Kanye, Trauma & The Nerve To Be Dope

By: Shawn Taylor

Before his current delusional behavior, before he became the epitome of “pick me, white people,” before the anti-Semitic rants, before the sartorial trolling, and before he matriculated into a being of pure arrogance, there was the beautifully vain and cocky Kanye Omari West. He was cocky enough to turn one of the most traumatic events of his life, a major car accident, into a song, “Through the Wire,” a song he knew would hit the cultural zeitgeist and have a major impact. The song was immensely vulnerable:

How do you console my mom or give her light support

Telling her, her son's on life support

And just imagine how my girl feel

On the plane scared as hell that her guy look like Emmett Till

In the third verse of the song, Kanye was bold enough to tangentially write himself into the canon of legendarily skilled emcees, internationality, and MTV:

In the same hospital where Biggie Smalls died

The doctor said I had blood clots

But I ain't Jamaican, man

Story on MTV and I ain't trying to make a band

I swear, this right here, history in the making, man

By name-checking Biggie Smalls, Kanye positions himself as participating in a hip-hop rebirth, rising up from Biggie’s tragic death. And the last line sees him demonstrating a bit of foreknowledge that he will be a history-making artist. 

This song debuted about five months before his classic album, The College Dropout detonated in the culture. 

This isn’t gatekeeping but if you weren’t outside when this album hit, it is almost impossible to describe the impact. Here was someone who crossed the hoods and the suburbs, the gallerias and swap meets. You could be the most gangsta but wouldn’t lose an ounce of street cred if you bumped “Jesus Walks” or “All Falls Down.” Kanye was one of the very few folks that Jay-Z co-signed who had any sense of longevity and lasting cultural impact. If you weren’t outside then, it is hard to situate the phenomenon of The College Dropout.

Legendary emcee, KRS-ONE called rap music, “a confidence sandwich.” We, the listeners, ingest what the emcee is saying and hitch ourselves to their confidence while we letting it inform our behavior—we become confident by proxy. If this holds true, Kanye’s first album is a confidence buffet. 

By naming the album The College Dropout, Kanye takes what could be seen as a failure—not completing college—and demonstrates his bounce back to the stratosphere. The level of gall and self-possession it must have taken for him to not only admit that his college journey did not go well, but to tell us that he dropped out, then present us with this album as a kind of “proof” that he didn’t need the American Academy of Art or Chicago State University. In fact, if Kanye would have stayed and graduated from either institution, Dropout might not even exist, at least in the form we’ve all been deeply affected by. 

Dropout gave us swagger, faith, comedy, schoolboy descriptions of romance and sex, insecurity in the Black community, excess, a roll call of Black vocalists on “Slow Jamz,”, and effective cultural satire with, “The New Workout Plan.” This album gave us a new artist—who shifted from only producing for others to producing and writing for himself, who wasn’t just coming into his creative powers, but was firmly entrenched in them. Kanye and his album were the confidence buffet that so many other artists and regular folk gained sustenance from. He told and showed us that there weren’t any boundaries to musical artistry, that no subjects were off limits, and that disparate subject matter could co-exist because that is just what regular ass life is like: a whole bunch of wild things happening that we have to make sense of. We miss that Kanye. 

The ‘Ye that we collectively experience now is not the same as the backpack sporting, Louis Vuitton Don, double polo wearing neo-‘Lo Life Kanye Omari West many of us checked for back in the early 2000’s. What once made him brash enough to show us all his warts, his kooky sense of beatmaking, and the self-assuredness to record a monstrously hit song with his jaws wired together has faded into our collective memory in lieu of someone who seems to have forgotten what made many of us fall in love with him in the first place. It is painful to watch a man beg for love, when so many of us gave it to him, willingly, for years. While Kanye’s current antics have completely overshadowed his music, at least we have The College Dropout to remind us of what was. 

You can check out Shawn Taylor on IG at shawndtaylor3 & on his website.