![]() All of which remains true, although with album after album over at least the past five years, his creative vitality seemed to be diminishing in direct proportion to the embiggening of his jackassitude.īut something snapped for me on Thursday night, during the third and as it turns out final listening party (in Chicago this time). Plus, of course, he was one of the most talented and influential creative forces in hip-hop, the definitive popular art form of the era. Also, for a long while, it was hard not to chalk some of West’s specific jackassery up to what emerged as untreated mental illness. (Maybe we’re better off when politicians are dull and humorless, causing fewer disastrous, sulky side effects.) Still, jackass-dom is so common among celebrities and often overestimated in its actual world importance. I always suspect this is a fundamental reason that an anti-Democrat grudge festered in West and bloomed into MAGA-hat-rocking Trump support, much the way Trump’s own political career was arguably directly caused by Obama’s zingers at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ dinner. As early as 2009, no less a master of rap beef than Barack Obama called West a jackass, a verdict the 44th president reconfirmed to The Atlantic in 2012. This, too, has been the Kanye Question for many years. You’d want to say, “Do we really have to give that son of a bitch the time of day, again?” But then again, that book might turn out to be The Executioner’s Song, the nonfiction novel that Joan Didion called “astonishing,” which helped reshape the debate over capital punishment in its time. ![]() Now imagine being a newspaper book critic in the mid-1970s assigned to write about the new Norman Mailer book. ![]() He was also a macho egomaniac, who wrote massively screwed-up things about race and feminism, was obnoxious and pugnacious, and, oh yes, was convicted of stabbing one of his six wives with a pen-knife in a drunken brawl. ![]() During the extended stretch of Sunday afternoon that I spent straining to force myself to start listening to the way-overdue, yet strangely unexpected, release of Kanye West’s eleventy-dozen-hour-long album Donda, my mind kept wandering: What must it have been like, I wondered, to be a books critic during the time that Norman Mailer was regarded as one of the most important American writers? Here was a guy who, over the course of three decades, helped radically transform the practice of non-fiction, co-founded the culturally indispensable Village Voice, and led a charismatic, compelling public life. ![]()
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