Kanye West is my favorite living
artist. Not for his music—although I do enjoy a good bit of his music—but for
the wonderfully douchy, diamond-studded enamel it comes cased in. Every time he
highjacks an award ceremony or a charity fundraiser to go on a wildly inappropriate,
barely coherent diatribe, my heart rejoices. Every time he tells some
interviewer that “I’m doing pretty good as far as geniuses go” I feel the joy
of a beautiful spring sunrise. Every time he does something like replacing his
bottom row of teeth with diamonds, I feel the indescribable light of the Holy
Spirit shining down upon me. People hate him
with a truly amusing intensity. I see it even in my day-to-day life. Any time
that I am in a packed car and hear one of his songs come on the radio, the
surrounding voices merge into a single harmony of groans. Sometimes I will
admit to liking a few of his songs just to hear the car burst into cacophonous
jeers. The fact that one of the most critically acclaimed musicians of the past
ten years—his five solo studio albums have an average score of 84 on
Metacritic—can be reviled to the point that it pains people to admit to liking
his music, is indicative of a huge shift in the way that we consume
entertainment. And it’s something we’d better start getting used to.
When I was 12, my favorite rock
star of all time was Keith Moon. He was the loveable wild man behind the drum
kit. His crashing, out of control drum fills were what made The Who my favorite
band. He was the archetypical figure of excess that we all aspire to at such an
age—the girls, the drugs, the unhinged behavior and wild stories and
don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. But unlike a Keith Richards or Jim Morrison, it
didn’t seem like he took himself too seriously. Underneath the antics, it
seemed like he was probably a genuinely sweet guy who just wanted to have some
fun and make people smile. So for my 13th birthday, I asked for the recently
released Keith Moon biography. It was sure to be a fun read. Instead, what I
got was the story of a violent and emotionally unstable alcoholic who would
routinely beat his wife whenever he became jealous. After that I was unable to
listen to The Who the same way. And in a way, I’ve never listened to them the
same way since.
The reason for this is that the
relationship that you have with a favorite artist is existential in the
strictest sense. It exists only in that which they present to you. You say that
you like Marvin Gaye or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Humphrey Bogart, and although
you really mean that you like their work, your words are more telling than you
realize. After all, the aim of a piece of entertainment or art is to make a
personal connection with its consumer. You make a personal connection with a
book or an album or whatever, and those personal feelings transpose themselves,
not onto the paper of the book or the vinyl of the album, but onto the person
who created it. And so, a very narrow, one-way relationship is formed. It’s
like the relationship you had with your teachers when you were a kid—when you
loved Miss Smith and hated Mrs. Johnson. It didn’t matter that these personal assessments were based on the narrow criteria of their
teaching. You truly loved Miss Smith and you truly hated Mrs. Johnson. And if
you had run into either of them at the 7-11, it would have been a mind-boggling
experience indeed.
Another reason that people fail to
distinguish between their favorite musicians/writers/filmmakers as artists and
their favorite m/w/f as people is that they see that their favorite artist
seems to have it all figured out in his/her work. And so why wouldn’t that
apparent understanding translate itself to his/her personal life? They hear
John Lennon earnestly and beautifully articulating the values of peace and love
in his music, and assume that their was no way that he could have possibly been
a neglectful father and abusive husband. Or they see David Foster Wallace
endlessly wringing his hands over the way that women are treated by
chauvinistic men, and assume that there was no way that he could have been a
tactful and accomplished womanizer. But, after all, the creation of art is a
work of obsession. That sentence makes even me cringe in its pretentiousness,
but think about it: a writer spends years working on a book—making notes,
writing draft after draft late into the nights, rearranging the order, editing,
writing more drafts, etc. A musician spends months writing an album’s worth of
songs on the road, tweaking them and perfecting them during performance, changing
the lyrics at the last moment, and then spending weeks locked in a studio to
record the album. If there was not near-maniacal obsession with the work and
the subject matter, they would do what a normal person would do. They would
throw their hands up and go “fuck it” a few hours or days or weeks or months
into the process, and abandon the thing. Obsession is needed. And while the
person who is obsessed with, say, diet is likely to have some good insights on
how to cut down your sodium levels, in my experiences, the people who spend
weeks and months and years obsessing about what they eat, staying up late into
the night wringing their hands about it and becoming emotionally immersed in
the subject, are unlikely to have the most healthy relationship with food in
their own lives. Objectively speaking, it would only make sense that the same
would be true for the person obsessed with ethics or the sexual treatment of
women or the dangers of emotional codependence. But the nature of the
relationship one has with a favorite artist/entertainer obscures that truth.
For a long time this relationship
between consumer and the artist was kept fairly clean. Jimmy Page existed only
as the towering rock god, coming out of a mist of smoke on the poster on your
wall. Bob Dylan existed only as the chainsmoking young vagabond on the album
cover. John Cheever existed only as the black and white, kindly old man on the
back of your old copy of Falconer. It was easy to keep our idols. Left to our
own imaginations, we could mold our heroes in the image of their own creations.
And although it should be obvious that a distinction must be made between the
artist/entertainer and his work, it is not always so easy. Sometimes I find
myself reading some literary titan of centuries past, and I wonder if I would
be able to take their self-consciously profound musings on God and Human Nature
and Ethical Responsibility so seriously if they were no longer a LITERARY TITAN
and were just… some guy. If I could pick up a celebrity rag and see Walt
Whitman picking his nose while trying to work off his paunch on an exercise
bike, would I still be able to be so enraptured by his poetic declarations of
nature’s singular holiness? Would I be able to read Dostoevsky’s dialogues on
the beauty of faith and the meaning of suffering with such solemn seriousness
if I could turn on TMZ at night to get the scoop on his latest vodka-fuelled
gambling binge?
Well, that’s what we’re going to
have to find out. The age of an artist’s mystery is dead. The days of mythic
rock gods and mysterious literary figures are six feet under. They have been
buried by the information age of ubiquitous celebrity magazines, gossip
television, paparazzi, websites, blogs, facebook, twitters, and a thousand
other mediums to make sure that we can no longer hold our favorite entertainers
as idols or our favorite artists as heroes. Every abused girlfriend and slipped
racial slur and personal tragedy and arrogant quote and unfortunate full
frontal flash will be ours for the taking. Our insatiable appetite for gossip
has reached critical mass; our desire for personal tidbits on our artistic
idols has gotten so great that no a line must be drawn in the sand once and for
all to segregate an artist as a person from his work. In the coming years we
will have no choice but to finally give up our idols and accept the fact that
our favorite writer is just some guy and our favorite rock star may just be
some asshole.
Many times Kanye West has called
himself the defining voice of this generation, and in opening his mouth to say
such a douchy thing, he may just have created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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