Walk with me for a second and place yourself in the shoes of an adolescent Oliver Song; eighth grade, to be exact. Your musical portfolio is underdeveloped – let’s just say, defined by the angsty laments of My Chemical Romance and the like (further examples omitted out of embarrassment), the head-banging counterculture of Slayer and Megadeth and the depressingly earnest Midwest emo of Modern Baseball and American Football. You firmly believe that rap is, indeed, crap. That is, until you sit down and take a chance on the Murakami-adorned tapestry that decorated the cover of Kanye West’s “Graduation.” 

You are hooked, and this obsession carries you into high school, as you envelop yourself in the vast discography of Mr. West and all his contemporaries. Despite your devout atheism, you suspend your disbelief to tune in to every Sunday Service livestream he performs, now as a cultural messiah (?), and you genuinely enjoy the gospel trap record he subsequently releases. You religiously follow every single listening party from the Donda era, staying up late and attempting to find meaning in the madness. 

This obsession has become fanatical, and you’re okay with that because the man is just a misunderstood genius after all, and you defend him, through thick and thin (You guys know his mother died, right?). It’s not until college that you feel that separation begin to wane, slowly but surely, as the corresponding quality of work consecutively begins to suffer until you can no longer stand to hear his name in discourse, tainted by his outlandish and otherwise crude remarks. At this point, you can no longer bear to attach yourself to this cultural pariah, equally fascinated and disgusted by the sheer depravity this name you once revered, idolized, even, has become synonymous with. 

I’m sure you’re already intimately familiar with Kanye West. It’s very difficult not to be, considering just how dominant he has been culturally over the last two or three decades, but I want to particularly illustrate how his journey through the very fabric of our popular culture signifies a larger, more prescient problem societally. 

The degradation of his public persona was a slow and arduous one that becomes more and more depressing the longer you think about it. Always the eccentric oddball, Kanye never quite fit in with his early 2000s hip-hop contemporaries. In an era dominated by the braggadocious opulence of heavy gold chains and silver rims, Kanye would stick out like a sore thumb in his pink polo and backpack. As he established himself in a genre that instinctively rejected him through tireless and groundbreaking production, insistent attempts to get in the booth instead of behind it and an unflinching auteurist drive, Kanye began to change.

This change was not inherently malicious – in fact, it became an expectation throughout his career, as he pioneered sub-genres in both music and fashion alike. But when you look back at the eager-eyed “College Dropout” Kanye, pink polo and all, it becomes heart-wrenching to witness this slow, steady morph into what we see today. Now corrupted by the very allure he once rapped about having one day, we as a culture have not only watched but encouraged this full-fledged descent into delusional mania. 

It’s difficult to sympathize with a man who has continuously said and done so much harm. Deplorable and unforgivable, to be sure, but the pedestal we have put him on, willingly or not, has become the crux he now gets to lean on, because he knows that we are still endlessly fascinated by him. And even though he might have opened a whole new artistic door for me and so many others (CAN, Arthur Russell, Labi Siffre, some of my favorite artists, all introduced to me through Kanye samples), there is a moral responsibility to detach ourselves from the shackles of celebrity culture that has become so prevalent and dangerous.

I still love Kanye, I probably will for a long time. “Late Registration” is one of the finest records of the 2000s and hip-hop as a genre. However, every time I revisit it, or any of the other pre “Donda” albums, these listens, once exhilarating forays into the mind of a constantly reinventing genius unconfined by the societal limitations that have confined so many others, have since become depressing recollections of a bygone era, tinged with the unshakable deterioration of that very same dissimilitude that for so long made him so remarkably undefinable. I’ll always have those memories and will eternally be grateful for the impact he made on my own artistic journey. But man, watching him tear his legacy apart, every few months it feels like, has been brutal to watch in real time.