Kanye’s music reminds me of weekends riding along Lake Shore Drive and sticky days at park district summer camp and recesses spent playing pickup basketball. It reminds me of family cookouts and wandering down Michigan Avenue and hood fireworks that christen the Fourth of July. It reminds me of home. But today (and, honestly, for a long time leading up to today) it is difficult for me to reconcile the Kanye of my past with the Kanye of my present. His most recent explosion of hate, the fulfillment of a long slide toward white supremacy, is the desecration of his legacy made complete. That desecration has forced me to go back through my memories and reimagine them without his lyrics.
When I was growing up, Kanye West was a superstar. Raised by a single mother on the South Side of Chicago, Kanye was the quintessential city kid. He wore braces, tried to play off his awkwardness by acting cool, and freestyled to the beats he made in his free time. He dropped out of college to try to make it as a rapper, and started producing for some of rap’s biggest artists at the turn of the century. Then Jay-Z signed him to Rock-A-Fella Records, and his career took off. He dropped a critically acclaimed debut album, The College Dropout, in 2004, then released two more over the next three years. He started touring, then started his own record label called G.O.O.D. Music. He made TV appearances, then made the TIME 100 Most Influential People list. He made it. The odd kid from Chicago, rapping outside of his mother’s house, wearing pink polos and khakis, made it. In doing so, Kanye pulled Chicago out of rap industry obscurity, offering a positive story from a city that was often beset with narratives of violence and corruption. He became Chicago’s pride.
His energetic, maximalist music blared out of car stereos, in barbershops, and at basketball games. I heard his music so often that I began to memorize his verses, and I’d rap along to them with my mom on the car ride to school every morning. His style was copied on street corners and in classrooms. In elementary school I was dressing in bright striped polo shirts, just like the rest of the kids in my class. His influence was everywhere in the city –– utterly inescapable.
What wasn’t clear to me then was that the early Kanye West was a brand. Entering the hip-hop industry when its ascendancy was defined by the glitz of rappers like Diddy and the gangster of rappers like 50 Cent, Kanye carved out his own niche as a soulful, incisive, and self-aware artist. He drew samples from classic R&B and soul artists –– like Nina Simone, Chaka Khan and Otis Redding –– to make his beats, paying homage to the forebearers of black music. He commented on social issues facing Black America, calling out racism and materialism in songs like “Never Let Me Down” and “All Falls Down.” He poked fun at the rap industry’s obsession with wealth while also playfully acknowledging his indulgence in it. In short, he made a lane for himself, and he did so by relating to everyday people at a time when the top rap artists weren’t. The stories he told reflected Black American life with universal resonance. Those stories made him rich.
***
It wasn’t until my eighth grade year, in 2016, that I began to fully understand all that Kanye had meant to Chicago. By that time Kanye had already established himself as a controversial, yet still transcendent, celebrity. He had released six critically acclaimed albums since the start of his career, launched his lucrative Yeezy sneaker line with Adidas, and married Kim Kardashian –– America’s biggest reality TV star. He had also spontaneously said that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” on national television, interrupted Taylor Swift’s MTV Awards acceptance speech, and defended Bill Cosby in the face of dozens of sexual assault allegations. Kanye had always been talented and he had always acted erratically, but as his stardom grew, his brand changed. He was no longer the rapper offering relatable narratives; he was the rich mogul whose contrarian views had a dark bent.
Kanye was not quite a role model anymore, nor was he widely cherished. But he was still interesting, and he was still representing Chicago, and his music was still good, so we all kept paying attention. I anxiously waited for the release of his album that year, The Life of Pablo, if out of nothing else than sheer curiosity. Always a touch arrogant and self-centered, Kanye leaned fully into those proclivities on the album, bragging about his wealth and success under the auspices of faith and spirituality. He shot back at critics of his who didn’t like his newer music and said they “missed the old Kanye.” He stretched this muddled, chaotic monument to himself across twenty tracks and sixty-six minutes, and it sounded incredible. He opens with a gospel-ish song, overwhelming you with the thrum of the bass, the swelling of the organs and the haunting, soaring lyrics of the choir. And for the rest of the album, he drags you through an odyssey of infectious, resonant beats and gaudy lyrics that stick themselves inside your brain and refuse to let go. I loved The Life of Pablo, and that complicated my relationship with Kanye. It had been a long time since I found him admirable, or even relatable, but Kanye’s music was still dear to me. So I placed a false wedge between the art and the artist in my mind, and I continued listening.
***
The thing about Kanye West is that he sees himself –– brands himself –– as a “free thinker.” Many artists do. The problem is that Kanye also believes his musical talent makes him an authority on everything else, and he uses his brand to convince people of that belief. Every damaging comment is framed as going against the grain, and every bad action is framed as boundary pushing innovation. Usually, failure humbles the arrogant man. But Kanye is one of the richest men on the planet; he has hundreds of millions of dollars to soften the blow of an underperforming album or an underwhelming clothing launch. There’s no need, then, for Kanye to listen to people that challenge him. As a result, every statement, artistic decision, and business deal he makes that doesn’t end in absolute catastrophic failure confirms to Kanye his belief in his own genius. It’s a closed feedback loop, and it’s only gotten worse with time and wealth.
By the end of 2016, Kanye had fully leaned into the “free thinking” brand, and it began alienating him from the city. At the San Jose performance on his The Life of Pablo tour, Kanye subjected his fans to a 25-minute pro-Trump rant. After the tour was canceled and Kanye was hospitalized for a psychiatric emergency, he visited the then-president-elect at Trump Towers to discuss “multicultural issues.” At a time when the shock and horror of the Trump Era was still new, Kanye’s support of Trump was seen as a deep affront to women and people of color. It was a devaluing of the stories he used to tell about Black life. It was an abandonment of the Black people whose support had made him famous. It was as though Kanye had used Blackness to build his wealth, and then turned on Black people at the first opportunity to gain power.
Black Chicagoans began distancing themselves from Kanye, and the DJs who used to play him on the radio started having on-air discussions about his behavior. The city was ambivalent about him –– disgust was mixed with frustration and sadness, as well as sympathy and nostalgia. Some Black Chicagoans pulled out lines like, “He hasn’t been right since his momma died,” in an effort to apologize for the man. I complained about his actions, then and began to lose interest in him. There were now other artists, like Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa, with claims to the city that Kanye had long lost the ability to make.
For the entirety of 2017, Kanye retreated from the public eye, skipping the Grammys, missing fashion shows, and deleting his social media accounts. He traveled to Wyoming, using his time there to produce a series of hyper-short albums for GOOD Music artists like Pusha T, Kid Cudi, and Teyanna Taylor. Those albums saw a solid reception when they were released the summer of 2018, but by then Kanye had already emerged from his quiet year and returned to championing white supremacy. He made news halfway through the year when he suggested in a TMZ interview that slavery was a choice. He then released a scattered album opening up about his bipolar disorder diagnosis and poorly attempting to address all the controversy he had stirred over the past two years. He continued to defend his support for Trump, offered a rant on the SNL stage on behalf of the president, and visited the White House in October of that year, all while hinting at a presidential run of his own. The apologies were fewer this time around, and the cognitive dissonance required to listen to his music had gotten too intense. Kanye’s brand had turned into a gross spectacle, and it looked like he was at the end of his prime as an artist. Chicago was done. I was done.
Still, Kanye attempted to rebrand. He dropped two Christian albums, expanded his fashion line by partnering with the Gap, made an unsettling run for president in 2020 and attempted a bounceback with a chaotic promotion and release of an album named after his mother: Donda. He got a divorce from Kim Kardashian and then began harassing her, started an unaccredited school called Donda Academy, and showcased shirts saying “white lives matter” at his fashion show.
Then he vowed to “go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”
***
The latest iteration of Kanye’s brand –– the Nazi, white supremacist kind –– is the natural end of his emptiness and egotism. It is his fall, his divorce from reality, made perfect. Only someone so devoid of dignity and empathy could go on an antisemitic tirade, then claim martyrdom, then continue that tirade. Only someone intoxicated by power could allegedly read Mein Kampf and express his admiration of Hitler.
Kanye is now a hollowed out person. I’m not sure when it happened. Maybe it was always the case; maybe there was nothing to begin with. Maybe the wealth and the power just made it easier to see. I’m not sure it matters either way; I don’t think there’s any consolation in considering that he might have once been a kind person.
What is now clear, though, is that whether he set out to do this or not, Kanye used Black people and he used Chicago. He mined our stories for gold, and used that gold to finance a sickening brand of hatred which seeks the end of Black people. He has pissed on every Black story he’s ever told.
Adidas has dropped him, Balenciaga has dropped him, The Creative Arts Agency (his talent agency) has dropped him. Vogue and Foot Locker and Peloton have ended relationships with him. Goodwill and TJ Maxx won’t sell his shoes. Even Madame Tussauds has removed his wax figure. There’s a ring of justice to this corporate cancellation. A kind of retribution for hate and exploitation that Black people don’t often see.
But, in some eerie sense, it doesn’t feel final. Kanye is still worth $400 million. He still has access to his Twitter account. His fans still love him enough to start a GoFundMe campaign to get him back to billionaire status. Chicago’s love for Kanye, and my love for Kanye, is long gone. But I don’t think Kanye is done. I don’t think a man that rich and self-serving will be done until he decides to be done. And I don’t think that decision is coming any time soon.