Losing Kanye/ How We Lost Kanye/Falling Out Of Love With Kanye/How West Was Lost/ How

West Lost His Way

A Eulogy For Kanye

I don’t think I could tell you the first time I heard Kanye West: it seems like it is more
appropriate to say I became aware of him – that I grew into him. I was only three years old when
his first studio album, College Dropout, was released, but I’d hear echoes of “All Falls Down”
and “Jesus Walks” all my life, with no awareness that these were relics from a time before I
walked and talk. Around the time that I was just old enough to appreciate music, Graduation, his
third album, seemed omnipresent on the radio and on tv music stations: “Good Life” and
“Stronger” played often but never too often. But it was “Gold digger” the biggest single off his
second album, Late Registration, that would crystallize him as one of the greats in my mind.
Everyone in my home seemed to jam along to it: a mother and an aunt, content with the polite
nod and the occasional sway along to it, two slightly older male cousins, who were more than
happy to blast it out whenever they had the chance and rap along to every word. It was an
anthem, a unifying force.

I think what was attractive about “Gold digger”, beyond the artful sample of Ray Charles and the
mastery of drums and rhythm consistent throughout the songs, was the parable in the lyrics. It
may seem counter intuitive that a home of single mothers would find empowerment in a song
about gold diggers: the notion of a gold digger is hardly a flattering one. But closer scrutiny
reveals that a “gold diggers” were merely a vehicle to explore the lives of black women, given a
bad rap for doing what it takes to survive after the men in their lives have betrayed them, left
them saddled with children and all the expenses that come along with it. West begins seemingly
sympathetic to the men who fall victim to such women. He laments the expenses that come along
with courting such women, and underscores the wisdom of seeking prenuptials (“It’s something
that you need to have, cause when she leaves your ass she gon’ leave with half.”) and cites the
humiliating and absurd situations men find themselves if they choose to enter long term
engagements with this brand of women without legal protection and other considerations. It is
only in the very last verse that he seemingly conveys the satire cunningly underlying his defense
of men throughout the song. In that verse, he tells the story from the position of the archetypal
woman of color who stands by the man in the period before he has found success. West cites
humiliating ordeals of having to wash dishes in restaurants, certainly as a consequence of not
being able to pay the bill once the meal was complete. Rather than leave the man, right then, at
his weakest point, the woman still sees something that she finds profoundly admirable in him: a
sense of striving that convinces her to continue to stand by him- :
“While ya’ washin’, watch him / He gonna make it to a Benz outta that Datsun /
He got that ambition baby / look in his eyes / this week he moppin’ floor, next week it’s the fries /
so stick by his side”.
- despite continued advances by more successful and financially stable men:
“I know there’s dudes ballin’ and yeah that’s nice /
and they gon’ keep callin’ and tryin’ and you stay right girl”
a sacrifice that ultimately goes fatally unappreciated:
“and when he get on, he leave your ass for a white girl.”

It is here that “Gold digger” comes full circle. Kanye West points out the irony in chiding the
women who callously exploit men for financial gain, when it is the men’s own callousness that
pushed them into that lifestyle and state of mind to begin with. The woman is shattered to find
that she has been more loyal to the man than he is willing to be to her, and the burned, newly
single mother evolves into a black widow type figure, with men helpless to her control, handing
over the keys to their SUV’s and the PINs to their accounts. It is not to be read as a blueprint for
women who find themselves in that position, but an exercise in catharsis, akin to Tarantino
revenge tale like Django Unchained. For single mothers struggling to raise children on their
own, it feels good to hear the story retold in an alternative universe where the scorned woman
has the last laugh – an eventuality difficult enough to achieve in real life. When young men
listened to Kanye, their awe was rooted in his prodigious talent. It hardly mattered what the
painting was – their appreciation was drawn from how artfully the image was conveyed. For
women of color, Kanye’s frankness and sympathy, his amoral endorsement of our hustle, and our
grind, in the contrast to hip hop’s misogyny, was profoundly refreshing. The singular act of
calling out his fellow black men, rebuffing their judgment of the women they continuously
castigated and forsaken in favor of lighter-skinned models, venerated him to us; he was
mainstream hip hop’s conscience and our patron saint within its ranks.

The rawness of his honesty was always charming: often boyish but always sincere. “George
Bush doesn’t care about black people”, he remarked on national television, after rambling
nervously, but nonetheless bravely, what had been on the minds of so many people of color in the
aftermath of Katrina. Of course everyone knows about West infamous snatching of Taylor
Swift’s grammy, outraged by the snub of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”: it was an act that was no
doubt a gallant one in his mind at the time, one we lovingly rationalized and explained away, in
the same manner we would the unruly actions of a rowdy but well-intentioned cousin, brother,
nephew or son. We were collectively protective of Kanye, and we stood by him, despite his
outbursts and his mounting narcissism. His talent would always excuse his bad behavior, in our
minds. He was a temperamental genius, after all, in the same vein as Bach or Hemmingway.

We winced, but we did not resent him as we watched his commercialization, as he catered to his
new, moneyed fans: those privileged enough to afford $600 sweatpants and $300 dollar shoes. It
was his grind, his hustle, after all. And we celebrated his success.
We bit our lips when the Kanye who navigated race in America with such tenderness in “Heard
‘Em Say” now claimed that the issue of today was “class” rather than “race”, doubtlessly an
attempt to extend a welcoming hand to the new demographic that was elevating him into a new
stratosphere. Still, we heard every new album, and we learnt the words to the songs.
The most shocking moment of this transformation, the moment our denials and obfuscations
were shattered, when he exhorted in one of his signature stream of consciousness sermons that
black people needed to “stop talking about race and racism” and announced that he did not vote
but “would have voted for Donald Trump”.

Needless to say, this was a far cry the Kanye whose pointed critique of George Bush on national
tv was so sharp that the Bush called it “the lowest point of [his] presidency”. This was not our
Kanye. This was Yeezus, more provocateur than crusader. This was Pablo, force of fashion and
pop culture. Our Kanye was dead. He was reborn ignorant and disconnected.

The “white girl” at the end of “Gold digger” symbolizes more than just a literal romance with a
Caucasian woman. It is a rejection of where one comes from and an embrace of the shinier, less
tangled, hot combed and straightened American ideal. The tragedy of writing about “Gold
digger” in 2018 is that a comparison of the West of today to the version we remember, the
version I grew up on, makes clear how much has been lost. Today’s Kanye is a parody of
himself: he is emblematic of the problem he elucidated so many years ago. He turned into one of
the very men he satirized and censured in “Gold digger” when he married Kim Kardashian, a
woman who is functionally white, and has built a brand entirely on the basis of dynastic privilege
and willful aloofness. Should we be surprised then that while his peers in the highest echelon of
modern black culture lend their voices to energizing the cultural movement that has coalesced in
the recent past, he is using his to disavow himself from the community that buoyed him out of
anonymity to begin with? Evidently, “Gold digger” was more than parable; it was prophecy.

Tasha/ Baby Oasis, circa 2017