Things I Don't Get #8: Kanye West at Oxford

This might seem a softball post, because it's pretty easy to find confusion, and despair, in the thought of Kanye West lecturing at Oxford. I was going to put lecturing in quotation marks but I'm fairly sure every verb of which Mr. West is the subject ought to be rendered within quotations, and boldface as well. That observed, and Mr. West's distinct character aside, a few things about his prestigious appearance–as I understand it he does just that, appear, having superseded human locomotion after a long talk with Galileo–at the foremost academy of the English-speaking world. Now I'm not surprised that he's speaking at Oxford. He's already spoken at Harvard. I would be more surprised if they passed up the opportunity to entertain a speaker whose most recent work has been read by more than twenty five people, and enjoyed by anyone. No, what I'm chiefly surprised about is twofold.

First, his pattern of speech is fascinating. I've never heard anyone speak like this before.

I don't mean to chide his misuse of literally or modern lingo like illest. I'm saying that the man speaks the way people write. Badly, yes, but interestingly so. Who uses the word vibe as a verb, or creative as a substantive adjective? What an extraordinary discontinuity of ideas, each crashing into the next:

“I think that progression of mind with the advent of a human being named Drake (laughs, smirks, crowd laughs) you know, this idea of holding onto a number 1 spot. And then you get this guy that comes and blows out the water every number 1 of any band ever. Be it me, or Paul McCartney [laughs].

How can you explain that? I realize these are haphazardly gathered quotations, likely somewhat out of context, but that's not remarkable. It reads like a Quentin Tarantino script translated into Latin, run through Google Translate, and edited by a Post-Structuralist PhD candidate.

Second, I'm baffled not only that there are idea therein which you can discern, not comprehend of course, but discern, but also that I agree with these ideas.

For example:

One of my biggest Achilles heels has been my ego. And if I, Kanye West, the very person, can remove my ego, I think there’s hope for everyone.

Yes, the presence of Kanye West and Achilles in the same sentence is risible in the extreme, as is the vexatious question of how many Achilles heels one may have and whether the heel admits the aspect of scale, but that's not an awful analogy. He's talking about overcoming tragic flaws and he's obviously in possession of some self knowledge. Who can fault that?

West on authenticity:

I’d see toys that some people would buy for my daughter and I’d say this toy isn’t quality. I don’t want my daughter playing with this. There’s not enough love put into this, this is just manufactured with the will to sell, and not the will of inspiration.

Yes, again the short, staccato, statements are rife for Shatnerization, but isn't he right? Mass-produced products are soulless. I'm not saying the world would be wholly better off without them, or that everyone  should pay a lot of money for hand-made computer keyboards, but there is an important distinction to be made between the work of craftsmanship and mechanically-produced knockoffs. There is indeed a difference between Michelangelo's David itself and a concrete reproduction, between sculpted bas-relief and mold-formed plastic duplicates.

Now a sound bite on aesthetics:

Let’s have an NBC telethon moment, and say that beauty has been stolen from the people and is being sold back to them under the concept of luxury!

Again, the string of appositions NBC telethon moment is both amusing and indicative of an inability to organize and subordinate ideas, but the rest is not half-bad. The fact that luxury is not equivalent to beauty is a pertinent observation I think.

Waxing philosophical,

Time is the only luxury. It’s the only thing you can’t get back. If you lose your luggage – I’m not gonna say the obvious brand of luggage that I’d normally say because I’ve got a meeting with them soon – if you lose your expensive luggage at the airport, you can get that back. You can’t get the time back.

No, there's no context or larger argument and admittedly Mr. West's opulent lifestyle contradicts his sentiment, but for all the wacky celebrity babbling, he could say worse.

On intellectual property,

I love Steve Jobs, he’s my favorite person, but there’s one thing that disappoints me. When Steve passed he didn’t give the ideas up. That’s kinda selfish. You know that Elon’s like ‘yeah, take these ideas’. Maybe there are companies outside of Apple that could work on them and push humanity forward. Maybe the stock brokers won’t like that, the stock holders wouldn’t like that idea, but ideas are free and you can’t be selfish with them.

I agree. I agree? Again? There you have it: I agree with Kanye West, who also said:

She bought my daughter these three wolves, knowing the whole collection, that it’d play with the song Wolves, and based on this concept.

It's worth note, I think, that a man who seems not versed in the terms and traditions of, well let's say a lot, has somehow, perhaps independently, hit upon some serious ideas. So he's what happens when someone who doesn't know the days of the week tackles the problems of aesthetics and time, and it's tempting to ridicule the incoherence and eccentricity, say, by posting a picture of him tenderly cradling a fish or photoshopping him into the School of Athens, which I considered.

Yet here's a man with talent, thrust into celebrity and success, publicly trying to sort it out. Some formal education would help his cause, and I wish he'd go down that path so I could endure more of his music, the last of which I sampled lost me sixty seconds in at assquake.