The song made me realize that Kanye isn’t pro Hitler or antisemitic out of any real ideological conviction, but instead a warped kinship born out of him feeling like an oppressed figure. He probably got called Hitler by someone during his divorce or whatever and his brain just ran with it
Damn, this is probably the best analysis of Kanye's new music that I've read. This piece goes in tandem with a thought I've had about the inherent irony in MAGA and suburban culture: These people want to defend Western Civilization while producing no cultural value, supporting socially conservative values and an economic system that will eviscerate said culture if it impedes the profit motive. They just consume someone else's idea of another culture through shitty chain restaurants, cheap clothes, etc. In a world full of aesthetics, it does seem like nihilism is the logical endpoint.
Although, even on his subreddit, the Kanye meatriders have finally hit their breaking point. Vultures 2 was pretty indefensible. But I wonder what's next for culture? Probably two perfectly parallel economies existing both in tandem and in opposition: You'll just have woke and anti-woke version of products, the appeal of each is specifically to negate the other. Politics will just be a matter of punishing the other side. This is a status quo that is untenable, just not sure if America is on the verge of destroying itself, Balkanizing, or about to undergo some unforeseen cultural renaissance.
This is one of those pieces that is so good I have to meditate and revisit it for the next week. Absolutely gobsmacked at how brilliant this is from writing to analysis!
I appreciate the compliment and I'm the same way. Kinda like if a podcast or book is good, I have to pause to think about what it says. But again, thanks much. I almost didn't publish but I'm glad I did.
This is almost certainly sacriligeous but sometimes I suspect there's a third power in the universe--neither God nor Adversary but a nihilism so complete that both the eternal powers are at a loss as to what to do.
"In the Void, nothing is real, nothing has meaning, and nothing leads us in any direction but inward. When we get there, all we find is our passions, and they drag us in every direction we can think of. We have no idea who to turn to for help, and despair rises all around us as a result. In this culture, Satan is cool, but not because we believe in him: precisely because we don’t. In the Void, we all hate Christianity, but not that much. It is barely worth hating. Nothing much is worth hating, or loving anymore."
If you're an atheist, the third power is the lack of power. There's goodness, badness, and then there's whatever left—but that's where we live! The emptiness of the universe leaves people to provide their own meaning, which is a LOT to ask, especially in the age of fragmenting community and splintering social support.
Excellent piece. Just responding to one common sentiment that pops up in every think piece about liberalism.
You write: "This is the dark mirror of the world the postwar consensus built: a culture that promised liberation but delivered loneliness, consumption, and debt. A society that told everyone they could be free, but gave them nothing to be free for."
Liberalism doesn't promise anything in particular. It is an ideology that specifically leaves it up to individuals to find or create their own meaning.
This was never intended to be or "sold" as easy. Traditional society makes life simple by prescribing roles and meaning whether you like it or not. In pre-bourgeois society, you may be hungry often and lose more than half of your children, but there's little uncertainty about what each person is "supposed" to do. For the vast majority of people who ever lived, you simply do as you're fucking told. Easy.
If it is now starting to become apparent that individuals in modernity are not up to the task of creating meaning despite the many available routes to bourgeois human flourishing -- family, inquiry, play, productive work, religion, civil society -- that does not make the project of liberalism into a lie or a broken promise, or something that wasn't worth trying. It means we were not worthy of its prerequisites.
Additionally, I find it plausible that modernity's crisis of meaning is an emergent and unavoidable property of economic plenty. That is, while the particular economics of liberalism have made life world historically safe and easy in developed countries, it's possible that humans are unable to live peaceably and contentedly under any political system or ideology when not distracted by constant scarcity.
You make excellent points, but: (a) while I fully agree that it is “up to individuals to find or create their own meaning”, I am not convinced that that is a product of liberalism—it seems more like an eternal truth; and (b) we are in fact distracted by constant scarcity—scarcity of time. It is frankly astonishing that despite all the labor-saving devices and increases in productivity driven by decades of technological progress and innovation, most people still need to spend the majority of their waking hours working, rather than engaging in study or creative pursuits: “family, inquiry, play” as you put it.
But isn't that the contradiction of liberalism? That it advocates for human progress and for individual self-actualization while supporting an economic system that is antithetical to those ideals?
Sure, but that's not a contradiction within liberalism, it's a potentially emergent tension between liberalism's normative commitments and the (drastically positive) material consequences of liberal economics. It's not accurate to say liberalism "supports" an economic system antithetical to self-actualization. Liberal economies are what made large-scale emancipation possible. Any serious emancipatory project requires that scaffolding.
What is true and worrying is that liberalism does not guarantee a particular cultural outcome. It's a metaframework that protects the space within which people can pursue meaning, but it doesn't supply the content. If that vacuum gets filled with a "culture of narcissism," nihilism, vitalism, or radicalism, that's not liberalism malfunctioning. That's free people failing to meet the demands of freedom.
Maybe the Enlightenment thinkers were right that a liberal order needs a certain anthropological substrate (virtue? restraint?) or it will decay into decadence or chaos. But if so, the right response isn't to shit on liberalism or LARP about feudal social relations. Ideally we would try to cultivate the kind of subjects who can actually live in freedom.
And maybe that's impossible, or unscalable, in a technological, pluralistic society. Maybe we landed on a timeline where it just didn't work out. That's not a contradiction or a lie, just a tragic outcome.
An orthodox Marxist would say bourgeois society was emancipatory, but the contradiction came with capitalism (bourgeois social relations plus industrial means of production). You can buy that or not, but liberalism and capitalism aren't the same thing. Confusing them muddies both the diagnosis and the cure.
It’s also interesting how in creating an evil “other” (ex “Satanism”) the dominant culture foments the seeds of its own destruction. It needs an “other” to define itself against but the subtext is “this is what we’re afraid of” so critics of/losers in the dominant paradigm flock to the very thing the wider culture attempts to suppress. Satanic imagery would have been next to non-existent if Satan wasn’t a conservative bogeyman.
“What we understand as ‘dissent' does not subvert, does not challenge, does not even question the cultural faiths of Western business. What David Rieff wrote of the revolutionary pretensions of multiculturalism is equally true of the countercultural idea: 'The more one reads in academic multiculturalist journals and in business publications, and the more one contrasts the speeches of CEOs and the speeches of noted multiculturalist academics, the more one is struck by the similarities in the way they view the world.' What's happened is not co-optation or appropriation, but a simple and direct confluence of interest."
So this is one of the best things I have ever read on Substack. You do an excellent job here and I have to hand it to you. But as you said, Manson could use fascist imagery and still have a career and still be famous.
Why with Kanye? Why can’t he Heil Hitler? Why can’t the system just commodify Hitler?
Imagine an Armenian man went to Yaravan and wanted to make a song extolling the virtues of Turkic peoples and Azerbaijanis specifically? Perhaps he didn’t even like Azerbaijanis in reality. Perhaps he had even killed some in the war there.
Wouldn’t matter. He couldn’t have such a song gain traction. Too much bad blood. Too against the society.
Kanye’s song cannot be commodified because who owns the music industry? Mostly Jews. When not Jews, people utterly commited to the post WWII order, and nevertheless aligned with them.
Jews don’t think that shit is funny. This is not a conspiracy. This isn’t some Protocols of the Elders of Zion stuff. Doesn’t have to be. They just have to be too offended to want to use the imagery and lyrics.
They were not offended by Satanism, or gender bending, or whorishness or the complaints of black people in times past. None of these things threatened Jews, or the main narrative , the myth by which modern Judaism (regardless of the actual religious conviction of the Jew in question) gains its power. Myth does not mean false by the way. I mean myth the way the Iliad was myth.
You can’t seperate that. Everything you said about the nihilism of modern society is true. But ultimately, this song is about a society that did a mentally unwell black dude who was abused as a child wrong. He got done wrong as a kid, and now as an adult he is continuing to be done wrong.
Many of those involved in doing him wrong were Jewish because that is who is working in the industry he is involved in. They called him a Nazi, even if that is incoherent in a literal sense.
But from the Jewish perspective, Nazi is Amalek. He took sides with Amalek. They have an archetype in their culture of people who oppose them. It has had many names. Amalek, Rome, Seleucid, Nazi.
West decided, in his schizo way to step on that hornet’s nest.
Very smooth integration of a vast corpus of commentary, history, cultural artistry, and political extremism. Perhaps this track represents the ultimate hollowness of this many sequential decades of (as implied by you) subversion and absorption by the status quo. I haven’t read it yet, but I understand Adorno may have talked about a phenomenon like this in “Negative Dialectics” but I am unsure as I haven’t read it lol. Will the next iteration of the cycle be a grandiose turn towards cultural repression? Inevitably churning into a cycle of neoliberal “freedom” via aesthetics? Or will the climate give out first? Seems like it could be hundreds of years of this in some ways, only a minute more in. Others.
I was thinking about this concept this morning actually. I think it's just allowing for endless narratives to exist and fight each other for dominance and never letting one take hold. Aestheticized fascism, communism, white nationalism, black nationalism, nativism, anti-colonialism, etc. Keep everyone fighting so we don't see wr have more in common with each other than the owners of capital. Allow everything, forbid nothing, but never allow one narrative that could unify to gain a foothold.
Yeah, I definitely see the evidence of Kill All Normies here, but you've taken it in directions she wouldn't; she's a left-liberal so she wants to strengthen the old progressive regime. That's looking less likely, though if there's a backlash in 2028 who knows.
Well written, dragging me through cultural history and centered around a piece of modern fixation I'd have never paid any mind, as I am with most "news"--Sabrina Carpenter and other "hot topics" for me to ignore, this was made meaningful by your artistry of telling it.
Perhaps in the future I'll lend an ear to discussion of trending topics, if as pleasant to scroll through as this.
Thank you so much! I tend to avoid "current thing" but a lot of this stuff has been banging around in my head and HH became the perfect way to talk about it.
Excellent disquisition on our current cultural moment. You touched on something that has been on my mind lately, which is that we've seemed to have left the age of ideology behind us now. These templates of the twentieth century don't seem to provide useful frames for analysis anymore. I have no idea what is next, but I believe it will be energized by a sense of what is possible, and not what fits a preconceived frame. It is possible that at some point a new consensus will be achieved, but I don't think it will happen in my time.
I think what’s notable is that we pretend it is forbidden to forbid, but that pretense only holds so long as you don’t ever actually look the thing in the eye. I disagree GG Allin was part of the capture of subversion - I think he’d be regarded more like West today (except for the fact that punk is a small niche *and* one very full of scolds so really he’d be a bigger deal to a smaller number of people). Actual self destruction, actual insanity, still shocks, which is why West does - see also O9A and schizoposting panic.
I think this contradiction plays out in a lot of ways. When we talk about the irresponsibility of elite liberals who promote behaviors they don’t partake in, this is what is being talked about, right? We’ve dulled our sense that there’s something taboo in drug use, but really only because we’ve looked away from its results long enough that we’re shocked when the policy failures of the west coast happen. Similar with sexual excess - polyamory gets protection rhetorically under “forbidden to forbid,” but that isn’t because the forbidden are doing it - then this leads to the behavior actually being picked up and everyone recoiling at the results
Ironically this suggests the solution should be for a degree of cultural conservatism, which is exactly what the kids rebel against in liberalism now. The key has to be an aversion to hypocrisy and a fidelity to honesty first and foremost.
Now we see even the movements that emerged as the latest rebellion such as a more domestic, simple and homemade life being subsumed by the capitalist machine and turned into “DIY” and “tradwives”
I know this is mostly about music but I can’t help but think of upper class Ivy League students wearing Che t-shirts mass produced by multinationals.
That's perhaps one of my favorite and the funniest examples of comodified rebellion that totally flies in the face of the intent of the subject
The song made me realize that Kanye isn’t pro Hitler or antisemitic out of any real ideological conviction, but instead a warped kinship born out of him feeling like an oppressed figure. He probably got called Hitler by someone during his divorce or whatever and his brain just ran with it
Probably had a bunch of run-ins with Jewish record executives too.
This would turn anyone into an antisemite
Not *anyone*, but I'd bet rule 4080 probably produces quite a few.
Damn, this is probably the best analysis of Kanye's new music that I've read. This piece goes in tandem with a thought I've had about the inherent irony in MAGA and suburban culture: These people want to defend Western Civilization while producing no cultural value, supporting socially conservative values and an economic system that will eviscerate said culture if it impedes the profit motive. They just consume someone else's idea of another culture through shitty chain restaurants, cheap clothes, etc. In a world full of aesthetics, it does seem like nihilism is the logical endpoint.
Although, even on his subreddit, the Kanye meatriders have finally hit their breaking point. Vultures 2 was pretty indefensible. But I wonder what's next for culture? Probably two perfectly parallel economies existing both in tandem and in opposition: You'll just have woke and anti-woke version of products, the appeal of each is specifically to negate the other. Politics will just be a matter of punishing the other side. This is a status quo that is untenable, just not sure if America is on the verge of destroying itself, Balkanizing, or about to undergo some unforeseen cultural renaissance.
This is one of those pieces that is so good I have to meditate and revisit it for the next week. Absolutely gobsmacked at how brilliant this is from writing to analysis!
Thank you so much 🙏
I appreciate the compliment and I'm the same way. Kinda like if a podcast or book is good, I have to pause to think about what it says. But again, thanks much. I almost didn't publish but I'm glad I did.
The death of the universal market and the birth of a million smaller ones perhaps.
This is almost certainly sacriligeous but sometimes I suspect there's a third power in the universe--neither God nor Adversary but a nihilism so complete that both the eternal powers are at a loss as to what to do.
Funny you say that. I have a theory on that very subject. We shall have to discuss over cigars some time soon.
Milton has Chaos in addition to God and Satan.
The Void: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/into-the-void
"In the Void, nothing is real, nothing has meaning, and nothing leads us in any direction but inward. When we get there, all we find is our passions, and they drag us in every direction we can think of. We have no idea who to turn to for help, and despair rises all around us as a result. In this culture, Satan is cool, but not because we believe in him: precisely because we don’t. In the Void, we all hate Christianity, but not that much. It is barely worth hating. Nothing much is worth hating, or loving anymore."
If you're an atheist, the third power is the lack of power. There's goodness, badness, and then there's whatever left—but that's where we live! The emptiness of the universe leaves people to provide their own meaning, which is a LOT to ask, especially in the age of fragmenting community and splintering social support.
Excellent piece. Just responding to one common sentiment that pops up in every think piece about liberalism.
You write: "This is the dark mirror of the world the postwar consensus built: a culture that promised liberation but delivered loneliness, consumption, and debt. A society that told everyone they could be free, but gave them nothing to be free for."
Liberalism doesn't promise anything in particular. It is an ideology that specifically leaves it up to individuals to find or create their own meaning.
This was never intended to be or "sold" as easy. Traditional society makes life simple by prescribing roles and meaning whether you like it or not. In pre-bourgeois society, you may be hungry often and lose more than half of your children, but there's little uncertainty about what each person is "supposed" to do. For the vast majority of people who ever lived, you simply do as you're fucking told. Easy.
If it is now starting to become apparent that individuals in modernity are not up to the task of creating meaning despite the many available routes to bourgeois human flourishing -- family, inquiry, play, productive work, religion, civil society -- that does not make the project of liberalism into a lie or a broken promise, or something that wasn't worth trying. It means we were not worthy of its prerequisites.
Additionally, I find it plausible that modernity's crisis of meaning is an emergent and unavoidable property of economic plenty. That is, while the particular economics of liberalism have made life world historically safe and easy in developed countries, it's possible that humans are unable to live peaceably and contentedly under any political system or ideology when not distracted by constant scarcity.
You make excellent points, but: (a) while I fully agree that it is “up to individuals to find or create their own meaning”, I am not convinced that that is a product of liberalism—it seems more like an eternal truth; and (b) we are in fact distracted by constant scarcity—scarcity of time. It is frankly astonishing that despite all the labor-saving devices and increases in productivity driven by decades of technological progress and innovation, most people still need to spend the majority of their waking hours working, rather than engaging in study or creative pursuits: “family, inquiry, play” as you put it.
But isn't that the contradiction of liberalism? That it advocates for human progress and for individual self-actualization while supporting an economic system that is antithetical to those ideals?
Sure, but that's not a contradiction within liberalism, it's a potentially emergent tension between liberalism's normative commitments and the (drastically positive) material consequences of liberal economics. It's not accurate to say liberalism "supports" an economic system antithetical to self-actualization. Liberal economies are what made large-scale emancipation possible. Any serious emancipatory project requires that scaffolding.
What is true and worrying is that liberalism does not guarantee a particular cultural outcome. It's a metaframework that protects the space within which people can pursue meaning, but it doesn't supply the content. If that vacuum gets filled with a "culture of narcissism," nihilism, vitalism, or radicalism, that's not liberalism malfunctioning. That's free people failing to meet the demands of freedom.
Maybe the Enlightenment thinkers were right that a liberal order needs a certain anthropological substrate (virtue? restraint?) or it will decay into decadence or chaos. But if so, the right response isn't to shit on liberalism or LARP about feudal social relations. Ideally we would try to cultivate the kind of subjects who can actually live in freedom.
And maybe that's impossible, or unscalable, in a technological, pluralistic society. Maybe we landed on a timeline where it just didn't work out. That's not a contradiction or a lie, just a tragic outcome.
An orthodox Marxist would say bourgeois society was emancipatory, but the contradiction came with capitalism (bourgeois social relations plus industrial means of production). You can buy that or not, but liberalism and capitalism aren't the same thing. Confusing them muddies both the diagnosis and the cure.
The lie is that individuals are capable of creating their own meaning. There is no question of being "up to the task."
Empirically some are capable. If you can't imagine it then don't worry about it, it's not for you.
"Please won't somebody force me to have a meaningful life" is just sad.
I think this is an all-time great Substack post.
Thank you, you're too kind
It’s also interesting how in creating an evil “other” (ex “Satanism”) the dominant culture foments the seeds of its own destruction. It needs an “other” to define itself against but the subtext is “this is what we’re afraid of” so critics of/losers in the dominant paradigm flock to the very thing the wider culture attempts to suppress. Satanic imagery would have been next to non-existent if Satan wasn’t a conservative bogeyman.
thomas frank was writing about this back in the ‘90s
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/frank-dissent.html
“What we understand as ‘dissent' does not subvert, does not challenge, does not even question the cultural faiths of Western business. What David Rieff wrote of the revolutionary pretensions of multiculturalism is equally true of the countercultural idea: 'The more one reads in academic multiculturalist journals and in business publications, and the more one contrasts the speeches of CEOs and the speeches of noted multiculturalist academics, the more one is struck by the similarities in the way they view the world.' What's happened is not co-optation or appropriation, but a simple and direct confluence of interest."
So this is one of the best things I have ever read on Substack. You do an excellent job here and I have to hand it to you. But as you said, Manson could use fascist imagery and still have a career and still be famous.
Why with Kanye? Why can’t he Heil Hitler? Why can’t the system just commodify Hitler?
Imagine an Armenian man went to Yaravan and wanted to make a song extolling the virtues of Turkic peoples and Azerbaijanis specifically? Perhaps he didn’t even like Azerbaijanis in reality. Perhaps he had even killed some in the war there.
Wouldn’t matter. He couldn’t have such a song gain traction. Too much bad blood. Too against the society.
Kanye’s song cannot be commodified because who owns the music industry? Mostly Jews. When not Jews, people utterly commited to the post WWII order, and nevertheless aligned with them.
Jews don’t think that shit is funny. This is not a conspiracy. This isn’t some Protocols of the Elders of Zion stuff. Doesn’t have to be. They just have to be too offended to want to use the imagery and lyrics.
They were not offended by Satanism, or gender bending, or whorishness or the complaints of black people in times past. None of these things threatened Jews, or the main narrative , the myth by which modern Judaism (regardless of the actual religious conviction of the Jew in question) gains its power. Myth does not mean false by the way. I mean myth the way the Iliad was myth.
You can’t seperate that. Everything you said about the nihilism of modern society is true. But ultimately, this song is about a society that did a mentally unwell black dude who was abused as a child wrong. He got done wrong as a kid, and now as an adult he is continuing to be done wrong.
Many of those involved in doing him wrong were Jewish because that is who is working in the industry he is involved in. They called him a Nazi, even if that is incoherent in a literal sense.
But from the Jewish perspective, Nazi is Amalek. He took sides with Amalek. They have an archetype in their culture of people who oppose them. It has had many names. Amalek, Rome, Seleucid, Nazi.
West decided, in his schizo way to step on that hornet’s nest.
Very smooth integration of a vast corpus of commentary, history, cultural artistry, and political extremism. Perhaps this track represents the ultimate hollowness of this many sequential decades of (as implied by you) subversion and absorption by the status quo. I haven’t read it yet, but I understand Adorno may have talked about a phenomenon like this in “Negative Dialectics” but I am unsure as I haven’t read it lol. Will the next iteration of the cycle be a grandiose turn towards cultural repression? Inevitably churning into a cycle of neoliberal “freedom” via aesthetics? Or will the climate give out first? Seems like it could be hundreds of years of this in some ways, only a minute more in. Others.
I was thinking about this concept this morning actually. I think it's just allowing for endless narratives to exist and fight each other for dominance and never letting one take hold. Aestheticized fascism, communism, white nationalism, black nationalism, nativism, anti-colonialism, etc. Keep everyone fighting so we don't see wr have more in common with each other than the owners of capital. Allow everything, forbid nothing, but never allow one narrative that could unify to gain a foothold.
Yeah, I definitely see the evidence of Kill All Normies here, but you've taken it in directions she wouldn't; she's a left-liberal so she wants to strengthen the old progressive regime. That's looking less likely, though if there's a backlash in 2028 who knows.
Great job, BTW!
Living up to the hype, it was an excellent read.
Well written, dragging me through cultural history and centered around a piece of modern fixation I'd have never paid any mind, as I am with most "news"--Sabrina Carpenter and other "hot topics" for me to ignore, this was made meaningful by your artistry of telling it.
Perhaps in the future I'll lend an ear to discussion of trending topics, if as pleasant to scroll through as this.
Thank you so much! I tend to avoid "current thing" but a lot of this stuff has been banging around in my head and HH became the perfect way to talk about it.
Excellent disquisition on our current cultural moment. You touched on something that has been on my mind lately, which is that we've seemed to have left the age of ideology behind us now. These templates of the twentieth century don't seem to provide useful frames for analysis anymore. I have no idea what is next, but I believe it will be energized by a sense of what is possible, and not what fits a preconceived frame. It is possible that at some point a new consensus will be achieved, but I don't think it will happen in my time.
I think what’s notable is that we pretend it is forbidden to forbid, but that pretense only holds so long as you don’t ever actually look the thing in the eye. I disagree GG Allin was part of the capture of subversion - I think he’d be regarded more like West today (except for the fact that punk is a small niche *and* one very full of scolds so really he’d be a bigger deal to a smaller number of people). Actual self destruction, actual insanity, still shocks, which is why West does - see also O9A and schizoposting panic.
I think this contradiction plays out in a lot of ways. When we talk about the irresponsibility of elite liberals who promote behaviors they don’t partake in, this is what is being talked about, right? We’ve dulled our sense that there’s something taboo in drug use, but really only because we’ve looked away from its results long enough that we’re shocked when the policy failures of the west coast happen. Similar with sexual excess - polyamory gets protection rhetorically under “forbidden to forbid,” but that isn’t because the forbidden are doing it - then this leads to the behavior actually being picked up and everyone recoiling at the results
Ironically this suggests the solution should be for a degree of cultural conservatism, which is exactly what the kids rebel against in liberalism now. The key has to be an aversion to hypocrisy and a fidelity to honesty first and foremost.
Now we see even the movements that emerged as the latest rebellion such as a more domestic, simple and homemade life being subsumed by the capitalist machine and turned into “DIY” and “tradwives”
There is no faker human than a multi millionaire anti-capitalist.
You neglected to mention that it's also a fuckin' catchy bop.