It is a health issue that has a strong stigma on it, and people are allowed to say anything about it, and discriminate in any way. This is like a sprained brain. Like having a sprained ankle. And if someone has a sprained ankle, you’re not gonna push on him more. With us, once our brain gets to a point of spraining, people do everything to make it worse. They do everything possible that got us to that point, and they just do everything to make it worse.
It’s a common misconception, stated or unstated, that somehow celebrities are immune to any number of problems. After all, they’ve got it made with all their fame and fortune and multi-million dollar mansions. And then we hear about Anthony Bourdain or Robin Williams, convincing ourselves that these tragedies “came out of nowhere,” asking ourselves, “Why couldn’t we see the signs?”
I get it. Kanye West has a huge ego and he certainly rubs some people the wrong way. At the same time, love him or hate him, Kanye West is also a very talented and remarkably creative artist. (I generally prefer the “old Kanye” over the “new Kanye,” but that’s another topic for another day.) He also suffers from bipolar disorder.
Kanye West and the Sprained Brain
In his interview with David Letterman on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Kanye poignantly describes his experience with mental health, drawing an analogy with a physical injury. Love him or hate him, he’s right. If someone literally breaks a leg, we’d never tell that person to “walk it off.” Why, then, do we do the same when someone is struggling with anxiety or depression or some other mental health issue?
By definition, an exceptional person deviates significantly from the norm. If they fell right into the middle of the bell curve, they’d be like everybody else. It’s obvious enough to anyone that Kanye West is not like everybody else. And he knows it.
We celebrate big personalities and grand displays elsewhere, yet we denigrate Kanye for his confidence. Why?
You Can’t Tell Me Nothing
On some level, Kanye West knows that his confidence is “delusional.” On another level, that never stopped him from putting himself out there. All his life, he’d been told that he can’t do this or he can’t do that. He’s “just” a producer, so he shouldn’t be rapping… and yet he’s made a huge career for himself as a rapper.
You get these stigmas when you get really good at something. Before we brought back this Renaissance era, it was like, “You’re a producer. You’re a producer-rapper. This is all you could do.” And you know, my raps weren’t as good as the rapper rappers, and my backstory wasn’t as gangster as all the rappers, so I understood why the kid with the pink polo’s raps were not being accepted as much. When I listened back to it, I was like, “Aw man. I wasn’t really as good as I thought I was.” But I had the confidence, and this delusional confidence to think that I could rap as good as Jay-Z. You know?
You might not like that he decided to “design” and sell a plain white t-shirt for $120, but that shirt sold out immediately. People told him that he couldn’t be a fashion designer, and yet his most devoted fans are constantly clamoring over the latest Yeezy release. Even if you don’t like Kanye, you have to respect his perseverance, his drive to do what he can’t.
Every human being deserves a certain level of dignity. Sometimes, we have to decouple the artist from the art, the persona from the idea. So, just as we may have varying opinions on people like Charlton Heston or Stephen Colbert, we must always start from a place of empathy.
And then you’ve just got to respect the artistry.
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