One afternoon in late February 2011, designer John Galliano sat drunk and drugged on the terrace of Café La Perle in Paris and hurled a series of anti-Semitic insults at the occupants of an adjoining table. The speech was recorded and spread like wildfire. Immediately, the couturier was fired from Dior and ostracized. It seemed that his career was dead forever, but three years later he was hired by the firm Martin Margiela and the magazine fashion he offered her his pages so she could remind the world how sorry she was for her actions. A decade after that fateful February afternoon in the French capital, books are already being published again celebrating his talent and articles are being written that remind us that perhaps he was the last free designer. This week, Kanye West (Atlanta, 45 years old), one of the greatest hip hop artists of the 21st century, has entered a spiral of foolishness and anti-Semitism that has cost him, among many things, his lucrative agreement with Adidas. Immediately after the German firm issued a statement announcing the end of his creative and commercial relationship with Yeezy, the rapper’s firm, he ceased to be a billionaire. His career as a musician, as a designer and as a celebrity – is no longer worth even survivors— is finished: The only question is: in 10 years will we talk about Kanye the same way we talk about Galliano today or will we have to wait for the rapper to die before we can once again celebrate the talent of an artist who has won 22 Grammy Awards?
“To me, Kanye is the greatest artist of our generation,” Nick Cave said Thursday in London. “But his comments are a disgrace. Does this person really need to come down from the heights to this tedious shit that we have heard so many times already? It disappoints me a lot and, for a while, it will be very difficult for me to listen to his records”. The difference between the current case of Kanye West and that of other artists who have been involved in similar controversies in recent years is that, at the moment, only Cave seems to remember the artistic talent of the accused. And the musician, furthermore, does so with absolute good sense, aware that having recorded Late Registration either My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy It does not exempt you from being a dangerous idiot, something that is still difficult to understand today for many followers of Louis CK, Woody Allen or Picasso.
Kanye West’s certified artistic death this week has been five years in the making. The beginning of this spiral of nonsense, outbursts and flirtations with all kinds of disasters coincides with the release of his first bad album. 2017 was going to be something of a Jacobean year for West. He had bought a ranch in Wyoming, was extremely happy with his wife, Kim Kardashian, and was preparing the release of his new album. Yewho was going to follow Yandhihis much-heralded sequel to one of his most successful feature films, Yeezus. In addition, he was going to produce music for colleagues like Pusha T or Kid Cudi that would be published on his label, GOOD Music, which would make him the most modern and successful hip hop reference of the moment. the launch of Ye he was late once, and again, and again. Along the way, West began to make absolutely delirious use of his Twitter account (from which he was expelled and, recently, reinstated to the satisfaction of Elon Musk, its new owner): he even published that he was preparing a philosophy book that would help everyone to be happier and, to the most diligent, even to be as happy as he is. When the album was finally released, the disappointment was monumental. The only good thing about that album was the phrase that could be read on the cover: “I hate being bipolar, it’s wonderful”. Yandhi never saw the light.
Welcome back to Twitter, my friend!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 8, 2022
Until that moment, the musical career of the man from Atlanta had been practically impeccable. In 2000 he collaborated on TheBlueprint, the album that reinvigorated Jay-Z’s career. He wrote songs for Alicia Keys or Janet Jackson, but, curiously, he did not get a record deal to release an album under his name because the labels did not see in him the badass type that hip hop of the time demanded. In 2004 he finally released his first solo album, The College Dropout. Immediately, he became one of the greats. It was precisely in 2011, while Galliano was hurling anti-Semitic insults, that he reached artistic and commercial heaven: the first, with the memorable tour to present his fifth feature film, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasyfor much of the press, the best Show of hip hop history; the second, with the long watch the thronealong with his friend and collaborator Jay-Z.
From the beginning of his solo career, when he got upset and stormed out of the room when he didn’t win an award at the American Music Awards, it was clear that his was a personality, to say the least, peculiar. But in the last five years the spiral has been accelerating and has been destroying her personal and professional life in parallel and almost at the same rate. He divorced Kim Kardashian, he ran for the US presidency, he released her worst album, donda (2021), which arrived, of course, after infinite delays. A year later he published the sequel to donda and, for the first time since it debuted in 2004, no one cared.
In 2020, Kim Kardashian, still married to the musician, released this message on social networks: “As many of you know, Kanye has bipolar disorder. Anyone who has it or has a loved one in their life who has it knows how incredibly complicated and painful it is to understand.” The words were reproduced by the media, including the BBC, which in its web piece accompanied the story with the testimony of a young bipolar woman: “I have done things that I will regret for years.” One can only hope that one day Kanye West can say the same. Meanwhile, fans of his music can only feel the same thing that the artist expressed on the cover of that distant and forgotten Ye: “We hate Kanye West, he’s wonderful.”
#rise #fall #Kanye #West #important #hip #hop #artist #century #outcast #future