Let’s dispel the fiction that Kanye West doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing, at least that’s what I thought before the artist’s most recent episode.
West performed on “Saturday Night Live” on Sept. 29, setting off the musician’s latest scene. The Chicago rapper was scheduled to be the week’s musical performer after Ariana Grande abruptly bowed out. West appeared alongside Lil Pump and performed “I Love it.”
West, dressed as a bottle of Perrier with Pump dressed as Fiji water, delivered a half-hearted performance of an already unimaginative collaboration.
West closed the performance by saying, “I wanna cry right now. Black men in America, you’re supposed to keep what you feel inside right now. And the liberals bully you and tell you what you can and cannot wear, where you and they can’t not stare. And they look at me and say, ‘It’s not fair. How the hell did you get here?’”
Then wearing a Make America Great Again hat, Kanye started again during the closing statements with an impromptu, politically charged rant.
“Actually, blacks weren’t always Democrats. It’s like a plan they did to take the fathers out the homes and promote welfare. Does anybody know about that? That’s the Democratic plan. And what this shows is we can’t be controlled by monolithic thought. You can’t always have when you have a black subject matter like Cosby that you have to have a black comedian talk about it,” he said before motioning toward African-American comedian Michael Che.
The studio fell mostly silent during West’s rant, with only occasional interruptions of boos and and a few audience members’ light applause breaking the silence.
At this point, it’s not unreasonable to chalk all this up as attention-getting ploys by the seasoned provocateur to promote his upcoming album “Yahndi,” which, at the time, was set to release the same night of his SNL performance but is now slated for Nov. 23 later this year.
But then, he goes on a bizarre, 10-minute monologue in the Oval Office just two weeks after. Which, if anything, just goes to show if you want a White House visit, all you really gotta do is stroke the President’s ego.
During the meeting, Kanye likened MAGA hats to Superman.
“There was something about putting this hat on that made me feel like Superman,” West said.
West also said Trump is on a hero’s journey saying, “Trump is on his hero’s journey right now. He might not have thought he’d have a crazy mother f—-r like me [supporting him.]”
Following backlash from his presidential visit, Kanye went on a one-week hiatus from social media, only to reemerge with another episode, only this time, about mind control.
“I just want to talk about mind control,” West began in a series of Twitter videos. “You know, when people try to influence you through social media and try to tell you what to do, or if you post something that’s like, positive on Instagram, it gets taken down if it’s not a part of a bigger agenda.”
Kanye went on to describe his IQ as “straight up Sigmund Freud, Tesla vibes.” and said how letting others influence your opinion is like having someone “cut your skull open and someone, like, touch your brain with their hand.”
The artist claims he’s not crazy, saying how the media has portrayed his is “all part of a system to control your mind. To control my mind. To make me look crazy to you.”
But at this point, Kanye doesn’t really pass as a troll anymore. He probably needs help.
