Last summer a friend and I went to see a screening of Rosemary’s Baby. When Roman Polanski’s name came up during the opening credits, a single person clapped; maybe it was a Political Comment, maybe he thought it was funny. Two hours later that friend and I walked out of the theater and into a nearby bar, where we talked first about the movie and then about separating the art from the artist. The limits of auteur theory, the distinction between critical appraisal and financial support, etc. etc. etc. etc., the loop we’ve all been stuck in for years. We noted the guy who clapped and rolled our eyes. I went home and posted “‘Believe women’ —Roman Polanski” on my Letterboxd account. Twenty-three people liked it.
Over the weekend, Kanye West posted on Twitter a new song called “World War 3.” The lyrics are a hyper-literal exercise in doubling down on his recent public comments. He raps about voting for Trump, begging a dentist to pump him full of nitrous, pissing on Grammys, and reading “two chapters” of Mein Kampf every night before he falls asleep. Like those public comments, the song is a near-perfect distillation of this moment in America: unfathomably dumb, proudly evil, but above all else, crushingly desperate. Typing slurs like a lab rat trained to press a button for food pellets. The song is awful, but that’s barely the point. What it illustrates is that many people have an interest in collapsing the distinction between art and “content,” in the sense that any craft or artifice can been done away with, or at least severely deprioritized, in service of feeding more pulp into the unending churn of slop and discourse that plays out on our phones and computers. It’s not that Rosemary’s Baby is metaphysically inseparable from Polanski’s crime; it’s that Rosemary’s Baby and Polanski’s crime can be flattened and smoothed until they simply serve to speed up the infinite scroll.
All of which made it shocking when, last night, Kanye posted links to several versions of his still-in-progress new album, Bully—which turned out to be not only the best collection of beats he’s assembled in more than a decade, but a rich, warm, even optimistic record that feels safely cloistered from the internet, the world, even its primary author.
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