Separating The Art From The Artist With Kanye West And Richard Wagner
Kanye just put out a new album. Does listening to it mean you also love Hitler?
Kanye West is the reincarnation of Richard Wagner.
Wagner, the famous 19th-century composer who is world-renowned for his operas, shares certain prominent qualities with Kanye and I am convinced they also share a soul.
Firstly, they are musical innovators of their time. To be modest about Kanye’s influence, he’s won 24 Grammys, and even though Wagner’s been dead for over 100 years, I guarantee you’ve heard his music — most likely the fanfare, “Ride of the Valkyries.”
“Ride of the Valkyries” is the piece Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore plays out of the helicopters in Apocalypse Now (1979) when they barrage a Vietnamese village with missiles and machine guns.
It’s also in movies and TV shows like Wrath of Man (2021), Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), Brooklyn 99 (2013), Rango (2011), Watchmen (2009), Norbit (2007), Jarhead (2005), The Running Man (1987), and Blues Brothers (1980).
Wagner wrote “Ride of the Valkyries” around 1870. 150 years later, those powerful horns still have a place in popular culture. If anything proves legendary influence, that’s it.
Another similarity between Kanye and Wagner is their petty, public attacks on their rivals.
Just like how Kanye wrote ignorant, degrading social media posts about Pete Davidson in response to his romantic involvement with Kim Kardashian, Wagner published essays disparaging other composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Both were more successful than Wagner, and he made his jealousy known.
The last and most deplorable quality that Kanye and Wagner share is their horrific antisemitism. In case you forgot about Kanye’s, watch the video below:
When I went to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, I saw one of Wagner’s essays in the first exhibit. He was Hitler's favorite composer, and here are some things he published about Jews:
Germans are repelled by Jews due to their “alien” appearance and behavior.
“With all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them.”
Wagner said that Jews could only make art that was shallow and artificial.
He also wrote in a letter that his “long-suppressed resentment against this Jewish business" was "as necessary to me as gall is to the blood."
Wagner’s hatred of Jews is unambiguous and well-documented. Yet studios are still syncing his music into major motion pictures and most music history books state that he is one of the greatest composers to ever live.
Other than an irate heckler in season two of Curb Your Enthusiasm, everyone is happy to separate the art from the artist in the case of Wagner.
Now Kanye, who released VULTURES 1, his joint album with Ty Dolla $ign, on February 9, is testing whether people are willing to separate the art from the artist in his case, and, to be frank, it very much seems like they are.
In a recent Complex interview, Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, described Kanye as the “GOAT rapper.”
“I know that’s controversial,” Glover said. “But I feel like we would not have any of the rappers we have now without him.”
Kanye has elevated the careers of dozens of rappers including Travis Scott, Pusha T, Desiigner, Sheck Wes, 070 Shake, and Chance The Rapper.
Consider the line from Chance’s verse on “Ultralight Beam”:
“I met Kanye West I’m never going to fail.”
That’s how people still view Kanye, and when VULTURES 1 came out, no one was shy about expressing their views.
VULTURES 1 was number one in 71 countries on Apple Music the day after it came out. Shifting things internally, here are a few artists who worked on the album:
Timbaland, Denzel Curry, Wax Motif, London on da Track, Freddie Gibbs, Ant Clemons. Kanye’s antisemitism didn’t bother them at all.
Sure, there was some backlash. Ozzie Osbourne called Kanye an anti-Semite when he discovered Kanye used a sample of “Iron Man” without permission (Kanye removed the sample from the album after), but overall, no one cares about the truth in Ozzy’s statement. Kanye is an anti-Semite.
And thus, the oft-considered question is answered:
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