What It Feels Like to be Kanye West is What It Feels Like to be American

by Sunny Biswas

So how do you feel if you’re Kanye West (or at least “Kanye West,” Twitter personality)? Well, you know you’re amazing and no one feels worse about it than you. You’re a superstar and no one could possibly be more alone. Acknowledging this, your heart swells like you’re becoming a better person while all the time you remain convinced that you were already awesome anyway. Self-pity mixed with delusions of grandeur — the identifying marks of a very particular type of asshole who feels like he should be congratulated simply for meaning well.

And nowhere do you get such a good approximation of what it feels like to be Kanye than that brew of sex, sentimentality and synapse-exploding amazingness that makes up the video for “All of the Lights.”

So how does the video simulate Kanye World? To start off, there are the Gaspar Noe-inspired titles and general war-on-epileptic strobe light vibe which is pretty much guaranteed to blow minds. There’s Rihanna looking so insanely hot that the only reference point I can think of is the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then maybe count in there the obligatory Michael Jackson references (Kanye on a cop car and Kid Cudi in red leather). Everything is as awesome and ridiculous and overwrought as something directed by a dude whose first name is Hype should be. And awesome, ridiculous and overwrought are just other names for the Kanye West persona. But there’s also this adorably serious-looking little kid wandering around, and that’s the part I find troubling.

Let me insert here that I view celebrity Kanye West differently than I do Kanye West the artist (Kanye West the real-life person is of course, at this time, unknowable to us). At his best, Kanye the musician writes songs that are self-aware and self-deprecating, traits you don’t associate with Kanye the celebrity. Take “All of the Lights” as a song — a huge backing track behind a sordid story about a deadbeat dad and abusive husband. The lyrics work to undercut the epic-ness of the music, an action-movie soundtrack for an indie flick. But the video is all Kanye the celebrity. Everything huge! The BIGGEST hip-hop star, the HOTTEST female pop singer, the CRAZIEST visuals and, uh, KID CUDI. And if last year taught us anything, all caps is how Kanye the celebrity interprets the world.

This would be fine on its own — making people feel like superheroes for three to five minutes at a time is one of the greatest things that pop music does. But the addition of sappiness to the mix in the form of that little girl is toxic here. Cheap emotion against such an expensive backdrop makes the emotions throw shadows that are as huge as everything else on display. So Kanye isn’t just better than you at being amazing, he’s better than you at feeling things too. It’s an unpleasant reminder that one of the great things that pop also does is evoke the mindset of a teenager. That can be beautiful, but in this case it comes off as one of the ugly parts of being young and stupid enough to believe that you somehow feel everything more strongly than anyone else in the world ever has. That your experience is more meaningful than everyone else’s. Self-satisfaction along with self-pity — an unlikely sounding but common enough combination. Which, by the way, is also a good capsule description of the mindset of the classic ugly American.

By my completely scientific and comprehensive analysis, one of the most common stereotypes of Americans that abounds in the world relates to that mode of self-congratulatory complacency (and it’s a criticism Americans make about other Americans, too). We defund Planned Parenthood because we’re against killing potential babies, but we can’t bother to do anything about actual ones. We’re all for democracy in Egypt even though two months ago we didn’t care that we were propping up the dictatorship. Wikileaks is the best thing ever, but what do you mean we’re supposed to do something with that information? We are, without a doubt, a force for good even though it looks suspiciously like we’re not doing very much.

This is obviously not true for all (or even, most) people. The events in Wisconsin the past couple weeks have shown that people are willing to take action beyond writing an angry blog comment. (And in fact, being convinced that out there somewhere exists a group of faceless, apathetic assholes who are ruining things for everyone with their hypocrisy while you don’t do very much yourself is a pretty good sign that you’re infected.) But trying to do more than care — to actually risk looking like an idiot (or worse) and take actions that will affect people other than yourself — is an impulse that has to be cultivated and tended to and guarded against all kinds of types of laziness and apathy.

As Kanye West the celebrity could tell you, it’s really easy to see the disconnect between how much you care and how much the world cares that you care as proof that your greatness is being unfairly rejected. Realizing that you are not amazing sitting by yourself and feeling very strongly about things, that you in fact have to work with other people to accomplish something in order to be considered a worthwhile human being is one of those things that adults are supposed to do. That it’s really hard to do all that looks like a worse excuse every next year. A music video might not trick anyone into thinking otherwise, but we should still be suspicious of anything that tries to make us to feel things without trying very hard at it. The cynicism at work there is all kinds of ugly. Which is probably all just a very long way of saying that Hype Williams should have kept that adorable kid the fuck out of the video.

Sunny lives in Austin where he works in a lab. He writes stuff here.