted, because I don’t want him to care about something so vapid. I want him to care about something else. It doesn’t even have to be music. It can be almost anything: Architecture. Drugs. Cryptozoology. I’m flexible. Just not clothing. Anything but clothing.

  But this is where I am shortsighted.

  This is where I don’t get it.

  “He’s really Cobain-ing this concept,” my rock-crit colleague Jon Dolan tells me, casually inventing a grunge gerund I instantly understand. It is, curiously, the ideal description of what West is doing with couture fashion: In the same way that Nirvana reconfigured the parameters of mainstream culture, West has altered the meaning of superficiality. He has turned superficiality into something profound. In his universe, designer jeans do not act as a barri
er between the rich and the poor; in his universe, designer jeans make a poor kid and a rich kid exactly the same. The jeans connect them (the jeans represent taste, and taste supersedes class). He projects that relationship everywhere, into everything he touches. When I view West from a distance, I think, “Here is a man obsessed with the unreal.” But the closer I look, the realer it gets. In 2010, West rapped the sentiment, “One day I’m gon’ marry a porn star.” Two years later, he proposed to a woman most famous for making a sex tape. That decision would be hilarious if it wasn’t so goddamn interesting. You cannot deconstruct the indestructible.

  I love Kanye West, but I don’t like what he’s doing to the world. I want Kanye to be the way that he is, but no one else. His version of progress should not become the acceptable definition of progression. “He’s not a diaper-changing kind of guy,” said the mother of his child when asked about West’s parenting style. When I first heard this, I thought, “Well, of course he isn’t. Who the fuck is?” But then I thought about it longer, and I realized everybody is (or at least everyone who chooses to have a child). Changing diapers is the most central, inescapable part of raising a newborn. But Kanye doesn’t view normalcy as a requirement. He sees normalcy as an optional path for uncreative people. When West releases a song (“Blood on the Leaves”) that compares South African apartheid to the complexity of having two girlfriends seated at the same NBA game, I think, This guy is truly himself. I think, This guy’s thoughts are sublime. But I only want him to think like this. I don’t want the world to follow. And I suspect they probably will. Not totally, but generally. Society at large will slightly drift toward his axis. His influence is palpable. West gets a lot of little things incorrect, but he’s (pretty much) right on the money whenever he swings big. When he released 808s & Heartbreak in 2008, everybody thought it sounded terrible; five years later, it appears to be the single-most influential album of the decade. He’s just not wrong about sweeping cultural bullshit. And I want him to be wrong (at least once). I know it would be fascinating, and I know I’d feel better. Because I am not ready for his reality to become my reality. I’ll probably never be ready. So I hope for West to fail . . . and with that hoping, I validate his professional paranoia. I become the haterade-swilling straw man he imagines in his mind. My faceless apprehension fuels his radiant insanity, and his power increases again. Which forces me to draw a curious conclusion.