By Any Other Name: The Devil, Hitler and Kanye West
On the limits of capitalist sublimation and the end of liberalism
In 1988, the alternative rock band Jane’s Addiction released an album titled Nothing's Shocking. This album was a landmark, heralding in the era of alternative rock and grunge that would dominate the 90’s and 2000’s. Hailed by critics as the saviors of the genre while also banned from MTV for videos featuring explicit nudity, Jane’s Addiction had managed to thread the needle of being critically acclaimed, commercially successful and still maintaining edgy, counterculture street cred. But even if their sound was fresh, Janes Addiction had a certain sense of weary, detached irony about their edgy rock n’ roll image and affectations. Coming at the tail end of the classic rock era and ushering in the era of modern music, there seemed to be a nod and a wink about what they were doing. Rock ‘n Roll rebellion was old hat, tropes to be played upon, not embodied unironically. They were playing a role in an industry that thrived on the outrage of the conservative, “moral majority” where the PMRC crowd needed something to rail about Sunday mornings just as much as these artists needed a hit record. It was almost like pro wrestling, a self-contained ecosystem where both parties knew (on some level) they were dependent on each other for their existence.
By the late 80s, the message was clear: the moral majority had lost the culture war and the cultural revolution of the 60s was ascendant. The "parental advisory" sticker on an album was the kind of marketing money couldn’t buy and getting a video banned from MTV was just as good (if not better) than having it in heavy rotation. Reaction against these cultural trends were as dwindling as they were anemic, with concert attendance and MTV viewership far outstripping church attendance amongst the youth. Nothing's Shocking wasn’t just an album title, it was a thesis statement for the decades that followed where pop culture was paradoxically aesthetically subversive, but also the unchallenged mainstream. Over 30 years later, most modern popular music flows from that same source, where rebellion is a required aesthetic, not a threat to the culture, but its most marketable product. All the sharp edges of subversive counterculture have been shaved off and incorporated into the mainstream. Because after all, nothing's shocking, right?
But in May 2025, hip hop artist Kanye West shattered that illusion with a song that wasn’t ironic, clever, or easily digestible. Titled “Heil Hitler,” from his album Cuck, the single seemingly refuted the thesis Jane’s Addiction had posited over three decades prior. The track was banned almost instantly from all major platforms. In it, West raps incoherently about being cut off from his children, humiliated in the public eye, being a cuckold and being misunderstood for what he posts on Twitter. The chorus is unsettling and surreal, with a Wagnerian chant of the words: “Nigga, Heil Hitler!” all over an eerie industrial beat. Perhaps most strange is how the song ends with a recording of a 1935 speech by Adolph Hitler played over an orchestral synth overture that would not be out of place in a mid-career Van Halen song. The video is just as surreal, featuring slow, panning shots of half-naked black men dressed as Nordic Viking warriors, draped in animal skins, all chanting “Nigga, Heil Hitler” in unison under unsettling, blue light. There is no wink. No nod. There is no irony. It is, by any reasonable metric, shocking. Not just because of its language, but because of what it represents. For the first time in decades, an artist with West’s cultural weight has created something truly unmarketable, something the establishment can neither monetize nor fully ignore. It is not a good song, maybe not even a coherent one, but in the age of algorithmic content churn and sterile virtue-signaling, “Heil Hitler” might be one of the most significant works of 21st-century art so far. Not because it’s right. But because it’s demonstrating both the limits to eroding social norms and the moment of cultural nihilism we are currently in.
It’s tempting to see Kanye’s Roman salute and "Heil Hitler" chorus as an unprecedented rupture, a singular event erupting from the void. And on its face, “Heil Hitler” is completely nonsensical. Easy to either dismiss as the downward spiral of a mentally ill celebrity or an ill-conceived, Kafkaesque piece of performance art. The chorus itself, “Nigga, Heil Hitler!” is a total contradiction- a black man praising a white supremacist is almost laughable in a vacuum. The combination of the most taboo racial slur with saluting the 20th centuries most reviled figure boarders on being comical for how it doubles down on maximum shock value at the expense of ideological coherence. Much has been made of West’s mental illness and seeming social media-fueled mental breakdown, but I don’t think that’s what’s really the true cause. To me, blaming West’s actions on mental illness is missing the forest for the trees. There is something else going on here. “Heil Hitler” is the symptom of the disease our sick society has contracted. Our current cultural and political moment, “Heil Hitler” and West’s self-destruction are all connected. The purposeful destruction of social norms and commodification thereof in Western society has been a self-defeating disaster- a virtual feast of seed corn. In that sense, there is a straight line from Elvis's swinging hips to Kanye’s Roman salute.
Post WWII America was a land of seemingly limitless optimism and prosperity. The United States had defeated Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany and was now the undisputed hegemon of the globe militarily, economically and culturally. By the 1950s, there had never been a nation that had so much wealth, power and influence with some of the richest and freest citizens in the world, a stark contrast to the fascists that they defeated or the authoritarian communists that they were now locked in a cold war with. American society was high trust, had a unified cultural identity and strong social norms. In the post-war, post-new deal America, many felt hopeful for the future and the promise of the FDR administration that “your life will be better than the year before” seemed like something as reliable as the ever-improving economy. The values of freedom, equality and self-determination that the US fought for were what this new world would be founded on. However, there was a contradiction. This prosperity didn’t reach everyone in the imperial core. Black Americans still did not have the civil rights they would later fight for. Women, or other minority groups were also excluded and while the US was still the richest country in the world, there was still much economic inequality. While the social and political unity created by the New Deal programs and WWII were a comfort to some, others found the socially conservative norms stifling and oppressive. There were internal contradictions within the system from earlier eras that no amount of material wealth could paper over. Each contradiction was a crack in the façade of the “American Dream”.
In this climate of postwar prosperity and suppressed inequality, music became a subtle but powerful outlet for cultural tension. The rise of rhythm and blues, and later rock and roll, gave voice to the frustrations and desires that weren’t reflected in the polished image of 1950s America. Early black musicians like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley brought an intensity and energy that reflected a lived reality very different from the suburban ideal. Their music captured both the joy and pain of a divided society, and in doing so, struck a chord with young white audiences as well. Figures like Elvis Presley helped bridge that gap- taking inspiration from black artists and fusing it with white genres of music like country, gospel and rockabilly and performing in a style that, while shocking to some, was also palatable enough for mass consumption. Elvis was America’s first superstar perhaps because he embodied the contradiction of American society itself- deeply divided on racial lines, young, up and coming and ready for change.
What began as something raw, disruptive and underground quickly became a marketable commodity as rock ‘n roll quickly became the sound of the era. The same culture that generated deep inequalities had also created the tools to package and sell the appearance of rebellion against that very same culture. As this new sound spread, so too did its potential to defuse or redirect social unrest. The music industry learned that challenging the status quo, if presented the right way, could sell records. Early rock n’ roll was not just a musical shift; it was an early indication of how the entertainment industry could both reflect social tensions and sublimate them. By the early 1960s, this process would accelerate, as rock music and the broader counterculture took hold- bringing new possibilities for rebellion, and new opportunities to commodify it.
By the 1960s, the postwar generation had grown restless. Raised in an America of unprecedented material wealth and global dominance, many young people began to feel a deep dissonance between the promises of freedom and the realities of war, racial segregation, and social conformity. The Vietnam War, civil rights struggles, and a growing sense of spiritual emptiness led to the rise of the counterculture- a movement that sought to reject the norms of their parents’ world. Musicians like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Jefferson Airplane gave voice to this rejection, fusing politics with music in ways that radically challenged the status quo. Figures like Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and Abbie Hoffman offered visions of expanded consciousness and radical change. For a time, it seemed that a political revolution might accompany the cultural ones.
However, this energy was quickly absorbed into the very system it hoped to challenge. The fashion, language, and music of the counterculture became commodities- tie-dye, protest anthems, and psychedelic imagery were marketed to a mass audience. The revolution was televised and had ad breaks for Coca-Cola and Sears. The hard political edge of groups like the Black Panthers, the Yippies, or the Weather Underground was sidelined, while a softer message, “All You Need Is Love” took their place. What began as an organic revolt against consumerism was itself consumed. The system proved capable not just of surviving rebellion, but of profiting from it. The stage was set for future cycles where art and music would push boundaries, only to be quickly folded back into the logic of the market.
The 1970s carried forward the rebellious spirit of the 1960s but introduced a darker, more ironic, and increasingly self-aware tone. Artists like David Bowie transformed alienation into art. His Ziggy Stardust persona blended gender-bending aesthetics, science fiction, and androgyny into a glam spectacle that challenged social norms while remaining commercially successful. At the same time, the liberation politics of the previous decade began to fragment. Black political music evolved into funk and later disco, genres that emerged from black and gay communities but were eventually repackaged for mass appeal. The dance floor took the place of the protest march, and spaces once tied to resistance, such as gay clubs and underground discos, became part of a broader pop culture landscape that sold freedom as a lifestyle.
Punk rock emerged in the late 1970s as a rejection of this kind of commodified spectacle. The Sex Pistols openly mocked British institutions, and The Clash infused their music with class-conscious messages. Yet by the early 1980s, punk itself was being absorbed into the mainstream. The Ramones became pop-culture icons, and punk fashion was co-opted by high-end designers. Country music, particularly the outlaw country movement of the 70s, was once the voice of the downwardly mobile, white working class. But as time went on, the songs that challenged offshoring, poverty and the selling off of the American dream began their metamorphosis to the cowboy hat wearing caricatures of later eras or the blue-collar minstrel shows of Bruce Springsteen. At the same time, the aesthetics of underground gay nightlife began to influence pop music. Madonna, for instance, borrowed from drag culture, Catholic symbolism, and club scenes to shape her persona, a fusion of transgression and commercial success. By the end of the decade, even the most provocative imagery, whether punk, gay, working class or black, had found a home within the cultural machine. The baby boomer generation, once revolutionaries, had become consumers of their own aesthetic rebellion. What once shocked now sold.
This was also the era of the Satanic Panic, when conservatives feared a growing cultural rot that they believed was corrupting America’s youth. Artists like Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest and Motley Crue played directly into this panic, using occult imagery, inverted crosses, and theatrical darkness to provoke and sell. These artists were rarely actually practitioners of satanism, but used the imagery to shock and justify their hedonistic lifestyles. And in the era of “greed is good”, the allure of the devil was much more seductive than the moral majority who criticized them. While these bands sold millions, their concerts were picketed and the PMRC (parents Music Resource Center) brought lawsuits against the artists, blaming them from everything from rising crime to teen suicide. Dee Snyder, singer of Twisted Sister, even testified in front of the senate to defend himself and his music against accusations of corruption of the youth. But far from derailing these bands, the controversy boosted their popularity. Snyder Became a counterculture hero for his surprisingly articulate and eloquent defense of heavy metal, satanic imagery and over the top theatrics as self-determination, freedom and artistic expression- real American values. As a result, metal had won. Darkness became a brand. The devil sold records. The same society that once panicked over Elvis’s hips was now buying records with pentagrams on the cover at suburban malls by the end of the 1980s.
The 1990s ushered in a deepening sense of nihilism and disillusionment in popular music, reflecting the anxieties of Generation X and the ever-increasing downward mobility of the American people. The grunge movement, led by bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam, channeled a raw dissatisfaction with mainstream culture- alienation, apathy, and despair became the rallying cry of a generation. Kurt Cobain famously wrote, “I hate myself and I want to die,” a statement that blurred the line between provocation and truth, eventually culminating in his suicide in 1994. His death was a cultural event, a tragic symbol of a generation's inability to reconcile its disillusionment with a world that sold rebellion as a product. As Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism, “Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable,” rendering rebellion itself a kind of simulation. The flannel shirts, unpolished sound, and bleak lyrics of grunge quickly became commercial trademarks, reducing what was once a raw critique of consumer culture into an aesthetic for sale at every shopping mall.
Similarly, hip hop in the 90s evolved from a radical expression of black resistance into a popular but neutered commercial force. Early artists like Tupac Shakur voiced the rage and struggle of black America: “Cops give a damn about a negro? Pull the trigger, kill a nigga, he's a hero.” (Changes, 1992). Yet as the genre gained mainstream traction, much of its revolutionary edge was defanged or co-opted. What once spoke to the experience of black poverty and frustrations with social inequality was often reduced to a materialist, vain glorification of violence and consumerism. Profitable images for record labels and advertisers. NWA could rap about killing police and sell millions of albums, their concerts protected by those same police in stadiums across the country. They were now a part of the very system they criticized. As Fisher observed, capitalism doesn’t suppress dissent, it absorbs it: “What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed subversive, but rather their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires.” Both grunge and hip hop in the 90s revealed a core contradiction, art forms that articulated genuine critique were folded back into the system they opposed, rebranded, and sold to the very audiences they sought to awaken.
By the mid-90s, popular music took an even darker turn. Marilyn Manson emerged as the ultimate provocateur, donning satanic imagery, inverted crosses, and Nazi uniforms. Not out of belief, but for theatrical rebellion. He described his persona as “a composite of everything America fears and loves at the same time,” a mirror to its contradictions. As a result, Manson was perhaps the last true rockstar because he, like Elvis before him, was able to embody the contradictions of American society. But by this point, American society had degraded, and American culture was something darker and less coherent. Sex and violence were ubiquitous, so artists like Manson took these concepts to their natural conclusion in over-the-top displays. He would do everything from fascist imagery, ripping pages out of the bible, gender bending and on-stage sex-acts in an ideologically incoherent potpourri of offensiveness. Manson was symbolic of that era- no real political or ideological project other than a vague sense of liberation from an ill-defined “Christian, suburban fascism” or tepid anti-war/consumerism. Manson represented the pop-nihilism of the era, and perhaps for that reason, he was blamed for the Columbine school shootings, but the accusations paradoxically raised Manson’s profile and made him even more famous and successful. Bands like GG Allin and Mayhem pushed that nihilism to extremes, engaging in acts of violence, desecration, and in some cases murder, not to challenge power, but to obliterate meaning altogether. These acts blurred the line between rebellion and spectacle; shock became a brand.
From the 2000s to the 2020s, the trend of rebellion becoming a marketable aesthetic only deepened. The fringes became the center. Pride Month, once a protest movement marked by resistance to police brutality and systemic oppression, has become a corporate holiday. Logos turn rainbow for 30 days while companies continue to support anti-LGBT politicians or profit from exploitative labor abroad. Rock music, once the sound of white working-class rebellion, faded into nostalgia, while hip hop, born out of black resistance and urban poverty, became the dominant cultural force. Yet while some artists continued to speak to injustice, the system proved capable of monetizing even the most incendiary messages. Kendrick Lamar can call out racism and surveillance in To Pimp a Butterfly, but his Grammy-winning anthem “Not Like Us”, a supposed rallying cry of liberation, can now play during a Super Bowl halftime show, sponsored by multinational corporations and watched by millions.
The objectification of women evolved, but never truly disappeared. Britney Spears’ schoolgirl aesthetic was once considered scandalous, now it seems quaint compared to the rise of OnlyFans or artists like Sabrina Carpenter or Nikki Minaj, where hyper-sexualized self-branding is framed as female empowerment. Feminism, once a structural critique, now lives in the language of hustle culture and sex positivity. “Being a slut is empowering,” we’re told, not because social conditions have changed, but because there’s money in reframing objectification as choice. Similarly, the angry anthems of working-class whites that once embodied anti-elitist rage have become another form of lifestyle branding. Country artists rep blue-collar aesthetics in stadiums sponsored by Ford and Bud Light, while anti-establishment language is fed back to the audience in a way that flatters rather than challenges.
Even Satanic imagery has received the Disney makeover. Once hated and feared for being symbolic of evil, Satan became symbolic of personal liberation and hedonism. But as time went on, even the Devil lost his power to inspire shock and fear. Satanism has also become aestheticized and stripped of danger. In the 1960s and 70s, Satanic imagery was used to provoke religious moralism; in the 90s, it was embraced by Marilyn Manson and black metal acts as a nihilistic middle finger. But by the 2010s and 2020s, it had become high-concept kitsch. Lil Nas X gives a lap dance to the devil in a music video sponsored by a sneaker collab. Sam Smith dresses as a devil on the Grammys with backup dancers in patent leather. Satan has become an emoji, a Halloween costume, a meme. What once represented dangerous freedom now sells energy drinks and TikTok trends. The Luciferian spirit of “do your own thing, man” and ‘do what thou wilt” has won, not because it transformed society, but because it aligned perfectly with the logic of capitalism and liberalism: maximum individual freedom, minimum structural change. As it turns out, the Devil won the culture war because nothing better represents the spirit of our age.
Today, supposedly “radical” art is not suppressed, it’s celebrated. But only so long as it reinforces the dominant cultural values of liberal individualism, tolerance, and personal expression. “Art should make you uncomfortable,” we’re told about a queer, black retelling of Hamlet that plays on Broadway, sponsored by Chase Bank and reviewed glowingly in The New York Times. Punk bands promote queer inclusion and anti-racist messages that are indistinguishable from an HR department's DEI training slides. Subversion has been domesticated. The once-dangerous symbols of rebellion, whether punk, gay, black radicalism, working class or even Satanism: now live inside the institutions they once defied. “It is forbidden to forbid” as the 1968 French cultural revolutionaries said, and that has become one of the few sacred ideals of modernity. Subversion and destruction of social norms are celebrated as long as that subversion doesn't create structural change. Legitimate social and political movements are coopted to destroy the status quo and praised as liberators as long as they don’t actually challenge capital. If a movement can destroy social bonds without having anything to replace them with other than individualism and consumerism, all the better.
Destruction of the past and tradition is seen as a universal good in and of itself. Everyone is an individual, is self-actualized. No gods, no masters. We aren’t connected to a past or a culture, we are marketing demographics. Isolated, deracinated and alone. Not human beings, but consumers. Any chance of organization against these trends is sublimated into the system itself and sold back to us as false liberation. The postwar Western consensus, increasingly, is not repression but assimilation. Everything is permitted, so long as it can be branded.
That brings us back to the curious case of Kanye West and his song “Heil Hitler”. Once hailed as a visionary and critical darling, The College Dropout, Late Registration, and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy were all seen as genre-defining records, Kanye embodied both the promise of the American dream and its contradictions like other superstars before him. He was commercially massive, artistically respected, and emotionally raw in ways that seemed to transcend the limits of genre or persona. He was of the system but also constantly testing its boundaries. But as the 2010s wore on, something shifted. Public breakdowns, erratic statements, and eventually an embrace of iconoclasm too intense for even the most “edgy” branding to contain pushed him from icon to pariah.
Kanye's descent into cultural exile has not just been about mental health or political provocation, it’s been a full repudiation of the postwar liberal consensus. His turn toward unassimilable content, religious fundamentalism, conspiracy theory, and ultimately, Nazi references, marks a rejection of everything American popular culture has spent 80 years selling: universality, tolerance, inclusion. His infamous “Heil Hitler” moment is not a political program, it’s an anti-message, a scream. In a secular society where nothing is sacred and everything is permitted, Hitler has become one of the last untouchable taboos, a modern stand-in for Satan. As Kanye surely knows, to say “Heil Hitler” in 2025 is to say “Hail Satan”, not in reverence, but in deliberate transgression. He is not a fascist in any meaningful sense; as Robert Paxton notes in The Anatomy of Fascism, real fascism requires “a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandoning democratic liberties and pursuing with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” Kanye has no goals. He commands no movement. His gesture is not ideological, but nihilistic. I don’t even think this is an intentional statement, merely the logical conclusion of the last 80 years. If Elvis, Marilyn Manson or Kendrick Lamar are pressure release valves, Kanye West is the explosion of that rusted machine that has been building pressure for too long.
A “black Nazi” is a contradiction in terms, and that’s precisely the point. It’s a provocation so absurd, so grotesque, that it tears at the seams of meaning itself. In a media ecosystem where everything has been flattened into performance and commentary, Kanye’s invocation of Hitler doesn’t offer a vision of power, it offers a void. He isn’t selling anything. There’s no brand. No uplift. No community. Just rage, isolation, and refusal. His art, at its most extreme, is a middle finger aimed not only at the culture that made him but at the very idea that culture can mean anything anymore. “Heil Hitler” isn’t a slogan, it’s a Molotov cocktail hurled into the marketplace of ideas. You can’t stream it, sponsor it, or celebrate it. You can only recoil or stare into it.
What Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” ultimately reflects is not a coherent political ideology, but a cultural sickness, one that’s becoming terminal. He is not alone. A growing segment of the population, young and disillusioned, now floats in the same psychic space: atomized, politically homeless, culturally exhausted, and unmoored from any sense of future. These aren’t just “lost boys” from one demographic or another. This is increasingly multiracial, multi-class, post-political. It’s made up of people who see nothing left to believe in, no institutions to trust, no future to aspire to, and no identities to comfortably inhabit. Decades of cultural deconstruction, ironic detachment, and performative inclusion have hollowed out meaning itself. And into that void flows rage, sarcasm, absurdity, and sometimes, fascist aesthetics with no fascist content. Listening to “Heil Hitler” brings to mind a multiracial horde of rioters throwing Molotov cocktails at government buildings just to see them burn like the synthesis of January 6th and the BLM riots. No, it doesn’t make sense. No, we don’t care. No, you can’t do anything to stop it.
“The culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII.”
This cultural nihilism, as the philosopher Nick Land predicted in The Dark Enlightenment, is not an aberration but a logical conclusion. Land’s thesis was that liberal modernity would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions: universalism that erodes identity, inclusion that commodifies rebellion, freedom that creates paralysis. Kanye’s “Heil Hitler” isn’t an endorsement of totalitarianism, it’s a desperate signal from the edge of the storm, an acknowledgment that the system has lost its power to shock, to organize, or even to inspire disgust. If the 20th century was defined by grand ideological conflicts, the 21st may be defined by the absence of ideology altogether, replaced by spectacle, acceleration, and psychosis.
In that sense, Kanye isn’t a modern Hitler, he’s something closer to Aleister Crowley, Gilles de Rais, or the Marquis de Sade: a figure of cultural excess and grotesque inversion who emerges at the crumbling edge of an old world. These men didn’t offer alternatives to the regimes they rejected; they mocked them, debased them, and weaponized the sacred as blasphemy. They represented not rebellion but collapse, symbols of rot from within. Kanye, in invoking Hitler not as a historical project but as a cultural totem, follows this trajectory. “Heil Hitler” isn’t a fascist manifesto, it’s the soundtrack to a funeral for meaning. A society that told everyone “do your own thing” now faces people doing exactly that. And it doesn’t know how to respond. All the institutions that could have resisted this destructive nihilism have been destroyed, mocked or atrophied into impotence. Religion, culture, mass organization, national identity or even common decency have been systematically dismantled, packaged and sold. And now, when we need these cultural counterbalances more than ever, they only exist as memories- relics of a past we were all too eager to be done with. We tore down walls searching for freedom to roam, but now the wolves are in the pasture, and we have slain the shepherd out of the resentment we felt for his guidance.
“Heil Hitler” is not great art in the traditional sense. It’s not beautiful, or uplifting, or even coherent. But it is important. It feels like something final, like the tolling of a bell that announces the end of a world we thought would last forever. If the 20th century offered grand ideologies, liberalism, communism, fascism, capitalism, the 21st seems to be offering only fragments, aesthetics, and echoes. In this void, “Heil Hitler” stands as a kind of monument to collapse. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a scream. It does not propose, it refutes. It doesn’t exalt, it desecrates. It doesn’t mean anything other than that there can no longer be any meaning. And for that reason, it may be the most honest piece of American music in a generation.
This doesn’t mean we should celebrate it. What Kanye has done is disturbing, incoherent, and possibly dangerous. But to dismiss it outright is to miss the deeper sickness it reveals. This isn’t about Kanye alone. It’s about the millions of people, angry, dispossessed, unrepresented, who see in his breakdown a reflection of their own. 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.
We are living through the end of something. That much feels clear. What comes next is not. It may be a new order, a resurgence of old ones, or something far more chaotic. But in the meantime, “Heil Hitler” lingers. Abrasive, offensive, and unforgettable. It’s not a blueprint for the future. It is the noise that plays while the lights go out. And we would do well to listen, not because it tells us where to go, but because it tells us exactly where we are and how we got here. We are living through the beginning of the end of the end of history, and Kanye West created the perfect soundtrack.
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.
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