Pessimistic Themes in Kanye West’s Necrophobic Aesthetic: Moving beyond Subjects of Perfection to Understand the New Slave as a Paradigm of Anti-Black Violence

Introduction

The release of Kanye West’s Yeezus was indelibly marked by the provocation of his hit song entitled “New Slaves,” which introduced a pessimistic terminology to capture the paradoxical condition whereby Black freedom from enslavement only resulted in the capturing of Black people psychically in the neo-liberal entanglements of poverty, servitude, and corporatism. His analysis, not unlike currently en vogue theories of Afro-pessimism or Critical Race Theory’s (racial) realist lens, maintains that despite all the rhetoric and symbols of progress to the contrary, Black people are simply not free in America. West’s performance of “New Slaves” on Saturday Night Live was only amplified by the “Not For Sale” insignia projected behind him.¹ West’s “Not For Sale” insignia was a symbol of independence, as well as a public declaration of his anti-corporatism. It signaled West’s resistance against com-modification, and announced his confrontational posture toward the rap industry; a posture that ignited the Hip-Hop community and academia alike over this artistic radicalism. However, such a provocation, despite its rhetorical flare and allure, was immediately cast as disingenuous and inauthentic.

Kanye West is a Black man torn: at moments by his brilliance and at times by his banality. The lack of attention to his discography in Hip-Hop studies and his performances in philosophical aesthetics is not because his work is not worthwhile; to the contrary, West’s analyses of anti-Black death, corporatism, and neo-liberal aspiration are enough to warrant more than one serious study of his art. The refusal to study West is not at all due to his lack of correctness about the world around him. In reality, West is not studied because his body, his Black male body, lacks the symbolic currency to motivate reverence for his thinking. Regardless of his popularity, West’s ideas, specifically his analysis of the New Slave, implicate all arenas of knowledge and political production hailing from the academy, and while his life and public proclamations are at tension with some of his work, it nonetheless necessitates serious study, rather than sophistry and condemnation. This article is an attempt to draw out some of the themes concerning anti-Black racism in West’s “New Slaves.” Unlike many scholarly works on Hip-Hop, this article does not attempt to center the artist, in this case Kanye West, as the sole creator of the art, but rather evaluates his aesthetics as a starting point of dialogue between Black men about death. This article explores the articulations, the signification(s), and the unexplored meanings of his work given that it was co-authored with Che “Rhymefest” Smith, and remixed by Jasiri X. It is my view that West’s work is an attempt to articulate the continuation of Black enslavement despite the artificial political and social changes that are attributed to racial progress and social equality through the lens of (the anxiety and fears endemic to) Black manhood. West’s aesthetics communicate the ever-looming threat of death, violence, and erasure seemingly married to the Black male body.

On Subjects Par Excellence: Dismissing West for His Corporate Dreams While Embracing Beyoncé as the Deserving Capitalist

Less than a month after West’s Saturday Night Live performance, Vladimir Lyubovny (DJ Vlad) conducted an interview with Charlamagne Tha God, who criticized West’s newfound radicalism as little more than a publicity stunt, saying: “[Kanye’s] a Gemini, so he’s two sided; so I guess it’s like two different personalities … but you can’t denounce corporations when you are in business with corporations. … [D]on’t be a fake revolutionary for profit. Kanye is being a walking contradiction. We are all walking contradictions but damn don’t be so blatant with it” (Charlamagne Tha God).² Similarly, Jessica Ann Mitchell’s piece entitled “Kanye’s Frantz Fanon Complex” argued that “Kanye’s commentary has shifted from calling out racism because it’s wrong, to calling out racism because he didn’t get a seat at...