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At the peak of his powers Kanye was Napoleon, marshaling armies of collaborators to conquer swaths of emotional terrain. He blocked out the sky with the scale of his hunger for sex, love, power, and approval. It was an imperial run of tightly controlled myth-making and tactical vulnerability. The clarity of his vision channeled a generation’s scrambled selfhood into monumental records that raised the romantic stakes of our lives. We worshipped him for it.
Cut to: divorce; Bipolar disorder; porn addiction; Wyoming; the presidential run; Nick Fuentes; the evil dentist; “can I have the nitrus today?”
Ye in 2025 bears little resemblance to the monarch he was. He’s a jester figure, dressed in rags, dancing for change outside the palace gates. He mocks his old domain with crude antics and slurs. The townspeople hurry past, averting our eyes from the sad spectacle. But at home, in secret, we still listen to the threadbare, half-finished music he puts out, and we recognize shreds of the old genius. Obviously he’s no longer an aspirational protagonist. He’s a lost soul rooting around in the muck, grabbing third rails and following them into the psychosexual bowels of a culture that can’t quite leave him behind. Sometimes that leads to tedious provocations like “Heil Hitler.” But then there’s “Cousins.” Cobbled together from a Double Virgo riff and a Dave Blunts melody (only Ye, all-time sample wizard, could connect the dots between those spiky misanthropes), it tells a raw, uncomfortable tale. A young Ye blows his cousin in a fit of youthful experimentation, tries to keep it a secret, and abuses nitrous decades later to hide the shame. The song evokes the feeling of a stranger handing me a home-made doll, scrawled with crazy symbols and embroidered with scraps of fabric from the trash. It might not look pretty and it definitely smells weird. But in its grubby little way, “Cousins” continues the project of Ye’s career: confronting the overwhelming power of his desires, losing the battle over and over, and forcing us to face the paler version of that struggle within ourselves.
Cut to: divorce; Bipolar disorder; porn addiction; Wyoming; the presidential run; Nick Fuentes; the evil dentist; “can I have the nitrus today?”
Ye in 2025 bears little resemblance to the monarch he was. He’s a jester figure, dressed in rags, dancing for change outside the palace gates. He mocks his old domain with crude antics and slurs. The townspeople hurry past, averting our eyes from the sad spectacle. But at home, in secret, we still listen to the threadbare, half-finished music he puts out, and we recognize shreds of the old genius. Obviously he’s no longer an aspirational protagonist. He’s a lost soul rooting around in the muck, grabbing third rails and following them into the psychosexual bowels of a culture that can’t quite leave him behind. Sometimes that leads to tedious provocations like “Heil Hitler.” But then there’s “Cousins.” Cobbled together from a Double Virgo riff and a Dave Blunts melody (only Ye, all-time sample wizard, could connect the dots between those spiky misanthropes), it tells a raw, uncomfortable tale. A young Ye blows his cousin in a fit of youthful experimentation, tries to keep it a secret, and abuses nitrous decades later to hide the shame. The song evokes the feeling of a stranger handing me a home-made doll, scrawled with crazy symbols and embroidered with scraps of fabric from the trash. It might not look pretty and it definitely smells weird. But in its grubby little way, “Cousins” continues the project of Ye’s career: confronting the overwhelming power of his desires, losing the battle over and over, and forcing us to face the paler version of that struggle within ourselves.
Dec 31, 2025