Poopity Scoopity: A Review of Kanye West’s Twitter Account

review #04

In reviewing Kanye West’s Twitter/X account, it would be unfair to ignore the role of mental illness in its production. I agree with everything Freddie DeBoer says on the subject here. The few extremely desperate fans who are still insisting that West is doing “performance art” are clearly wrong.

But I would note that, in addition to this very real mental health crisis, Kanye has also been experiencing an artistic crisis for years now. If you squint, you can see how this contributed to his eventual decision to embrace the novelty of being a Black Nazi and post hardcore porn clips on Twitter.

I first felt that Kanye was struggling artistically when he released the track “Lift Yourself” in 2018. It starts off with a Gospel sample and a catchy beat, before West begins to talk up the lyrics he’s about to drop: “ This next verse, this next verse though… these bars… Watch, this some shit…”

But then he just raps rhyming nonsense, all clustered around “poop”:

Poopy-di scoop

Scoop-diddy-whoop

Whoop-di-scoop-di-poop

Poop-di-scoopty

Scoopty-whoop

Whoopity-scoop, whoop-poop

Poop-diddy, whoop-scoop

Poop, poop

Scoop-diddy-whoop

Whoop-diddy-scoop

Whoop-diddy-scoop, poop

I’m sure Kanye’s devotees argued that this was a brilliant Dadaist joke. Clearly, he was trolling, but I felt like he was also confessing that he was struggling to find a new artistic direction. He was saying, “I recognize that I’ve exhausted the current of inspiration. The muse is no longer present to me. I have only this excremental vision to offer you. It’s all shit.”

Briefly, he found a new direction by becoming more overtly Christian. Kanye was always devoted to Jesus, as demonstrated by his early hit, “Jesus Walks,” off The College Dropout, but this religious passion existed in tension with his earthly and pornographic interests (Daft Punk said that he watched so much porn in the recording studio that it started to make them hallucinate).

As part of his reversion to Christian praxis, Kanye hosted Gospel-themed “Sunday Services” in LA and released the album Jesus is King, which disavowed profanity and any sexual or violent lyrical content. He also swore off porn. I thought the album was interesting and maybe a start in a new, fruitful direction. If anything, it could’ve been even more Christian and burrowed further into exploring different dimensions of Gospel and incorporating them into the sonic landscapes Kanye has proven so adept at designing. It’s not hard to imagine a sonic collage that would, say, incorporate religiously themed classical music, Black American Gospel, and hip-hop in a way that felt new and exciting. Plus, Kanye has always had an affinity for the baroque and maximal. Jesus is King felt like it was heading in this direction but hadn’t fully realized it yet. It seemed like a new beginning.

But the critical reaction to Jesus is King was muted if respectful and, in some cases, quite hostile. Robert Christgau, the revered “Dean of American Rock Critics,” was particularly vituperative, calling the album “grandiose, self-involved, uninspired, plus there are the underlying politics, which as far as I'm concerned verge on evil.” He concluded, “Spiritually he's an egomaniacal shell, and the music is nothing. May he be born again for real, but I'm not holding my breath." (For the record, I think the real problem is that Christgau has an aversion to religious music. He didn’t even like George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass).

I wonder if this muted-to-hostile reaction was a greater disappointment for West than commonly realized? I think most people saw Jesus is King as a gimmick or a novelty record, treating it dismissively the way Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming and Saved were originally treated before they gained respect in the following decades. Albeit, Kanye’s explicitly Christian output wasn’t as good as Dylan’s, but you could see how he might’ve developed more in that direction.

Instead, we see what happened: a messy divorce, bipolar diagnosis, hospitalization for mental health, plummeting back into porn addiction, hanging out with Nick Fuentes, routinely sexually humiliating his new wife, and, of course, ranting against the Jews on Twitter. He jumped back into the excremental vision, into the nihilistic poopity-scoop world. Now, I understand that mental illness plays by its own rules, and I don’t mean to claim that the artistic crisis caused the mental health crisis. I’m just saying that they go together. As Graham Greene, who was bipolar, wrote to his wife, “Unfortunately, the disease is also one's material.”

It is as though, after losing his creative direction and failing to stick with Christianity, Kanye had nothing left but lust and rage in his psyche, nothing but Id—which is what his Twitter account bears witness to:

These comments were followed by a fusillade of hardcore porn clips. He also announced his support for the now legally embattled Diddy and defensively and angrily admitted to having hit women in the past.

There is undoubtedly a trollish channer’s glee here, which again isn’t to say that this is “performance art.”

Kanye has always been fashion conscious and adept at sensing the cultural winds, but here this ability is routed into channeling the Internet’s dumbest, vilest elements. Instead of determining the cultural direction and setting trends himself, he’s now churning out trollslop, lagging behind the curve, scrambling for a rancid drop of relevance.

This culminated with Kanye deleting every item for sale on the Yeezy store except for this one:

Since it’s so over the top, it makes you wonder if the secret purpose isn’t self-destruction more than anything else. I think DeBoer is right when he talks about the suicide risks for someone who has been unmedicated for as long as Kanye. He needs help, but clearly no one in his increasingly self-selected cosmos has the capacity to offer it.

For obvious reasons, I have to give Kanye’s Twitter account zero stars. He’s in the darkest cavern right now, and I can only hope that he makes it out. Maybe he needs a miracle.

He used to believe in them.