In going public with his bipolar disorder diagnosis in June 2018, Kanye West described his illness as his “superpower.” This touched a nerve — as have his erratic public behavior, his high-profile support for President Trump, and most recently, his insistence that he was misdiagnosed and therefore has stopped taking his medication.
On Dec. 15, he tweeted: “I cannot be on meds and make watch the throne level or dark fantasy level music,” a reference to two of his celebrated albums, “Watch the Throne” and “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”
The Atlantic magazine’s Amanda Mull chided, “West is promoting one of mental health’s most persistent and dangerous myths: that suffering is necessary for great art.” Earlier, the Daily Beast’s Tanya Basu sounded similar notes, writing, “He embraces the tortured genius stereotype that science has found to be questionable.”
“Dark Fantasy” is not merely good music. It is a transcendent record, mesmerizing in its musical complexity and lyrical depth. But that’s honestly irrelevant to the discussion at hand. What if Kanye loved that record, but Amanda Mull hated it? Is that an argument for pop culture scribes to be ordering others to go on medication?
Mull takes this further. She says the idea that suffering improves art “is not logical” and quotes a Columbia University psychology professor: “Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed, or so manic that no one can tolerate being with them and they start to merge into psychosis, or when they’re filled with numbing anxiety.”
She paraphrases the same professor that “the correct combination of medication and therapy can make you more attuned to how your work’s quality will be perceived by people who aren’t in your mania with you.”
In other words, you’re crazy, so you don’t know what’s good.
It’s particularly risible here. “Dark Fantasy” exists. It went double-platinum. Yet, Mull & Co. are telling a mental-health patient that they don’t understand their own art, all for the sake of curbing behavior that isn’t dangerous but includes a beloved music figure putting on a red cap that expresses support for the president.
The era of invasive, ubiquitous social media has turned us into self-declared experts on any and all subjects that flow through our Twitter feeds. Everybody seems to think they know what’s best for a famous person struggling with a mental-illness diagnosis. They — we — don’t.
America’s culture critics can hate Kanye’s “MAGA” turn all they want, but that doesn’t make them doctors. Nor, it’s clear, does it make them insightful judges of art.
