Black Mass

Kanye's Trauersmarsch

I’m back from vacation and will have more for you soon, but I wanted to share some quick thoughts about the new Ye (Kanye West) song, entitled “Heil Hitler.” This song, like his entire life at this point, is meant as a provocation. And it’s even arguably a kind of tedious one: West’s insistence on being a villain bring to mind is that old Onion headline, “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People.” Yes, yes, we get it. You’re a Nazi. Although I’ve often enjoyed West’s music, I always found his pattern of public self-assertion annoying. Not for his lack of modesty—that’s not a reasonable expectation of an artist—nor even for the pathetic need for attention, but because it seemed conventional and unimaginative—trite—in its twin-headed cult of genius and consumerism. It’s just too pop for me, I guess: I never found this bluffness to be secretly clever like many others did. And you could fit this newfound Hitler worship as just the dark converse of the pop universe: the most mass, the most accessible, clichéd, symbol of evil. (A brief parenthetical: If Andy Warhol could’ve gotten away with screenprints of Hitler in the 1960s, I bet he would’ve done it.)

You could roll your eyes, but you can also laugh. It's such an insane thing, such an outrageous statement, that it also starts to seem silly. A chorus that goes, “N****a, Heil Hitler” gets into Mel Brooks “Springtime for Hitler” or, even better, Dave Chappelle “Clayton Bigsby” territory, or it might have in more innocent times, when the prospect of a return to Hitlerism was still more ludicrous than sinistrrer. For all of its real murderousness, there is something about fascist strutting that inclines healthy people to laugh, rather than admire or cower. Fascism, on some level, is just an ultimately buffoonish insistence to be taken very seriously or else, so one must reserve one’s right to mockery. But laughing seems almost as much of a defense in this case as rolling one’s eyes. The content is disturbing, so it feels irresponsible or dishonest to dismiss it with boredom or laughter.

So what about outrage? Surely, that’s the correct response: condemnation, declaration of principles, the recitation of one’s anti-fascist or anti-anti-semitic bona fides. But no: all the huffing and puffing and stamping on the floor also only seems to feed the whole thing, too. So what about pity? The invocation of mental illness, of the loss and self-destruction of a great talent, of a lost and tortured soul. Maybe getting warmer. And this is where the actual musical experience of the song comes in: It contains a lot of pain; It’s partly a mournful cry. The strange, compelling, catchy, and even hypnotic effect of the song comes from the combination of that unholy chant “Heil Hitler” with the soulfulness of the black musical tradition. Profanation of the religious has always been part of Kayne’s art, and there is something genuinely new and odd about hearing Nazi slogans in tones developed and refined in the spiritual and the black church choir. It would be a step too far to say that the form somehow rescues the content and this is a subtle or unintentional piece of anti-fascist art, but West cannot help representing the truth of Nazism in a way that undermines its usual propaganda image of omnipotence. The lyrics give a pretty good account of the psychological roots of Nazism: undigested frustration, impotence, pain, defeat, and humiliation. But this honesty does not rescue the song any more than a murderer’s expressions of terrible frustration would excuse him. We can see a trace of human feeling there, but also its intentional, violent extermination.

In the final analysis, the provocation is a successful one because it freezes us and leaves us with no good response: It’s an expression of defiant power. We seem to laugh or ignore it at our peril, but also to express outrage to no avail. This is the whole point. As Sartre said of the anti-semite reveling in his bad faith, he seeks above all else, “to intimidate and disconcert.” This modern Nazism says, "Yes, we are losers, we are incels, we are cucks, we are despicable creatures, we do fear, we do hate, and there is nothing you can do about it. We chose it. We are proud of it. Herein lies our power.” The fear, weakness, and sense of impotence are transferred from the perpetrator to the victim. But a new collectivity is also thereby born, as in a Church. When the fascist squads in Italy went out on their punitive expeditions with their clubs and castor oil, they sang songs together.