Kanye West’s first major screw up came in 2009. Taylor Swift – a promising 19 year old ingenue at the time – was giving an acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards when West (now “Ye”) stormed the stage, commandeered the microphone, and declared Beyoncé a more deserving recipient of the award in front of the music industry’s great and good. Barack Obama called him a “jerk” in the aftermath; Donald Trump even suggested a West boycott. The rapper receded from public life, fled to Hawaii, and didn’t emerge again until he had a very solid apology lined up.
That apology was not a mealy statement drafted by a PR; nor was it a long meandering YouTube video in which he promised to learn from his mistakes and – in the favourite refrain of the cancelled celebrity – “do better”. Nor was it a suggestion that he would atone for crimes against Swift via some philanthropic gesture. Instead it arrived in the form of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), perhaps the most important – certainly the most celebrated – record of a generation. And with the 9-minute sprawling track Runaway as its centrepiece, the Kanye Principle was secured: you can get away with pretty much anything if you are good enough.
He’d better have another Dark Twisted Fantasy up his sleeve because there is a lot of ground to make up. Over the weekend West announced, to his 33 million X followers, “IM A NAZI” before suggesting “JEWS WERE BETTER AS SLAVES” amid more rancorous anti-Semitism. On Monday, his website was selling nothing but a T-shirt with a swastika on it. By Tuesday, it had been taken down. It’s all a development on a theme established when West declared in 2022 that he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”. West, once the world’s greatest and still most influential producer and artist, now a paid up Nazi and avowed Hitler lover, is above all an inveterate attention seeker.
He is also a clearly unwell man – in the past, he has said he has bipolar disorder, though he recently claimed that was a misdiagnosis and that he has autism – playing out a personal and medical crisis in public. But redemption lies close around the corner for the mentally ill visionaries of the world.
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West is probably just one successful artistic venture away from being reappraised as the genius we all knew and still know him to be. It’s not that the tweets and nazism will be forgotten, this will remain firmly within the Kanye West lore. But celebrity rehabilitations happen fast, and it will all be regarded as secondary or tertiary relevance to the quality of the songs. If West is still capable of making a good record then the world is – for better or worse – likely capable of forgiving him. (The aesthetic merit of his recent projects shouldn’t give him great cause for hope, however.)
This principle came up recently in conversation with a friend who had been eating at an expensive London restaurant. Great playlist, he remarked, full of Michael Jackson… why hasn’t he been cancelled yet? It’s a good question but welcomes an easy answer. There is the fact that he was acquitted in a court of law, which should help. But plenty of people have been cancelled for behaviour that is only alleged, and in spite of Jackson’s technical exoneration, the suspicions of serious sexual malfeasance never went away. Instead, upmarket London restaurants can play Michael Jackson to accompany “seaweed custard” and “nasturtiums” (I don’t know either) not because anyone believes he’s an uncontestable bloke, but because the songs are good enough. Michael Jackson is a bad man and a good artist – an important statement because it’s both banal and true.
There is something else in the culture going West’s way right now, too. Years of perversely cruel moral censure at the hands of the progressive establishment – wokeness, cancel culture, whatever you want to call it – have been undone in a matter of months. Anti-woke is in vogue, hurried along by Trump and Elon Musk. Virtue-signalling has ceded ground to its inverse number, vice-signalling. And now, the general vibe is unusually permissive to the rhetorical and moral depravation being spouted by the likes of West. Don’t expect this to hold for long, though. The pendulum will probably find a position of equilibrium between the priggish extravagances of the 2010s and the nastiness of the current moment. But in the immediate sense, West could have picked a worse time for this particular meltdown.
I have no doubt that West’s back catalogue will outlive his brutishness, humming in the background of Michelin-star joints for decades to come. I hope to hear it. Because amid all his moral ugliness something encouraging about people writ large emerges: there will always be enthusiasm for consuming and preserving the legacy of good music, no matter how poisonous its source. It is a timeless and human instinct.
