KANYE WEST AND THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING or How Not to Pitch Esquire

I’m sure I don’t have to explain Kanye’s significance. Multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning rapper and producer. Superstar. Outspoken artist known for an inflated ego. Attention starved. Polarizing pop figure known for two very public outbursts - “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” during NBC’s Hurricane Katrina benefit telethon and the Taylor Swift “I’mma let you finish” incident at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Fashion icon. Internet fixture. Conflicted personality. The driving force behind hip hop’s recent shift to more middle class concerns (a shift that opened the door for Drake’s recent success). Iconoclast.

I’m sure I also don’t have to explain, at least not in too much detail, the arc of Kanye’s career and what’s been going on with him lately. Chicago producer/would be rapper - learns the ropes under influential Chicago-based hip hop producer, No I.D. Develops a classic hip hop sound that is brought to the fore on Jay-Z’s seminal album, The Blueprint. Gains notoriety but is dismissed as a rapper until his breakthrough 2003 mixtape Get Well Soon, which featured the single “Through the Wire,” a song on which he raps about a car accident that left him with a broken jaw following a late night studio session. The tape leads to his breakthrough 2004 debut, College Dropout, which features the inspirational and polarizing hit “Jesus Walks.” The album establishes Kanye as a power player in the hip hop scene, a position he secured over the next few years with a series of releases that built on the upper education theme Late Registration and Graduation, a reference to his own pursuit of upper education and his mother’s work as a college art professor. But with his mother’s tragic death in late 2007 from complications suffered while undergoing plastic surgery and the breakup of his engagement with Alexis Phifer, the direction of Kanye’s life and his sound changed.

Always introspective, Kanye released his most somber album to date in late 2008, 808s and Heartbreak. The album, which is built on the emotion of pain and loss and features more spartan soundscapes and more singing, was greeted with a combination of confusion and acclaim at first but has gone on to be regarded as a bold statement that has shaped the sound of hip hop since. Kanye’s Taylor Swift stunt followed a year later and since then he has been in a self-imposed exile, visiting an ashram in India and recording his next album, Good Ass Job in Hawaii. On September 14, he plans to release Good Ass Job, an album that’s by all accounts, a hard, dark rap album, this despite Kanye publicly denouncing his interest in rap on more than one occasion in the past. The album’s first single, “Power,” is a defiant fuck you to the American society that has ridiculed him since the Taylor Swift incident. The record is angry and proud. And it is a hit.

Kanye’s return is going to be a big deal. It already is. But while so much of what is sure to be written about Kanye surrounding this album is going to focus on his personal journey, which no doubt, is incredibly important, what I’m offering Esquire is a broader piece that relates Kanye’s struggles with fame, ego, celebrity, hip hop ideals, and consumer culture (just to name a few of his struggles), are not limited to Kanye and Kanye alone but reflect larger struggles being faced by American society at large. Like so many of his generation, the majority in fact, Kanye is the product of a consumer driven, youth and celebrity obsessed, commercial culture set to a hip hop soundtrack, but now that he is facing adult situations, decisions and realities, he is being forced to reevaluate his entire worldview, OUR entire worldview, and he’s doing it right before our eyes. Kanye has always been the most articulate rap superstar about the innate conflicts in today’s society.

“I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven,” he once rapped. “When I woke I spent it on a necklace.” This is our struggle as a society and a generation. Post recession, post head down, bullish 90s and aughts, we’ve seen so many systems and ideals collapse that we’re all taking a moment to reevaluate what we want to do/what we can do with the rest of our lives, often with today’s high unemployment, against our will, but the time is being taken nonetheless. So many supposed absolutes have been destroyed in the past two years, everyone is looking around trying to figure out what to do next. Including Kanye. Even Good Ass Job’s lead single, “Power,” speaks to our larger situation as a society - many would say that everything we’ve experienced in the country of late was brought upon us because, as Kanye raps, “no one man [country, bank, society, etc] should have all that power” and “I’m tripping off the power.” The record is simultaneously an ode to and a rejection of the power of hubris - a conflict we’re battling out as a society at all times. Press forward or take stock.

How does the hip hop generation grow up? And by hip hop generation, I don’t mean those raised on hip hop primarily, but because hip hop has been so pervasive in our culture (I couldn’t help but notice one of the major donors mentioned that he had to give “a shout out” during his speech at the Summer Gala this year’s Shakespeare in the Park while introducing Bernard Gersten, the night’s honoree), basically everyone under 35. This is an idea A.O. Scott explored in his recent, well-circulated piece for the New York Times, “Gen X Has A Midlife Crisis” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09aoscott.html), but what Scott missed was the separate and I would argue, equally, if not even more profound, hip hop narrative that runs through this generation as well.

Kanye West occupies a central point in our larger cultural identity today because he represents the intersection of these two threads - the higher educated, disillusioned middle class, and the take no prisoners, highly consumptive, blindly ambitious lower class. Kanye is the ironic indie kid and the blinged out hip hop kid rolled into one. The problem is how does that kid become an adult? In previous generations it was a larger conflict - war or social revolution that galvanized a sense of adult identity. How one came out of that conflict shaped who one would be for the rest of one’s life. But with today’s wars marginalized as a larger social experience and even September 11 diminished into a “go shopping” solution, we are left to identify ourselves against the market, our sense of adulthood only marked by our purchasing power. But the market promotes perpetual youth, glamorizes it, idolizes it. So then how does one actually grow up, stop throwing tantrums on the VMA stage, engage in real political debate and action (not just attacking, provocative but ultimately not constructive comments like “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people”), and basically become and then be a functioning adult?

I would argue that without a larger social conflict to cleave to, the only way to do so is to go to war with one’s own self.

In “Power,” Kanye raps, “Reality is catching up with me, taking my inner child, I’m fighting for it, custody.” This is our battle, both as a society and as individuals. So much of what we have been doing for the past 20 years has felt great, but ultimately so much of it has failed. Now what?

This is the piece I would like to write about Kanye West for Esquire. A piece exploring how his struggles are our own and how what he represents, in all its conflicted, complicated, and often flawed glory is just a reflection of who we are, what we value and what we represent. Kanye is trying to be a better person just as I think we are trying to be a better society. Kanye, Gen X, my generation may be the “abomination of Obama’s nation” as Kanye puts it on “Power,” but we drove the election and drove change. Now we’re all being forced to recognize that alone isn’t enough. BMI.