Muristek
The rapper and businessman is the focus of an intimate three-part documentary, premiering at Sundance, following his highs and lows
Much like Jesus Christ, the friction between Kanye West and the general public comes from an attunement to the grandeur of his own destiny that can read like delusional arrogance. His first album as a rapper, 2004’s The College Dropout, is littered with nods to his significant place in history and how they foretell an auspicious future. He mentions his mother’s arrest at “the tender age of six” for Oklahoma City’s sit-in protests, declaring “with that in my blood, I was born to be different”. As he’d have it, it was no mere coincidence that on the fateful night of his near-death experience in a 2002 car crash, he was brought to the same hospital where Notorious BIG drew his final breaths. In one of the comedic skits breaking up the tracklist, a snot-nosed character delivers a line that rings out like a broad artistic statement of purpose for its writer: “This was meant to be.”
And indeed, it was. Many of the claims that skeptics took as boastful chest-puffing – that he’d be one of the greatest emcees to ever pick up a mic, that he’d revolutionize hip-hop and fashion in his own image, that he would attain such notability as to make him one of the main characters of planet Earth – were borne out with time and recast as extreme yet correct self-assurance in the face of insecurity. (Crucially, The College Dropout is also shot through with feelings of inadequacy, West’s anxiety about living up to the stratospheric standards he feels God has set for him.) Though his belief in himself may have been expressed in the language of borderline-pathological ego, his later successes retroactively transformed that mentality into a defiant assertion of worth. The future’s context brings clarity to the past deeds and words of a confounding, complex figure, but in the new documentary jeen-yuhs, that cuts both ways to shed some insight on the chaos that’s engulfed West as of late.
Continue reading...