The split between Kanye West and Kim Kardashian is one of the most overdetermined divorces in modern American history.
West, until recently one of our few consensus geniuses and someone who has transformed American pop culture on more or less an annual basis since 2003, could not have been an easy man to be married to. At a certain point, with his best work far behind him, the themes that gave human scale to West’s sprawling palaces of quasi-symphonic hip-hop — reckonings with money, fame, ego, and excess and increasingly with grief, Christianity, parenthood, and mental illness — devoured the man himself.
In the years since the release of his last universally acclaimed album, 2016’s remarkable The Life of Pablo, West has experienced manic episodes of an increasingly severe and public nature, blown his critical darling status by cozying up to former President Donald Trump, gone to war with the recording industry, launched a shambolic presidential campaign, said a number of very odd things about slavery and race relations, and risked his remaining credibility with the cultural mainstream by remaking himself as a morally rigid religious mystic, inveighing against abortion and insisting on celibacy from members of his backup choir.
No one should have to live with all that, not even if the “all that” includes an estimated $65 million in yearly sneaker royalties — not that Kardashian needs West’s Adidas money. She is now an entrepreneur, law student, criminal justice reform activist, and dignified pop culture elder stateswoman. Only someone eager to advertise his or her piggishness treats Kardashian as a punchline in 2021. In the dissolution of their marriage, we see the inevitable consequences of a mismatch between a dysfunctional man and a focused and responsible woman — and for this and other reasons, we can also glimpse the passing of an era in American life, the curdling of an earlier frivolity into an all-pervading feeling of drift.
Kardashian and West were married atop Florence’s Forti di Belvedere in May of 2014. A bathroom containing a golden toilet was hoisted over the 16th-century battlements by a crane, and guests at the reception had their names chiseled in marble at their place settings. This was a union of two world conquerors. During a hot streak of wildly different and endlessly imaginative albums, West had stretched a sound and sensibility originating in hip-hop until it encompassed every musical genre and perhaps every musical possibility, soundtracking the 21st century in the process. Kardashian had pioneered the all-platform celebrity brand-making industry that was coming to define our psychic and cultural space.
The match was luridly fascinating because of the groom’s instability and the fact that Kardashian, of all people, would now have to manage West’s various manias in public. She made a courageous go of it. The pair often defied expectations and modeled a loving relationship, with Kardashian becoming a sensitive and unquestionably patient advocate during many of West’s darkest moments. But it should come as no shock that the marriage couldn’t survive him. The clues are in his music, which everyone agrees has been in steady decline, just like its creator.
Fresh off of swapping some remaining sliver of dignity for 60,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election, West is now mired in a creative, personal, and literal wilderness, hopelessly alienated from his formerly vast abilities, brooding on matters of God and man and self from the solitude of his Wyoming compound. Dave Chappelle and Kid Cudi drop by occasionally, but in a sense, Kanye can never leave, with the pressures of health, faith, and creativity amounting to a kind of exile. West’s fearlessness and originality have unmade him: Reaction and religion have always been themes of his, but the Trump flirtation and preachy, anti-abortion religious epiphany were even less subtle than those 15-year-old lines about the “victims of welfare” and fantasies of a nightclub crowd hailing Christ’s return.
It isn’t just West who changed. He lost himself and his marriage at a moment when the cultural climate was becoming sharply intolerant of free-thinking eccentrics. A single political or social justice-related snafu can now erase any remaining patience for a troubled genius, and West’s been guilty of dozens of them. Even the concept of “genius” is beginning to sound suspect, as it asserts vast inequities in human ability and is frequently used to excuse people like West who allegedly think and behave in ways deemed detrimental to society as a whole. Kardashian, along with much of the rest of the public, decided genius wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.
Jesus is King, West’s unevenly received 2019 gospel-rap record and his last full-length release, is about as direct a rebuke to the ever-judgier mainstream as one can imagine these days. Though only sporadically brilliant, the record has a spiritual intensity that cannot be easily faked, not even by an artist as capable as himself. Some saw the album as an announcement of personal redemption and the attainment of elusive inner calm through religion, with West boldly proclaiming, contrary to the entire culture, that God remains the final and only measure of reality. Certain religiously inclined listeners welcomed his embrace of faith, trumpeted in both the album and in his choir-backed Sunday Service concert series, as an act of bold defiance against a hostile and secular monoculture. But it’s possible the record was also one stop on an often-troubled journey and that West, similar to Bob Dylan before him, arrived at Christianity as a language of self-expression at a time in his life when nothing else could animate him. On this reading, Jesus is King is as bracing a record of personal crisis as anything else in West’s discography, the sound of someone turning to God in thwarted hopes of getting his powers back.
West was wracked with turmoil even at his most potent — it’s part of what made his music so good. A sample of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” anchored a major single from 2010. On the 2005 landmark Late Registration, he rapped about the immorality of conflict diamonds and gave a nihilistic account of an acid-fueled Vegas debauch over the same orchestral beat. “My friend showed me pictures of his kids/And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs,” West laments on 2008’s “Welcome to Heartbreak,” which was recorded shortly after the death of his mother, an event that unsettled him deeply, perhaps even permanently (Kardashian and West would later have four children together). While there are many worthy candidates, I believe West reached the absolute outer limit of his art on 2016’s “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1,” when a soaring gospel choir prefaces a self-consciously depressing rumination on empty sex with a model. The numinous plummets into disillusionment, and listeners feel the pathos of yearning toward a higher ideal and failing to get anywhere close.
By the time “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” came out, Kardashian and West had been married for over a year. She wasn't quite the pillar of seriousness she is now, and he wasn’t quite so totally unhinged. Narrow political sentiment had yet to exert its current death grip on elite artistic values. Marriages between two very different types of hypercelebrities almost never work out, and it always strained credulity to think that the then-greatest American musician and the most mesmerizing American reality TV spectacle would stay together forever. KimYe couldn’t last. Then again, not much else has really lasted either.
KimYe wrecked against untreated mental illness and a mercurial icon's long, ugly struggle with his frustrated sense of purpose. It’s a story a lot of people can recognize by now, since hyperwealthy musical geniuses are hardly the only people left feeling desiccated, exhausted, and existentially adrift at the moment. The strange relatability of West’s condition and the potentially great music he may still be capable of making should have everyone rooting for his comeback. What’s worrying is how little people still seem to expect one.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
