“Name one genius that ain’t crazy,” Kanye West raps on “Feedback,” the fifth track of his recent album “The Life of Pablo.” “I’ve been out of my mind a long time.”
West continues with 13 more eclectic tracks, having already spawned a lifetime’s supply of headline controversy and internet memes in the previous four albums. The record simmers with crazy and at times it feels like it is going to burst at the seams. He gets a call from a friend during an ad-lib, throws in an utterly incomprehensible skit and raps a cappella about himself — in the third person.
But Kanye’s moments of insanity are juxtaposed with real, sobering moments of clarity. On “FML,” Kanye removes himself from his grandiose persona long enough to admit he takes Lexapro, an anti-depressant, and to give an explanation for his episodes of mania. He swears off the womanizing he so proudly rapped about a few songs before. During moments like these, West seems like someone who is human — even normal. It makes Kanye’s apparent delusions on portions of “Pablo” seem less believable and potentially contrived, because we get the feeling that he knows exactly how crazy he sounds. It begs the question: is Kanye actually crazy or just a genius?
If Kanye faked his way through the insanity of “Pablo,” acted through a couple award show interruptions and soberly crafted Twitter gems like “I love everybody… only thing I don’t like is taxes.. me and taxes gone fight,” he deserves to be thought of as a genius performance artist.
But it also makes him seem more than a little bit crazy: what sane person could maintain that persona for such a long time, simply for the sake of great art?
You could probably go back and forth forever about whether Kanye’s craziness makes him a genius or vice versa. I think part of the allure of “The Life of Pablo,” although we might not like to admit it, is the naked display of this genius-crazy paradigm. The record, with its uncharacteristic looseness of musical style and unbelievably bold lyrics (see: the Taylor Swift “Famous” controversy), feels like a train wreck — albeit a well-crafted one — that you as the listener simply cannot look away from. Kanye’s in-laws, the Kardashians, make themselves famous in a similar fashion.
Whether he knows it or not, Kanye is making a point about this paradigm in music and art. He makes us as listeners question what exactly it is about his music that appeals to us — is it the meticulous craftsmanship and its objective quality, or is it the larger-than-life personality of its performer and the anticipation that at any moment he could do or say something to cause controversy? For most people, it is probably a combination of both, but the fact that the latter comes into play is a little troubling.
For me, it brings to mind the history of mental health and art. It makes me think of Daniel Johnston, a singer-songwriter with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder who is now a sort of cult hit in indie music scenes. During his career, he made over a dozen tapes of lo-fi, outsider music, but was plagued by his mental illness. Once when flying back from a show in Austin with his father in a two-seater plane, Johnston, believing himself to be Casper the Ghost, removed the key from the ignition and threw it out the window. Johnston’s father managed to crash land the plane and avoid any significant injury to the two, but after that manic episode, Johnston was committed to a mental hospital involuntarily.
The appeal of Johnston’s music is the raw, unbridled emotion captured in his songs (He has a tape literally titled “Songs of Pain”). Moreover, he is capable of evoking these strong feelings with simply his voice and a guitar or keyboard. I understand how that is an appealing idea, but when those emotions are channeled directly from the torment caused by severe mental illness, one has to question things. Is it fair for a record company to try to sell what amounts to schizophrenia and depression in musical form? Does our enjoyment of these songs encroach on something akin to voyeurism, like looking at, well, a train wreck?
But if we are to write off the appreciation of Johnston’s work as misguided, where do we draw the line? Johnston is an extreme and well-documented example, but plenty of musicians and artists suffer from mental illness of varying degrees. Is it wrong to enjoy their music as well?
Like Kanye, Johnston is frequently given the “genius” moniker. I think that while a lot of the questions I posed above are complicated, one thing remains clear. It is just plain unfair to turn someone’s crippling disorder into genius. “The Life of Pablo” most recently contributes to this discussion with the idea that genius and insanity are too often synonyms in our vocabulary.
