ESC

Is Kanye West’s Recent Heel-Turn Actually Perfomance Art?

There’s a new wrinkle in the Kanye West insanity tour with Twitter user @Snowcone965 presenting a very plausible argument that West’s current heel-turn is actually a piece of performance art inspired by Andy Kaufman, Joseph Beuys and David Hammons.

Are you following along so far? Kanye is friends with Tremaine Emory, who tweeted a spade emoji in response to Kanye West tweeting about performance artists Joseph Beuys and David Hammons. Beuys locked himself in a room with a coyote as a performance on healing racism by taming the coyote with the power of love. It’s some next-level Sailor Moon stuff, but done well before Sailor Moon was a thing.

Here’s the heart of the theory. If you combine Kanye’s love of these artists, along with Andy Kaufman, his tweets about originality being overrated, which I assumed just meant he liked the recent Marvel movies, and his recent behavior hanging out with people like Candice Owens, you could reasonably assume West is recreating I Like America and America Likes Me with alt-right shitheads in the role of the coyote.

That is a bit of an unusual response to a tweet from Emory. “The Prestige” doesn’t really have an alternate meaning, it’s not like Kanye is getting a lot of accolades for palling around with the MAGA idiots.

I kind of like the idea that Kanye and Emory are going with the long troll here. I can’t guess what the end goal is here, but Kanye has really shown how willing everyone has been to entirely change their view of Kanye West because he said some things about politics they liked or disliked.

Kanye is a musician and shoe salesman, not a candidate for the Senate, so why do we actually care if he likes Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders? Does it change his music? It must, because all these right-wingers who were calling West’s rap trash a few weeks ago are rushing out to buy his albums today, and people who called him a genius don’t want to listen to his new music.

Also, this does track with Kanye. He has said he’s a fan of performance art and if there’s thing that’s easy to gather about Kanye is he doesn’t want to be known as a great musician, he wants to be considered a serious artist and genius whom people respect for his ideas. And if it isn’t true, well, we just gave Yeezy a huge out when he wants to come back to his senses and resume his normal life.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments