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Kanye West at the end of January at the Fashion Week in Paris: Fame may be the religion of our time
Photo: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
For a few days, peace has returned to the mind of American rapper and superstar Kanye West.
Or Ye, as he has been calling himself for a while.
For days he threw out message after message on his social media accounts, accusations, lawsuits, suspicions, always in capital letters, at maximum volume.
Against his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, against old friends like rapper Kid Cudi, against real and imaginary opponents like Billie Eilish.
About his pain of losing his family.
About the longing for his children.
Is this really peace?
Now you can only see two things on his Instagram account: a picture of himself on stage, with an apology for the erratic behavior of the past few days.
And a short film in which the rapper reflects on what actually constitutes real success.
Cars?
Money?
Jewellery?
Or is it something else?
Achieving more spiritual goals?
The fascinating thing about Kanye West is that you never know where you are.
On Sunday he was still in the audience at the Super Bowl final, watching his colleague Dr.
Dre, Snoop Dogg and Eminem as they celebrate hip-hop as the new mainstream culture, posted a statistic that #kanye is trending better than #superbowl.
And got booed by the audience when his masked face appeared on the giant stadium screen.
Now there is almost meditative silence.
But is this really peace?
Or just the calm in the eye of the storm?
A few years ago he made a bipolar disorder public.
Has he just had a psychotic episode or does he just want to promote his new album »Donda 2«, which is due out soon?
Calculation or crazyness?
What's the matter with this man?
And why is he interested at all?
The music he recently released was actually the least exciting thing about Ye.
Kanye buys a porn magazine
Nor does the new Netflix documentary Jeen-Yuhs help answer those questions, a three-part series that chronicles the early days of the rapper's career, when he moved to New York from Chicago because he wanted to be something more than just a successful producer making beats for other rappers.
The film was directed by comedian Coodie Simmons, an acquaintance of West's from Chicago who senses that this young man wants something bigger than what other young men want.
You can see him recording the first versions of the songs on his groundbreaking first album.
How he fawned over MTV folks to get a spot on a show.
How he gets on people's nerves at his future record company.
How he buys a porn magazine.
And how he sits at home with his mother Donda, who tells him that he sometimes seems arrogant.
"Arrogant?" Kanye asks, as if the thought had never occurred to him.
Donda looks at him, smiles and replies: "The giant looks in the mirror and sees no giant." Donda died a few years later as a result of cosmetic surgery.
»Jeen-Yuhs« tells the classic story of a star's beginnings.
How he has to assert himself against all kinds of resistance.
A film about how the star has to believe that he is something special when everyone else still sees the sausage in him that makes himself important.
It's said that fame spoils character, a classmate once said of Diana Ross - when in fact it's the other way around, Ross was unbearable even at school.
But does that tell you about the Kanye that exists today?
Who, when he flies to the Paris fashion shows with his new girlfriend, is for a few hours the most photographed man in Europe.
Who obviously has major mental health issues, which nobody wants to talk about because it's so difficult to bring up.
Kanye has long since morphed from rapper into something else, a new breed of star bigger and weirder than anything imaginable in the early noughties.
Recognition in Milan
The interesting thing about Jeen-Yuhs is how people look around 2003.
Every rapper who appears in this film is wearing a basketball jersey.
Jay-Z on stage, Scarface in the studio, Kanye too.
These are recordings from a bygone era.
Rappers don't walk around like that anymore.
And indeed, it was Kanye who changed that.
Not just by injecting a certain form of middle-class black sensibility into hip-hop, the whole drama of a failed school and college career that his early albums revolve around.
A theme that didn't exist in hip-hop before.
The will to art that characterizes the following albums, which was also new.
A turn to the old world, a desire to find recognition in Paris and Milan.
It was Kanye West who went to Europe with Virgil Abloh in tow in 2009 to do an internship at Fendi.
West was already a superstar back then.
Abloh eventually became the creative director of Louis Vuitton, one of the fashion industry's most influential jobs, before he died last summer.
Last December, it was briefly said that Kanye was being considered for Abloh's position.
Hip-hop and thus the models of masculinity in pop look different today than they did back then.
More colourful, more diverse.
This is also Kanye's work - who earns his money not least with a shoe, the Yeezy sneaker, which he designed for Nike.
So what interests you about this man?
That he is not only megalomaniac, but also follows this delusion with action?
That he not only compares himself to Jesus, Bill Gates and Picasso, but is also somehow a genius?
An attention icon
"Jeen-Yuhs" doesn't really unravel all these questions either.
Of course you're watching a man warming up for big things.
But that this somehow ridiculous character, who has to take off her braces to rap, could one day be married to Kim Kardashian and become the world's most famous couple at the same time, that's totally unpredictable.
Also not that Kanye West could design a superstar model that is no longer about making something, music or fashion, but just about being.
A presence.
An attention icon.
However, one thing is already indicated in the images of this film, it also rages through all these wild rants, which Kanye has now withdrawn and which will inevitably be continued in the next batch: how alone you are at the top.
Fame may be the religion of our time, with its own beliefs, saints, devils and icons.
But if you want to be a god, you have to be willing to step into the freezing cold of eternal solitude.
»Jeen-Yuhs«, on Netflix. A total of three parts, the first part can already be seen, the other two will follow next Wednesday and the week after.