Kim, Kanye, and the end of a cultural era

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.