is there anybody in there, Kanye West?

is his life playing out a bit like a certain rock opera?

in this awards season, when the american culture industry indicates to the rest of the anglosphere what music, tv, and film is worthy of our attention, the best summary of the 2025 Grammys came from a now deleted tweet which commented on how the award ceremony felt like it came from a place where politician Kamala Harris won the united states presidency.

one person who reminded us that we are living in the alternate timeline was the ‘nominated for best rap song’ Kanye West, who paraded his ‘wife’ on the red carpet in a naked outfit while striking Zoolanderesque poses before leaving the show to bask in the toxic glow of controversy generated from the stunt (Variety).

then for an encore Ye then proceeded to have one of his social media induced meltdowns ‘experiments’ (HotNewHipHop). it’s the easiest thing in the world to spew antisemitic hate on Twitter, pretending you are edgelording through it all and that you are actually of sound mind. but is it so easy to keep avoiding the consequences of your actions?

that said, if there is an experiment at play, i’m calling it like this: i think there is a parallel between the way Ye is playing out his career and a certain character from a rock opera. and if i am even halfway right, it will end badly for him.

i would like to establish a couple of things before continuing:

1. while Kanye has some salient gripes against the worst excesses of the entertainment industry curtailing artists’ creative freedoms and wealth generation, the obnoxious antics he deploys to make them are indefensible.

2. he is a not a genius. Leonard Cohen was right (he is not Picasso), as was Barack Obama (he is a jackass). i blame the industry and his most loyal fans for inflating his ego. i have long argued with anyone who would listen to stop lauding him or any other pop star with the tag (the problems with the term ‘genius’ in popular music is a theme for another essay). he has had a remarkable impact on 21st century hiphop, and his musical excellence is certifiable. but he’s also been consistently destroying his legacy since Yeezus, a incoherent mess made by a man high on endless hype and praise. overfeed a goat and at some point it’ll only produce sh*t in between bleats.

with those points in mind, i am convinced that Ye has never truly worked on himself psychoanalytically in light of losing his mother Donda. any and all observations about his relationship with his mother – especially from that jeen-yuhs documentary – suggest that he never had a bigger champion, someone who made him feel like the god he thinks he is now.

in this context, i can understand his sorrow over the circumstances under which Donda died. i think there is a legitimate lifetime’s worth of beef Ye could take up with the surgeon who last operated on her. but i think that in the aftermath of Donda’s death, he has tried to find her in every woman he’s dated, which is Oedipal, to say the least.

this was evident in his marriage to Kim Kardashian. i can believe Kim when she says she loved him, and that’s a heck of an achievement: it takes something special to convince a billionaire heiress to care about anyone over and above money. so, at the risk of sounding like a low rent Sigmund Freud, i believe that with her support Ye had an opportunity to process losing his mother and gain an emotional maturity that could only make him stronger, to paraphrase one of his songs.

but it was never on Kim to play a surrogate parent to Ye’s childishness. he chose to fall in with unsavoury influences, and in some ways exceeded their sickest dreams.

when i first caught sight of Kanye’s rants, i was immediately reminded of the character Pink in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. and at least on the face of it, much of his history from the loss of his mother dovetails with the rock opera. for those who unfamiliar with its tracklist, we are on side four, the stage at which he’s emerged from a cocoon of drug-addled depression to present as a fascist. the rally-style concert he held in 2022 in which he wore a White Lives Matter t-shirt reminds me in particular of the song In the Flesh (Part 2), in which Pink holds a neo-nazi rally to find out ‘where his fans really stand’, before proceeding to fantasise shooting those he views as degenerate.

except, unlike Pink, all this is not a hallucination for Ye. the whole world is watching his delusions in real time, and it seems as though no one can reach him now, as he is left waiting for the worms to come.

in The Wall, Pink gets himself into such a state that he finds himself on trial for his actions, eventually ordered by a judge to tear down the wall he built for himself, exposing him to the outside world in a sobering way. at this rate, Kanye might well be headed down the same path.