(2/2)
"As I said earlier, the field of self-viewing, of self-awareness, is inescapable. Even those who cut themselves off from the world to live in the woods haven’t escaped fully, since nothing is more affected and self-conscious than this extreme rejection of the modern world. Mostly, these smaller, half-escapes take the form of concessions. A good example is the romantic-comedy. We are willing to indulge in one of the ideas put under suspicion by the four thinkers listed above, but only if we can distance ourselves from it. And we do this by framing it in comedy, something that acknowledges itself as a kind of fantasy, too good to be true."
"But Kanye does something different. It’s not a wholesale rejection of modern world’s self-consciousness (because this would be false and affected too), but more a wilful ignorance of it. He surrounds himself in the techniques of the 20th century—the pastiche of sampling, the synthetic quality of the music, the free discussion of taboo subject matter—while completely rejecting its ethics. He acts in a way which very deliberately eschews self-consciousness."
"First, it’s important to clarify just what a genius is. Wolfe cottons onto the fact that genius is intricately linked to history, to the extent that geniuses, in the sense that Wolfe means, represent and respond to their eras, and are inseparable from their time in history. So, a genius clarifies the issues of their time and solves them."
"Does this describe West? He certainly says so often enough, constantly referring to himself as a genius in interviews. He doesn’t fit the mould of what we would regard as genius; he lacks the reserve and the premeditation that we expect."
"But maybe Kanye West is a genius in the same way Don Quixote is a knight. On the one hand, obviously, Don Quixote does not measure up to the tales of chivalry he attempts to imitate. But on the other hand, the arch-irony of the book, that those who interpret it as straight satire miss, is that Don Quixote, by virtue of his heroic inadequacy, embodies the chivalric ideals better than most knights. What makes Cervantes great is this reversal: he manages to take a ridiculous character, an absolute vacuum of self-awareness, with no clue how much disdain and mockery is directed towards him by the other, less naïve characters, and dignifies him, by showing the emptiness and impoverishment of their worldview in comparison to Don Quixote’s. And if Kanye West does anything, it's show up, in a subtle but powerful way, the vapidity of the self-viewers, the real narcissists, whose constant self-consciousness, projected onto others, provides our culture with its desire to dissect how people come across, and our suspicion of any kind of sincerity and authenticity."
