Kanye West’s conscience

Coming after two days of blindingly idiotic and dangerously hubristic denials of reality from President Bush, FEMA director Michael Brown and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, and during MSNBC’s well-intentioned but sentimentally scripted Hurricane Relief telethon, Kanye West’s unvarnished, emotional and decidedly off-message invective came across as simultaneously refreshing and disquieting. News reporters, running the gamut of journalistic integrity from NPR’s Robert Siegel to the New York Times’ David Brooks to Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera had been similarly pleading for compassion on every broadcast medium available as the initial panic turned to sadness and then desperation.

However, West’s words rang truer than any I’ve heard yet. Coming from a man many consider to be the new popular face of hip-hop, his flustered delivery and affecting sense of naivete when, without blinking, saying the words “President Bush doesn’t care about black people” is, more than anything offered by any well-intentioned celebrity burdened by a publicist, “keeping it real.”

Many critics of West’s music, both 2004’s flawed masterpiece The College Dropout and this year’s universally acclaimed Late Registration, cite as his central flaw his lyrical delivery, which tends to shift focus from his genre-defining beats and singular production skills. Indeed, his lyrics come across as incredibly raw and, as West himself defines it, “self-conscious”.

Which is why his give and take with a stoic Mike Myers on Friday night was not surprising, but in keeping with what has become West’s stock in trade: an almost childlike honesty.  Whether referencing his nearly life-ending car accident (”I had an accident like Geico/They thought I was burnt up like Pepsi did Michael”) or passive-agressively accusing in his latest single, “I ain’t sayin’ she a golddigger/But she ain’t messin’ with no broke nigga,” Kanye’s lyrics are the product not of an adolescence spent hustling or four years spent in college, but of an unblocked unconscious.

And while his words exit his mouth tangled and hard to follow, presented in gulps as he chokes back tears, they are real. Desperate, unadorned, truth. Time Magazine, in a recent cover article, noted that you “can’t ignore Kanye.” Right now, I hope that’s true. Thank you, Kanye West.

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