Later that night, Ye videoconferenced in to Chris Cuomo’s program on NewsNation from the back seat of a vehicle, with no light. The content of the conversation toggled between coherent and worrisome, and the staging felt haphazard and desperate. He was largely unable to meet the camera with a firm gaze. He appeared like a man being conveyed to nowhere.
Perhaps crucially, it gave the image of a man truly untethered — from other people, from loving counsel, from shared social ethics.
“The common understanding,” he told Cuomo, “more oftentimes than not nowadays, is not the truth.”
And yes, sometimes that is the case. But the antisemitic sentiment that Ye has been espousing is gross, and also gross in its casualness — familiar, tiresome tropes that serve only to incite hatred. (On Wednesday, in an interview with Piers Morgan, Ye appeared to apologize for some of his comments. “Hurt people hurt people, and I was hurt,” he said, in a short clip released in advance of the interview’s airing.)
If this run of interviews and social media bursts feels familiar, it’s because there is a certain cyclicity to how Ye has navigated his public life. Early in his career, his loudest complaints were often followed by his most ambitious achievements. But in recent years, the balance between volume of grievance and level of achievement has become destabilized. This recent time period feels like a callback to 2016, when Ye cut his Saint Pablo tour short and was briefly hospitalized; not long after, he publicly embraced Donald Trump and questioned whether slavery was a choice.
In that era, like the current moment, Ye would not, or could not, turn off the faucet. Sometimes it seems that he wants words to mean something other than they do. He has burned through several cycles of trying out ideas in real time only to recalibrate when he found — intentionally, or more likely not — the outer bounds of acceptable discourse. But there is no apparent fail-safe in place now.
