I've been struggling to process many issues this morning, and I'm looking at a big honking pile of research I'll need to do if I'm going to criticize a certain pundit whose name I won't mention, mainly because I've forgotten it. (Matthew Elrod? Big John Abernathy? No, it's gone.) So, research may be called for, but the sun's rising on a day where I won't have time for anything of the sort, because much of the next 24 hours involves multitasking of the most unpleasant kind--
By which I mean the kind of multitasking where some activities will require me to maintain a laser-like focus and the agility of a cat, while others will necessitate me adopting with lightning speed the slack-jawed nirvana of a mythical lotus eater. The quickest way for me to put that multitasking in perspective while sparing you the gory details is to omit verbs and modifiers in my explanation, and just list a few nouns.
1. Recording studio
2. Grandfather
3. Urethra
If you've ever signed up for a Mickey Mouse elective class to balance out a lot of exhausting mandatory ones, you'll understand why I've chosen the following topic to kick around today.
I spent my coffee time this morning circling passages in newspaper articles about the pizza gun incident, free trade, the media, and the like, but every refill forced me to walk by the section of the paper I don't usually read. I generally avoid it because I don't enjoy reading snooty articles that make fun of America's obsession with celebrities, while simultaneously talking about celebrities ad nauseum. I'm no fan of childish celebrity behavior, but it's insufferable when a newspaper writer suggests he or she is somehow above it all, even while telling us about the sexual peccadilloes of some photogenic man-child.
But I can only walk past an article about a Trump/Kanye West summit meeting a certain number of times before stopping to read it. And on picking it up, I immediately started rehearsing my version of the disingenuous excuse for taking time out to wade through fluff, or sleaze.
Here's my point-- Kanye and Trump are a lot alike. They are both guys who have achieved many impressive things, while their public utterances consistently reveal idiocy, anti-intellectualism and cognitive dissonance, on top of a roux of impregnable self-confidence.
Some will argue with my claim about the many impressive things. Many of those people will not be swayed by the next few sentences, but I'm typing them anyway.
Trump's many achievements come with an asterisk. As a giant army of writers have told us, if we cared to read them, Trump has employed weaselly tactics and dubious business practices with some consistency over his long career. And he's oftentimes landed on his feet after spectacular failures, suggesting to some that his real innate genius is less about accomplishment and more about ass-covering. I'm not going to allow that debate onto the stage here, though I'm giving it a shout-out, as it were. I do say a giant garish eyesore is an achievement, in the same way filling up a blank page with psychotic ramblings is. Trump is like a guy who pays another guy to fill the page with dense raving, and then stiffs him.
Now to Kanye.
Many white people of my acquaintance have a knee-jerk reaction to any bulletins from the world of Kanye. This is entirely reasonable, as news of Kanye's exploits generally involves public displays of hubris that are truly jaw-dropping. Some will recall his peevish entreaty to audience members who had declined to jump up and shake their asses at his concert, only to reveal when pressed that they were in wheelchairs. Most performers, even the more messianic among them, would have been embarrassed by a bonehead mistake of that magnitude. Kanye didn't seem to be. (I'm not proud of it, but I know this because I watched the video.) On another occasion, he waxed eloquent about his disdain for books. I have never heard an anti-book screed with this level of passion, except from children. (This is another connection with Trump, but I say this with a caveat. Trump doesn't appear to like books, either, unless they were written by Ayn Rand, but he does have deep respect for the honorable profession of public relations. Thus, because having a ghostwriter write a book with your name on it makes you look smart, and because Trump doesn't do public relations halfway, he's written a shelf of them. It's one of those shrimpy bookshelves you find at beach houses, usually filled with books the owner didn't want to ever see again, like the memoirs of the guy who played Lumpy on Leave It To Beaver, but a shelf nevertheless.)
But his many well-publicized examples of gaucherie and doucherie notwithstanding, Kanye has an ace in the hole-- his music. I'll confess that I can't muster up the kind of affection for West's work that I have for, say, Gang Starr or Pete Rock, but as a musicologist I care about the medium. Kanye is a master of the language of hip hop. I did a tiny bit of research and added a few Kanye "joints" to the Straubinical archive, and I'm nodding my head to one of his albums as I type this. I haven't heard any modern hip hop musicians that have done more with the medium than Kanye has, and I don't think he suffers much even from comparison with artists I greatly prefer.
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