Maybe it’s time to mute Kanye and just wait for the music to come out.
Kanye West told artist Axel Verdoordt in a recent interview that he hopes his work “represents humanity for the next 500 to 1,000 years.” The quote reminded me of a musing I’ve always had when it comes to Kanye: If we were waaay in the future, in a time when white supremacy has hopefully been dismantled, Kanye’s push for free thought and idealism above all would be commendable. In 2018, however, he’s continuing to make a fool of himself.
He once tweeted that Twitter was “designed specifically with me in mind just my humble opinion hahhhahaaaahaaa humble hahahahhahaahaaaa.” In theory, Twitter is an ideal vessel for the impulsive, outspoken artist to have 24/7 access to the public. But eight years later, his tweets are showing that we don’t at all want to know what he’s thinking — unless it’s music-related.
On Sunday, he tweeted that “people demonize people and then they demonize anybody who sees anything positive in someone whose been demonized.”
That’s true. But the problem with the tweet is that he’s not merely philosophizing, he’s weaponizing it against people who were legitimately upset that on Saturday he expressed admiration for conservative pundit Candace Owens. Owens is a conservative Black woman who even fellow Republican Eugene Craig called a “Tomi Lahren in Blackface.” In her bluntly-titled I Don’t Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy video, she opined that Black Lives Matter organizers should “extend their slogan to ‘Don’t Shoot, Because We’ve Already Got It Covered.”
