Kanye's Trump Love Shouldn't Surprise Anyone: They're Made for Each Other
In 1968, Bob Dylan was living in Woodstock, New York, where he'd recently relocated to escape public scrutiny, focus on his new family and, eventually, record a shit-ton of world-historic music with the Band. On visits upstate, friends found Dylan relishing his new bucolic life, "contented to talk about stonemasonry more than Vietnam," as author Barney Hoskyns writes in Small Town Talk, his 2017 history of the Woodstock scene. "He even expressed support for George Wallace, the pro-segregationist governor of Alabama."
The idea of the man who wrote "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" big-upping the avatar for racist backlash may still shock a few people. But, of course, it was just another example of Dylan being Dylan, tweaking his friends and signaling his disdain for his role as spokesman for the Sixties left. In 1968, Dylan also knew his self-conscious bullshitting wouldn't make it much further than his dinner table. Fifty years later, Kanye West's dinner table is as big as his number of Twitter followers – and the wall between sincerity and irony, lazy contrarianism and genuinely unhinged belief, has essentially collapsed into a kind of dada hate speech.
Sure, there have been right-leaning rockers before. But the kind of raw hurt West has caused feels new, delivered with a blithe, vengeful narcissism that makes Morrissey look well-intentioned and levelheaded. It's hard to think of another artist at the top of his career who has alienated so many people so quickly for political reasons. To a generation of hip-hop fans, it's a seismic, even quasi-Oedipal betrayal – record-burning time, a moment where the only thing holding some people back from firing off anti-Kanye Twitter invective is that it might inadvertently offend the mentally ill.
But we also probably shouldn't be too shocked that pop's preeminent narcissist would be down with our infant emperor. Even before washed-up reality-TV star Trump morphed into birther-bully Trump, Kanye was already vaguely Trumpian – charging through his Olympian ascendance in a swirl of arrogance and ambition, giving his songs fashy win-at-all-costs titles like "Power" and "Stronger," ripping an award from the hands of a woman because that's what famous men get to do, firing off asshole aphorisms a mile a minute, weaponizing chaos and scandal.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/why-kanye-west-and-donald-trump-are-made-for-each-other-w519596?utm_source=rsnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=042718_11
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