The Cultural Impact of Kanye West

Kanye West’s first collaboration with Jay Z on The Dynasty: Roc La Familia (2000) gave an early inkling on what would be the producer’s contribution to the sonic excavation of the Soul music tradition of the late 1960s and 1970s. The track “This Can’t be Life” features Beanie Sigel and Scarface (whose The Fixx, West would later contribute production), and is based on a sample from Harold Melvin and the Bluenote’s “I Miss You.” Though the song is not significant within the larger scope of West’s career, it placed Jay Z in a distinctly soulful context that would form the basis of the rapper’s career-defining The Blueprint (2001) as well as frame the early stages of West’s own solo career. At the foundation of West’s music prior to the release of his 2007 recording Graduation is recovery of the aesthetic possibilities of Soul music—a broadly conceived attempt to elevate Soul music as a classical American form, rooted in what Guthrie Ramsey Jr. calls the “community theaters” of Black life.¹ Additionally, West’s attention to the Soul archive was also a method to balance his status as one of the most recognizable mainstream rap producers—a legitimate Pop star—with his creative devotion to laboring as a “Crate Digger,” as evidenced by famous lyrics that reference long periods of seclusion and a Cosby show reference to living in a different world.

Kanye West is arguably one of the most talented figures of his generation. In his relatively short career, he has gone from no-name beat producer to one of popular culture’s “it” kids. From his successful music career to his paparazzi/fantasy relationship with reality TV “star” Kim Kardashian, West has parlayed his 15 minutes quite well. In this essay, I examine how Kanye West embodies the zeitgeist of this particular moment. In reading West, I turn to America’s classic past time—baseball. It is in baseball, through another larger-than-life personality, that I consider how Kanye embodies the cultural climate of this era and represents what can be called an asterisk genius.

The emerging contemporary cultural logic of Africa and the African Diaspora is reflected in what some scholars refer to as afrofuturism. In the past, afrofuturism was primarily regarded as a cultural mode of expression and philosophically as a form of aesthetics. However, contemporary afrofuturism is maturing in the area of metaphysical components such as cosmogony, cosmology, speculative philosophy, and philosophy of science (Szwed, 1998). Currently, a dominant expression of afrofuturism lies in its aesthetics. What is less understood is how afrofuturism is related to the cultural production of hip-hop music. That is, how afrofuturism is linked to the hip-hop culture that emerged during the decline of urban inner city cores in the latter half of the twentieth century and its digital transition in the twenty-first century, especially in visual culture. Previously, Galli (2009) illustrated connections between technological advances, artistic creation, and hip-hop culture; however, its Eurocentric construction of black culture and limited understanding of the historical development of black music limit its utility. This chapter asserts that the afrofuturist digital aesthetic perspectives, along with hip-hop culture, are impulses of Africa and the African Diaspora. They are both conscious and unconscious manifestations of “black technocultural syncretism” made possible through the proliferation of digital media as part of what some scholars refer to as postmodernity (Everett, 2009; Harvey, 1990).

The NBC sitcom A Different World, a spin-off of The Cosby Show, aired from 1987 to 1993. Watching that show every week undoubtedly influenced my desire to earn a college degree, but it was not the source of that desire. My dream actually began with The Cosby Show. Not knowing Dr. Huxtable was an OB/GYN, I wanted to be a pediatrician, because I thought they delivered and cared for babies. I will always be indebted to Bill Cosby for giving young blacks like myself a glimpse into college dormitories, cafeterias, and classrooms on A Different World. Because of him, I saw black professors for the first time. I believed that I could be a doctor. Since Kanye West is only four years older than I am, I can assume he also watched, or at least knew about, The Cosby Show and A Different World. The difference between the two of us, however, is that he didn’t need a television to witness blacks working in higher education. His mother, the late Dr. Donda West, was a professor of English at Clark Atlanta University and Chair of the English Department at Chicago State University before retiring to serve as his manager. Especially because of his background, then, many of individuals with strong academic sensibilities may be inclined to take offense to what appears to be an anti-academic stance infusing his first three albums: College Dropout (2004), Late Registration (2005), and Graduation (2007), hereafter referred to as “the higher education trilogy” or “the trilogy.”

On February 26, 2012, a black male walked home from a convenience store, traversing the sidewalk area of his father’s fiancé’s gated community in Sanford, Florida. He was carrying seemingly harmless items: an Arizona soft drink, a bag of Skittles, and a cell phone. As reported in a CNN article written by Greg Botelho, an armed, non-Black male, Mr. George Zimmerman, was surveying the neighborhood when he discovered the black male, identified as Trayvon Martin. Martin allegedly invoked suspicion, prompting Zimmerman to place a call to the Sanford Police Department exclaiming the following: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around.” Although instructed not to do so, Zimmerman followed and confronted Martin. Minutes later, a scuffle ensued and Martin’s lifeless body lay face down on the community’s well-maintained lawn, where according to Zimmerman, he should not have been walking.

On September 2, 2005, Kanye West appeared on an NBC benefit telecast for Hurricane Katrina victims. West, emotionally charged and going off script, blurted out, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Early in his rapping career and fresh off the critically acclaimed sophomore album Late Registration, West thrusts himself into the public eye—debatably either on accident or purposefully—as a seemingly budding cultural-political pundit. For the audience, West’s growing popularity and visibility as a rapper automatically translated his concerns into a statement on behalf of all African Americans. West, however, quickly shies away from being labeled a leader, disclaiming his outburst as a personal opinion. In retrospect, West states: “When I made my statement about Katrina, it was a social statement, an emotional statement, not a political one” (Scaggs, 2007). Nevertheless, his initial comments about the Bush administration’s handling of Katrina positioned him both as a producer of black cultural expression and as a mediator of said blackness. It is from this interstitial space that West continued to operate moving forward, using music— and the occasional outburst—to identify himself as transcending the expectations placed upon his blackness and masculinity.

In an MTV News interview, Kanve West had this to say:

Man I think as straight men we need to take the rainbow back because it’s fresh. It looks fresh. I just think that because stereotypically gay people got such good like style that they were smart enough to take a fresh-ass logo like the rainbow and say that it’s gonna be theirs. But I was like “Man I think we need to have the rainbow”—the idea of colors, life and colors and stuff, I mean how is that a gay thing? Colors? Having a lot of colors is gay? (2009)

Despite debuting at the number 1 spot on the Billboard charts, the reaction to Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013) has been diverse (Makarechi, 2013). While some critics have embraced Kanye’s brash political commentary on race (Nigatu, 2013), many academics have mobilized an intersectional moralization, pitting his very real material account of the racism that Blacks, especially Black men, suffer against his sexual engagement with women. From being called a violent misogynist (Shird, 2013) to sex crazed (Johnston, 2013), Black progressives and feminists echoing the haloed/hollowed values of their respective disciplinary/political ideologies—ideologies that offer little to nothing to Black Americans, especially the worsening plight of Black men—have condemned Kanye West’s message as little more than the patriarchal ramblings of a power-hungry deviant. Such a condemnation, which exceeds the utility of a corrective criticism, does not aim to transform or interpret Kanye’s sentiments to more ameliorative ends, but rather seeks to eliminate such sentiments because they allegedly come from a pathological/immoral/Black/masculine mind.¹ Unlike much of the academic criticism that claims to be in the business of antiracism and critical of white supremacy, but is nonetheless approved of by white journals, white readers, and white colleagues, West completely disregards the morality that sustains the academic’s loyalty to the preapproved disciplinary rhetoric used to convey disdain, and the bourgeois lexicon of academic pretense created to criticize oppression and social inequity.

There is an axiom that says all books are about other books. This proposition is supported by the fact that the archetypes found in the earliest of recorded literature continue to (re)appear in contemporary literature. Following the supposition that music lyrics, when read through a literary lens, also fall into the contemporary literature category, it is safe to posit that many of the archetypes of classical literature appear in contemporary music. Further, it can be assumed that there exist many songs, as there exist many poems (and other artworks in other forms), “about” classical literature, intentionally or otherwise, that can be used as a tool to make the canonized works more accessible to many students if we open our eyes to the existent possibilities. The popularity (and co-optation in many instances) of hip-hop culture in pop culture places rap music lyrics at the forefront of youthful preoccupation. The storied career of Kanye West places him in great company with moguls such as Jay-Z and Sean Combs not only as a hip-hop tastemaker, but also as a cultural icon with the ability to affect other areas of art and “everyday” living. West has been responsible, almost single-handedly, for cultural movements (progressions, even) in hip-hop and popular culture over the span of his career.

Born alongside neoliberalism during the late twentieth century, hip-hop exemplifies capitalist interactions involving stigmatized bodies and success. Kanye West’s interruption of Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) reveals modern manifestations of privilege hidden behind the ease of consumption allocated by competition in a meritocratic free market system. Regardless of the race of the interrupter, outrage at the obvious rudeness would have resulted in societal castigation. Race came in to play because West’s gesture broke a multitude of social conventions. Swift—the first country singer to win a Video Music Award—was interrupted by West, a musical laborer engaged in traditional forms of black critique. ¹ West’s actions, albeit rude, can be understood as a defensive reaction to covert and overt messages of racial privilege evidenced by the selection of Taylor Swift as the award recipient. Championing Beyoncé Knowles, West seized power over the cultural/musical productions under review and interjected a critically conscious discourse of resistance into the neoliberal cultural celebration at hand. Despite being lynched by society at large for his act, West’s aspirations for equity and power were not crushed.² Cognizant of the rules of meritocracy and consumer culture, West continues to master the meritocratic merry-go-round with a pragmatic and relative form of humanism predicated on a simple premise: Neoliberalism is incongruent with democratic enfranchisement, and meritocracy is nothing more than a fantastic lie obscuring the oppressive social realities of the United States.

Kanye West’s album, Yeezus (2013), marks a divisive point within West’s career because of its raw and minimalistic sound as well as its unapologetic and antagonistic message. Although West has pushed the boundaries within his previous artistic work and public life, his creation of Yeezus as well as his media-magnified life defiantly operates outside societal expectations and boundaries (Caramanica, 2013; Makarechi, 2013). Through his career as a producer, rapper, singer, director, writer, artist, designer, celebrity, and social critic, West has solidified his position as a facet of American culture. As a black male living in the twenty-first century, West additionally reflects the complex race relations that continue to exist. Following Gilroy (1993), West creates “routes/roots” through his artistic work that map his own relationship to modernity as he makes connections between the past and present to construct his individual and collective identity as a black male. West’s artistic work utilizes his individual agency to create a critical message that envisions possibilities for societal transformation. The power of West’s artistic work comes from his ability to unite aesthetic creations with the cognitive and pragmatic capabilities of his audience. Tyrangiel (2005) makes the point that “In music, West’s juxtapositions make your head nod.