Substacks

Kanye the Vulture Eli Lake

Published

5 months ago

February 23, 2024

Kanye West on February 2, 2024, in Los Angeles, California. (Rachpoot/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images via Getty Images)

The first time I really took notice of Kanye West was at the tail end of hip-hop’s golden age in 2001. He was one of the hot new producers on Jay-Z’s Blueprint, framing Hov’s rhymes with candy-coated samples of classic soul tracks sped up and augmented with heavy drum loops. Most people would be content to be heirs to Pete Rock and DJ Premier, creating beats for more talented lyricists and making a mint in the process.

But Kanye was not. He needed to be the main attraction.

When he dropped his debut, The College Dropout, in 2004, I was curious and skeptical. The beats were fire. But most producers don’t rap for a reason. (Listen to Large Professor’s guest verses if you don’t believe me.) Then I heard “Slow Jamz,” which did not feature a particularly strong Kanye verse, but it was so meta—literally speeding up a Luther Vandross slow jam for a song about slow jams by artists like Luther Vandross—and I was hooked. When Twista came in for the second verse, I realized I was listening to greatness. And it wasn’t just “Slow Jamz.” “Through the Wire” did not feature the agility of Eminem or the authority of Jay-Z, but it was raw and honest as Ye described the aftermath of a car wreck that nearly killed him. “Jesus Walks” was a jaw-dropping blend of the sacred and profane. The entire album was wall-to-wall bangers.

At this point I was rooting for Kanye. He defied hip-hop’s division of labor and proved that with enough chutzpah, the producer could become the star. His follow-up to Dropout, Late Registration, convinced me he was in the same category as James Brown or John Lennon: a visionary. Nearly every track is a gem. My favorite moment comes at the end of “We Major,” a celestial symphony of brass and wobbling synthesizers that sounds like it came to Earth from a Stevie Wonder dream. Just as the composition resolves, Kanye asks, “Can I talk my shit again?” Please do.

Fast-forward to October 8, 2022. That’s when Kanye tweeted that he planned to go “Death Con 3” on Jewish people. In short order, he was telling Alex Jones that he wouldn’t let the Jews tell him he can’t admire Hitler; sharing conspiracies about the Jewish-owned media on the podcast Drink Champs; and hanging around with the incel / nativist / moron / antisemite, Nick Fuentes.

When you think he can’t go lower, he does. In December, a video of Kanye emerged where he claimed that Jews, like the Rothschilds, were out to get him. Then when TMZ asked him whether he regretted his “Death Con 3” tweet, he responded, “For all the Jewish kids that love me, I’m sorry that y’all had to hear a grown-up conversation where they’re screaming at each other. But we got to a point where something needed to happen.”

Oy.

I am a proud Jew who opposes cancel culture. So I never wished Kanye a “social death,” to borrow a phrase from Dream Hampton. My first thought was that someone should invite him to Shabbat dinner and set him straight. But as Kanye continued to double, triple, and quadruple down on this ancient hatred of my people, I realized I was being naive. The man is not going to change.

So when I hit play on his new album, Vultures 1, it was with a sense of deep wariness. It would be easier if it was incoherent garbage, like so much of what comes out of Kanye’s mouth has been lately. But it wasn’t. I liked it. And I wasn’t the only one.

The one consistent theme in Kanye’s music is himself. He is a proud egotist. (Album cover for Vultures 1 via Instagram)

Since its release earlier this month, Vultures 1, a collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign, has reached number one on Apple’s streaming charts. It confirms what we already knew: Kanye West is too big to cancel. Despite losing endorsements from Adidas and Balenciaga, despite losing his representation from CAA and his own lawyers, Kanye’s art still demands attention.

Vultures 1 is not Kanye’s best work, but his B-minus is an A-plus for most artists. And in 2024, despite his controversies and failed cancellations, Kanye is still capable of finding musical brilliance inside of his crazy. The album demands relistening because it’s filled with hidden delights. There is the chorus of Italian soccer fans chanting a filthy hook on “Carnival.” The first half of “Talking,” which features his 10-year-old daughter, North West, is haunting and beautiful. The second half punctuates Ty Dolla $ign’s gorgeous melody with distorted industrial-strength base stabs. Despite its adolescent animosity, the album’s title track, “Vultures,” is crafted with a master artisan’s attention to detail. It features layers of dissonant chords that sound like an orchestral alarm before evolving into majestic resolution.

All of this vindicates the adage to separate the art from the artist. Anyone who has enjoyed great music, literature, or visual art has applied this pithy rule. Paul Gauguin raped the Tahitian girls who posed for his portraits. Novelist Norman Mailer stabbed his wife Adele with a penknife in 1960, nearly killing her for saying he wasn’t as talented as Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis abused his first and second wives when blinded by rage, cocaine, and booze.

There’s no shortage of Jew-haters in the canon. T.S. Eliot, for example, wrote in “Burbank with a Baedeker,” The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot. The villain of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is the Jewish moneylender Shylock, who demands a pound of flesh from one of his debtors who cannot repay him. We study these works not because of their antisemitism but despite it. Can I glean something valuable from the work of a man who thinks of me less than a rat? Sadly, the answer is sometimes, but not always, yes.

And anyway, if museums stopped showing Gauguin, or Spotify stopped streaming Miles, or libraries stopped carrying Mailer’s books, or even if T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare were revised to meet our better standards, we would only be punishing ourselves. We make exceptions for genius. So we make exceptions for Kanye. And make no mistake, Kanye West is a genius, and knows it.

The one consistent theme in Kanye’s music is himself. He is a proud egotist. The final line of “I Love Kanye” sums this up with perfection: I love you like Kanye loves Kanye. And Vultures 1 is no exception. It is both an expression of and commentary on his recent controversies, making the artist’s life, in this case, the art itself. In “Keys to My Life,” for example, he references his ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s affair with SNL alum Pete Davidson. Look at what I stumbled on / Another nigga chillin’ on your couch with pajamas on, he raps over ethereal, gothic chords.

On three of its tracks, Kanye addresses his quarrels with the chosen people. The opening of the album, “Stars,” features this line: Keep a few Jews on the staff now / I cash out. In its closing track, “King,” Kanye chants, Crazy, bipolar, antisemite / And I’m still the king. On the title track, “Vultures,” Kanye raps, How I’m antisemitic / I just fucked a Jewish bitch. That line is tasteless enough on its own. But he completes the verse with petty venom: I just fucked Scooter’s bitch and we ran her like Olympics / Got pregnant in the threesome, so who’s baby is it? “Scooter” here is Kanye’s former manager, Scooter Braun, who divorced his wife Yael Cohen in 2022. They had three children before the dissolution of their marriage and at some point one imagines they will hear this misogyny and cringe or possibly cry. It made me nauseated.

Vulgarity is nothing new for Kanye. All of his great works contain songs that celebrate debased carnality. The chorus of his masterpiece, “Runaway,” implores us to raise a “toast for the assholes.” Part of Kanye’s genius was that you still rooted for the antihero despite these confessions. But “Vultures” doesn’t get us there. The line about his estranged manager’s wife is not aspirational fantasy. It’s toxic enmity.

After three listens to Vultures 1, I’m torn. Yes, I miss the old Kanye. The latest version of this ever-changing artist is that of an unhinged megalomaniac. The artist has turned into the kind of man who boasts of his sexual conquests and lives a life unattainable to anyone who doesn’t have fuck-you money. I gotta fly to Japan just to be secluded, he raps on the aptly named “Problematic.”

I don’t like the new Kanye very much, but I make an exception for his genius even though he is now an antisemitic edgelord. He is hardly the first great artist to embrace the socialism of fools. He will not be the last. I separate Kanye’s art from Kanye and appreciate the glimpses of beauty that lurk inside his vulgarity. The difference is that I am no longer rooting for him.

Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist and podcaster. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @EliLake and read his latest Free Press piece on how October 7 might bring down the Squad.

To support Eli’s writing, and all of the work of editors, reporters, interns, and producers at The Free Press, become a subscriber today:

Subscribe now

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

7 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

14 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

18 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641