Kanye West

Let the Beautiful People Rule the World

The_Rock_celebrating_Wrestlemania_28

by Guy Walker

You may have begun to notice the looming end of politics. It’s overwhelmed us like a marching band of wild rodents, a huge spectacularized circus of dysfunction. It happened so suddenly and so powerfully, there’s almost no memory of when things were normal. You tune in to the news not because you want to understand the nuances of public policy currently underway, or so you can better debate the advantages of a single-payer health care system—you just want to see Donald Trump stumble around like a mangled half-shaven sasquatch, smashing windows over his head, kidnapping women sunbathing on the beach, lighting off fireworks in the Oval Office. There’s no going back to the dreary ashen-faced days of passing bills and submitting formal disagreements. Especially now that a band of other celebrities have joined the elegiac cantus firmus and announced their plans for political office.

Most recently, it was Caitlyn Jenner, who told radio host John Catsimatidis that she “would look for a senatorial run.” Before her it was Kid Rock who announced he would also run for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. Soap opera star and underwear model, Antonio Sabáto Jr., is running for Congress. The Rock might bypass the whole bumbling peasantry and just run for President. If elected, he’ll sit there in the Situation Room in his neon highlighter panties and leather vest, and plot drone attacks on Wrestlemania enemies. Stone Cold Steve Austin will be blown to smithereens, body parts ablaze, the crowd screaming for more. Kanye West might also run for President, where he’ll campaign solely about the importance of cool shoes, as the First Lady’s chronic steatopygia gobbles up terrorists whole.

As the list of celebrity contenders grow, regular politicians are growing more concerned. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warned about Kid Rock’s announcement: “There were a lot of people who weren’t concerned about Donald Trump running for the presidency…So, I take it all seriously right now.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote in an email to his supporters, “I’ll be honest, we don’t know if this is real, a joke, or a bizarre publicity stunt. But I’ll tell you this: I don’t find it funny.”

By now, it’s obvious that the dull hubris of establishment politics is passed its prime, out of touch with the star-studded appetites of younger generations. Their awfully brittle logic ignores the successes of Saturday Night Live comedian turned senator, Al Franken, or the Tugboat Annie Sails Again movie star, Ronald Reagan, who rightfully matured into his political role and funded far right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua. Arnold Schwarzenegger arguably did as well as most governors before him. The problem is that our political beliefs have been condensed perversely into two camps: pro-Trump and anti-Trump. There’s no room for moderation, no slight left or right of center; just the ravenous schizophrenia of a public who is completely consumed by the wild orange beast in front of us. So when Warren and Schumer say they don’t find Kid Rock’s announcement for a senatorial run funny, they just mean that because he’s not on their team, he is a viable sensationalistic threat.

We’re not supposed to care this much about politics; it was never supposed to be front and center entertainment. Government policy is what only the most boring, moth-eaten cretins are capable of, allowing the rest of us to carry on our business of meandering through hobbies and escapism until we die. When President Trump tweeted the video of him wrestling down the spindly embodiment of CNN, his testosterone-bloated fists wailing into the emojilike head of the news organization, he wasn’t ‘insinuating violence’ or hurling metaphoric rage like a character on Street Fighter; he was tossing another morsel of entertainment to his deeply loyal fans, persuading by means of his cult of personality. Scott Adams—creator of the most lifeless, unimaginative comic strip, Dilbert, and likely the most rational of all Trump supporters—describes the aching dichotomy of responses to Trump as a “two-movie reality,” in that, between the pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps, we are all watching “two movies on one screen.” When Trump smashes in the head of CNN, his fans see their leader as the dominant alpha he already is while simultaneously working as a catastrophic blow to the frail sensitivities of liberals. His critics see another version, something akin to a deep-fried Michelin man who ejaculates fountains of Tang onto his own family members.

Critics call his CNN video unpresidential behavior, but what they mean is it’s not their movie of presidential behavior. Because there’s been many like him. Teddy Roosevelt wrestled and killed a cougar with a knife. Alexander Hamilton, though never president, was killed in a duel with then sitting Vice President Aaron Burr. Andrew Jackson—the man who Trump sees himself as the burly reincarnation of—killed a man in a duel who accused Jackson of cheating on a horse race. John F. Kennedy is well-known for his compulsive womanizing, fucking everything beautiful in site with his inescapable fury of charisma. So Trump’s behavior certainly is, to an extent, presidential—it’s just not the version his critics want to see in our languid arena of old men politely shuffling around in grey suits. What Trump is doing in all his orgiastic madness is being the celebrity showman his supporters want him to be. He is the caricature we all want him to be, because he fits our chosen narrative of hero or villain.

We used to judge a presidential candidate’s competency on the beer test: they could likely negotiate a peace deal with a hostile nuclear threat if they seemed like a dope person to have a beer with. We’re beyond that now. We want our government leaders to be glossy overlords, greased up with coconut oil and a stringy goatee, commanding over 320 million screaming fans with a burning trident. We’re a generation who grew up on American Idol and Internet porn—the dull bromidic fuckery of Nixonian politics is over. And although there have long been celebrities who later became politicians, Trump galvanized the celebrity persona and showmanship within modern politics. He brought the celebrity with him, as others before him separated themselves from their starry personas. The Rock, Caitlyn Jenner, Antonio Sabáto Jr., Kanye West—these are the gods of youth and sex we’ve always gawked at up on a high stage or ohuge television screen; now they are the obvious chosen ones who can fix health care, resolve the climate crisis, pardon turkeys, do whatever it is our government does.

When you go to the cinema and see another heroic war drama projected monstrously in front of you, there’s a subtle, yet gnawing depression when the film ends and the overhead lights come back on, and you have to shamefully walk back to your car and then your thankless life back home. The tragedy and ecstasy has ended, and the verdant luxury of escape along with it. It doesn’t have to be that way. Because we’re in a movie now. It’s likely all a computer simulation anyways, freewill just an imaginary fart in the VR imaging system; so let the big-titted celebrities roam like they were always meant to, declaring war on octopus demons and fucking supermodels in space. Reality will be so much better. Caitlyn will put on his Bruce costume whenever he wants to fuck with other leaders at G20 summits. Kid Rock will Snapchat himself in a wife-beater, masturbating into sinks and killing rodents with a hammer. Kanye West once made a music video of him in bed with wax figurines of Taylor Swift, Bill Cosby, and other celebrities and world leaders—now it will be real life, striking a peace deal with Bibi Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas by humping their legs like a dog underneath the bed linens. The show must go on.


Donate Button

“Famous”: The Passion of Kanye West

“Self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice.” Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

picasso11

by Guy Walker

Kanye West’s new music video for “Famous” was a non-event. Actually, it was an awful 8 minute episode of pubescent vagary. The soporific post-coitus scenery of famous people with their clothes off, the illusory novelty of seeing a politician’s naked wrinkly body, or Taylor Swift’s elusive belly button, lacks the shock value that it so desperately craves. He’s mimicking what every young boy does when they’re first stepping into the shallows of internet porn, as they look up pictures of Britney Spears with photoshopped bare tits, as they jerk off into a dirty sock, looking behind their shoulder to make sure mom isn’t walking in to check what all the padded smacking is in the middle of the night. Kanye uses the banal and dreary antics of sex, celebrity, and scandal to cobble up some hermetic perversion, like the chubby kid in film school who decided to make amateur soft-porn instead.

But I’m not saying anything new. Nobody liked it. The narcissism is obvious. The lack of artistry is obvious. The plagiarism is obvious. Kanye said he was directly inspired by Vincent Desiderio’s painting “Sleep.” This is incorrect. Being directly inspired to this extent is nothing more than stealing an artist’s original idea and posturing it as your own interpretation of it, as something more deep and enigmatic. He directly lifted the composition and concept from Desiderio and glued in the bodies of people we recognize. Art has this weird brutish tendency that says it’s okay to plagiarize as long as you say you plagiarized it. It praises this, in fact. Because it allows other oleaginous Calabasas illiterates to repeat to their doleful friends, “Oh, it was inspired by Desiderio’s painting ‘Sleep,’” and sound like they know what the fuck they’re talking about. “Desiderio” rolls off the tongue like butter on a horse dick in the scalding summer heat. You can hear Javier Bardem whisper “Desiderio, mi amor” into your ear, the moist titillation of rosebud and jasmine filling up your underwear. You can see Kanye in a moss-laden forest somewhere, screaming “Desiderio! I like art! Desiderio! Now I’m smart! Desiderio! Smell my fart!” and then scamper off to steal some bird eggs and tell his friends that Kim just laid them.

Of course it’s a pity that all the fuss and attention is directed at Kanye, because “Sleep” is a phenomenal original work of art, and “Famous” is cornfed tabloid fuckery. Comparing “Famous” to “Sleep” is like claiming “Babe” is a film adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm—we are all sadder and more cynical for seeing the former.

But as an artist, what did Kanye actually create? He obviously didn’t sculpt the waxen effigies of all the celebrities. He didn’t do the filming with a shitty camcorder. He didn’t come up with the original concept. We can give him the benefit of the doubt and say he wrote the lyrics, with all his grand Rimbaudian paean:

Bam bam, bam bam

Bam bam dilla, bam bam

Let me see you act up in this motherfucker

‘Ey what a bam bam

Bam bam dilla, bam bam

How you feelin’, how you feelin’, how you feelin’ in this motherfucker, god damn…

And on and on until you want to kill squirrels, eat pinecones, dress in those silver heatsheets, anything to take your mind off his scabrous hell of dick and meatloaf.

So what actually makes this Kanye’s video? He did after all admit it was merely a “comment on fame,” a lonely grunt in the whirlwind of theater, a shrug of troglodytic humor amongst the 7 billion handicapped tribe dragging themselves up the moor of mortality. Or is he playing a practical joke? After all, when Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal from a New York plumbing supplier and turned it upside down and signed it “R. MUTT 1917,” he was playing a Dadaist prank on the entire art world, exposing it for its appetence for sham. And every non-artist bought the bullshit, and began the conceptual revolution in the art world: Damien Hirst glued diamonds onto a human skull, Tracey Emin displayed her messy bed, Joseph Kosuth set a chair next to a photograph of a chair next to a dictionary’s definition of a chair, Piero Manzoni canned 90 tins of his own shit (and sold them for the price of gold). And Kanye West created the film to his song “Famous.”

In Either/Or, Kierkegaard says the original sin of everything is boredom. God was bored of empty space so he created the world. He was bored of algae and flies so he created Adam. He was bored with Adam so he created Eve, then the apple, then tits and lust and hunger and war. We were bored with Africa so we went to Europe, then the New World, then the moon, and now Mars. We’re bored of sobriety. Bored of whiskey. Bored of coke and strippers and love. Pop stars are known to have about three years of fame before we all get bored of them. Fortunately for Kanye, he’s not a pop star; he’s Pablo. He’s Andy Warhol. He called the wax artist for the video his Jesus, which makes him God.

For these few years of ephemeral misery, there is Kanye to show us the way forward. From the bright empyrean gates, the massive gold clouds continue to swell, overwhelming the heavens. The cloistered cum-encrusted bedsheets mummifying Bill Cosby, who giggles rudely as he humps Rihanna’s leg. Donald Trump is of course on all fours, Kanye tossing his salad, his glossy face covered in damp Cheeto dust, the moist triumph dripping down his neck. Everyone wheezes in the heavy air, Kim’s ass continuing to swell, larger than the clouds—finally, she is just one enormous ass, chomping on everything around her, smacking on the food of other bodies, all that hunger for the world. The celebrities disappear one by one, down the hatch. Taylor Swift croaks “What did I do?” as Kim’s ass gobbles her up. Soon, her ass has eaten everything. No clouds, no forests, no whales or fish or mountains. There are no more planets, no more stars. Just one stagnant black hole, her greased-up buttocks waiting in the infinity of empty space.