Nothing Hurts Anymore: Kanye West and Manic Fantasy
What happens when reality is more manic than your dark, twisted, fantasies?
By Eric Shorey
CW: self harm, suicidality, mental illness
A few years ago, I watched an acquaintance ascend into mania on Facebook. In retrospect, their lapse into a fully psychotic state reminds me of the first sentence of The Exorcist novel:
“Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.”
That is to say, it happened almost imperceptibly at first, a few posts about God here and there, some photographs of paintings that looked like angry scribbles. It didn’t seem even remotely remarkable amidst the sea of hot takes, news stories, pictures of happy families, and people begging for money. The posts grew exponentially and erratically in number: six or seven in an afternoon, then nothing for days, then 30 or 40 in an hour. The posts themselves didn’t make any sense: mathematical experiments attempting to prove the existence of God, proclamations about Christ’s sexuality. This pattern went on for a few weeks. And then, suddenly, they were live streaming themself naked, screaming, running through a store, knocking over products and babbling incoherently. There they were: throwing cans of food, yelling about the third coming of The Lord into the front facing camera, proclaiming their own divinity. They had painted a cross on their stomach and had written prayers on their arms. I wanted to pretend like I had never seen it; there was nothing I could have done about it anyway. They were in another city — we hadn’t even spoken in years. I didn’t even have their phone number. Eventually the police showed up. I’m not sure what happened after that.
Mania and manic psychosis are both somewhat outside the realm of psychoanalytic treatment and consideration: although plenty of theorizing has been done about both the state of mania and its etiology, psychoanalysts — in general — agree that our methodology is not suitable for treating patients in which facilitating a regression could catalyze a total decompensation.
In other words: for psychoanalysis to work a person needs a strong enough ego to explore deeply buried fantasies and primal, primitive urges: “real mindfucky stuff” as one patient recently described it to me. An “analyzable” patient has to be able to delve deep into the unconscious — and then get up off the couch and go back to the office. The process doesn’t really work if a person will shatter under this kind of psychic pressure. The last thing we’d want to do is induce a psychotic break.
Manic fantasies are terrifying. Mania is often described as a feeling of too-goodness: everything is up, up, up — so high in the sky you can barely see it — but this doesn’t quite capture the horror of the experience. It’s true that lots of people who experience mania actually like it: they can get a lot of work done, they have enough energy for days of activity and no need for sleep. They feel great! Too great! But people in the grips of more extreme mania are often also quite afraid. Voices are speaking to them from the sky. God is telling them strange things: burn off all your body hair — or that Buddha lives underneath your floorboards. The Earth is flat and also NASA’s real project is to control the weather, not go into space. You have secret knowledge. God himself gave you that knowledge. You can prove the Earth is actually flat if you work out the math just right. You can save the whole world with this forbidden wisdom you suddenly have! You were chosen to save the world! You have to do it fast before they find you and hurt you! You can see the equation right in front of you but for some reason you can’t write it down. You have to tell people the Earth is flat — they need to know they are being lied to. And by the way, where am I and how did I get here?
When I think about mania, I think about Kanye West. While West’s diagnosis has been discussed publicly for years, I’d like to refrain from taking this as a fact. It’s unethical for me to diagnose him or any public figure. I don’t know the man and I can’t imagine I ever will. I don’t know his private thoughts and feelings. I don’t know if his whole “bipolar is my superpower” gimmick is a carefully produced media stunt designed to sell minimalist hoodies. Maybe his art is actually a sublimation of or meditation on mania, a place where he can safely express it — and actually he’s totally healthy. Who knows?
Album cover for Ye (2018)
That being said, I think West’s music provides listeners with an exploration of manic fantasy. We may not know if his expressions of mania are real or entirely fabricated by a team of PR personnel — but the aesthetic world Kanye inhabits certainly takes audiences into a kind of manic cosmos. But I think what scares me about watching Kanye is that for this mega-celebrity every manic fantasy is actually reality.
Rap music as a genre is organized around certain kinds of manic dreams: rappers spit about endless access to sex, drugs, money, guns, and power. This is, in many cases, entirely aspirational: having been denied wealth and agency due to poverty and racism, rappers fantasize about a better life where they’re on top, where they are kings (or queens), where “nothing can stop me, I’m all the way up.”
For a select few rappers, these fantasies eventually become real: they amass wealth and power through their music. This was obviously the case for Kanye, whose early albums describe both struggles and triumphs on the road to super-stardom. But something changed around the debut of Yeezus in 2013. Suddenly, the descriptions of beautiful, dark, twisted fantasies had taken on a more schizophrenic sound.
Yeezus, featuring chaotic and cacophonous beat making from Arca, is filled with the sounds of literal screaming. Kanye describes a paranoid universe in which anything and everything can be taken by Black skinheads and a new generation of slavers. West is reflecting on an emerging political reality: the increased negative racial partisanship in American political discourse — but something else is going on here, too. He is both proclaiming his own divinity (he deserves veneration, massages, designer clothes — no, he demands them — “Hurry up with my damn croissant!”) but he’s terrified it all could be snatched away at any moment. The fantasy has become persecutory.
Around the same time, Kanye was becoming romantically involved with Kim Kardashian, perhaps the highest profile female celebrity in the world. He was signing multi-million dollar deals with Adidas. His music was being described as the work of a tortured genius. When he proclaimed that he is a God, or that he was chosen by God: who could argue with him? He had gone from being a middle class Chicago kid to the planet’s most important artist within one short decade. He was sleeping with the most beautiful person alive, he was being handed unfathomable amounts of money to spout half-formed ideas about fashion. Everywhere he went he was praised. He was chosen for this destiny, and he had known it all along.
So: what happens when manic fantasy totally merges with reality? What happens when there’s no difference between psychotic dreams and your daily experience?
Only a few years later Kanye would be visiting the White House, he’d be offered a 10-year contract with GAP, he’d even try and run for President himself. There he was, in a bullet proof vest spouting suspicious and entirely incomprehensible theories to an audience of confused hypebeasts who were live-streaming the event for clout. (Later, it would be revealed that his campaign was a nastily crafted plot by Republican operatives to draw Black votes away from Biden.)
To me: this looks like someone in the throes of total mania. His speech is almost word salad. He looks scared. He’s dripping sweat. At one point he cries, thinking about abortion and his daughter — and how both God and his mother saved him from being aborted by his father.
Released to nearly-universal terrible reviews in 2018 — 2 years before launching his delusional (or performatively delusional) presidential campaign — the 23 minute album ye is Kanye’s most frightening work. The LP is obviously incomplete and nearly incoherent, as if released the morning after a particularly manic night of explosive artistic progress. The opening track, “I Thought About Killing You,” plainly describes a matricidal or infanticidal fantasy. Not rapped, just spoken:
The most beautiful thoughts are always besides the darkest
Today, I seriously thought about killing you
I contemplated, premeditated murder
And I think about killing myself
And I love myself way more than I love you, so……
Just say it out loud to see how it feels
People say "don't say this, don't say that"
Just say it out loud, just to see how it feels
Weigh all the options, nothing's off the table…
I think this is the part where I'm supposed to say something good to compensate it so it doesn't come off bad
But sometimes I think really bad things
Really, really, really bad things
When I think about mania, I think about Kanye’s Sunday Services performance of “Ghost Town” from the same album. I think about Kanye’s strange mumbling, the bizarre laser sound effects (like the noise of VALIS), the desolate crooning drenched in a harsh red light. I think about about a beautiful Gospel choir — the sound of heaven itself — singing about self harm:
I've been tryin' to make you love me
But everything I try just takes you further from meOh, once again I am a child
I let it all go (go), of everything that I know, yeah
Of everything that I know, yeah
And nothing hurts anymore, I feel kinda free
We're still the kids we used to be, yeah, yeah
I put my hand on the stove, to see if I still bleed
Yeah, and nothing hurts anymore, I feel kinda free
Has there ever been a better example of the manic mindset? Both the angelic, blissful voices, the praiseful and prayerful sound of God — and the absolute terror, the fear, the crazy self-destructive impulse given a voice: suicidality disguised as Holy devotion, as liberation — being finally “free” as the chords and harmonies rise, as he is delivered from pain (“Nothing hurts anymore!”), higher and higher, all the way up.
We all watched as Kanye’s marriage exploded on social media, as his wife begged him to get help, as he refused her pleas and characterized her as a captor. To what extent this too was a carefully calculated media performance, we may never know. But he is a God. Everything he touches turns to gold. Everywhere he goes, someone offers him more money. He is currently valued at upwards of $6.6 billion — with a B. Who could say he’s wrong? “Tell ‘em this, did he miss?”
Kanye would follow ye with two albums whose central through-line is hyper-religiosity: Jesus is King and Donda. The first is a straight up Gospel album, the second a sprawling and frenzied 108 minutes of boastful electronic soundscapes and problematic cameos. Named after his late mother, Donda shows Kanye using hyper-religiosity as a defense against grief. Although his rapping is almost embarrassingly bad throughout — as if rabidly improvised on the spot, with lyrics that are often childishly entitled — he openly discusses loneliness and emptiness. “60 million dollar home, never went home to it,” he quips on “Hurricane.”
The production on “Hurricane,” by the way, is astonishingly beautiful. The way the gospel choir appears and disappears, no fading in or out, just sudden walls of overwhelming sound amidst menacing layers of synthetic droning, a muffled trap snare, and an insistent choir organ — it’s almost gothic in its oscillation between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. “Don’t let me down!” the choir sings before suddenly and instantaneously evaporating. God is there, then gone. (See: Freud’s fort / da game.)
But, despite the album’s name, he never talks about mourning or loss. At one point, Kanye could grapple with these feelings, as he attempted to do with the creation of his since-abandoned melancholic video game, Only One, in which he depicted his mother’s ascension into heaven.
Now, instead, he talks about God. He talks endlessly about God. He talks repetitively about God. There is a void here, represented by the LP’s monochrome black album art. (The album’s art was at first supposed to be an adaptation of 2007 painting titled “FEMME” by Louise Bourgeoise, an artist whose monstrous depictions of her own mother have earned her the honorary title of Freud’s daughter.)
Manic psychosis is often sparked by a traumatogenic event — could Donda’s death in 2007 be at the center of his metaphorical manic universe? Could his (either performed or very real) manic episodes have been the result of delayed affect, a time-displaced pathological response to an unfathomable loss and blocked grieving?
(Could something also be said about Kanye’s inability to process grief and his recent insistence on turning his new girlfriend into a clone of his ex-wife? Could more be written about a kind of manic denial of loss and his insistent belief that he will get back together with Kim? Probably.)
The release of Donda was plagued with delays until it was semi-surprise-dropped during the Summer of 2021, amidst unhinged social media battles about censorship between the artist and his label. Ye kept uploading new versions of the tracks to Spotify even after the work was released. He was living in Atlanta United’s stadium, where Demna Gvasalia, the creative director of Balenciaga, had constructed a recreation of his boyhood home and from which “listening parties” would emanate nightly: “Oh, once again I am a child…”
Now, Kanye’s projects are falling apart around him. His ex-wife dodges him as he threatens and begs for her acknowledgement in terrified and terrifying social media rants and livestreams. GAP can’t actually get him to produce any garments beyond a hoodie and a jacket. His Donda “communications company” has absurd plans to expand into “holograms” and “medical research” and “surveillance technology” and “luxury search engine[s].” Sure, Ye.
And yet, Kanye’s latest commercial for his GAP hoodie (which doubles as a music video for the track “Heaven and Hell”) appears more manic than ever. In it, a dark cityscape of hoodie-wearing denizens covertly plot some kind of clandestine war. They must have some forbidden knowledge. They hold each other protectively. They battle across urban and biblical landscapes before their bodies rise into heaven, where Kanye himself is surrounded by some kind of celestial miasma. He is the literal center of the universe. When I think about the manic psychosis of some of my patients in the past, this isn’t far from the world they have described to me:
Make this final, make this, my eyes closed
Burn false idols, Jesus' disciples
I can feel your pain now, I done bled my vein out
New level the game now, simulation changed
No more problems, no more argue
No more askin', "Who really are you?"
No one can stay this manic forever — in fantasy or reality. It’s simply too exhausting. That’s why mania is usually followed by depression. Everything has to slow down. But without the constraints of a normal person’s reality, without the normal needs of work and love — and instead surrounded by oceans of yes men and mega-corporations handing you more and more money and power at every moment — what incentive is there to descend back to Earth? When does Kanye come down?
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