Aw what the hell….
Y’know, I’ve come to realize something recently. I don’t think Kanye West has ever had a coherent political ideology. In fact, I doubt he’s given any political issue more than a few minutes of thought. He certainly hasn’t read up on anything. I keep going back to that quote of his, that he’s “a proud non-reader of books” and I don’t think he’s ever read up on much of anything throughout his whole career. I think Kanye’s politics are just a mish-mash of the politics of the people around him at any given time of his life. He just parrots an approximation of whatever he’s heard the people around him say, not unlike a child that regurgitates whatever they heard from their parents.I think this goes all the way back to the beginning of his career. I don’t think that all the “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” stuff and all the stuff about the Black Panthers and Ronald Reagan he was saying on “Crack Music” was stuff he felt as strongly about as we were led to believe. Where was he in the mid ‘00s? He was still in Chicago and the closest people in his ear were his parents (who were highly educated and politically involved) and some of his boys around the way like Rhymefest (he might have been hanging around Kweli and Mos Def more back then too). There’s a strong Afrocentric left-of-center sociopolitical bend to these folks Kanye was around and they would have been virulently anti-Bush in the mid ’00s.Where was Kanye when he went full MAGA? His mother wasn’t in his ear anymore because she had been dead for almost 10 years. He was now living in Calabasas. Now the people in his inner circle are incredibly rich. Almost all of them are white and all of them are hardcore capitalists. There is no doubt that a majority of people that can afford to live in an area like this supported Donald Trump and his economic policies have been financially expedient to them. These are people that preach the bible of rugged individualism and “picking yourself up by your bootstraps”. There’s no doubt that some of these folks in Kanye’s orbit either say or listen to people that say things like how black people are stuck on the “Democrat plantation” or how “the Democrat Party has made blacks dependent on government handouts” or how “black people just need to get over slavery”.Where is Kanye now? He’s now in this born-again, Evangelical, wannabe Joel Osteen phase and I’m pretty sure most of the people in his inner circle these days are other ostentatious Evangelical preachers and peddlers of the prosperity gospel. That’s why in his recent interview, he’s saying the word “god” more than Evander Holyfield after a fight and why he’s talking about how prayers will heal COVID-19 (but not a vaccine!) or how we need to put prayer back in schools.
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