Over the weekend Kanye West was hospitalised for his own safety, and the safety of others. This came after a typically turbulent week for the rapper as his fans reacted badly to his tweet about how he would have voted for Trump if he’d voted at all, and ending a gig after a few songs plus a rant about everything including digs at Beyoncé and Jay Z.
I’ll admit, before he was hospitalised, I thought “oh this is just Kanye being Kanye, that dude’s always been crazy”, but the events of the weekend should remind us that he’s still a human being. Since the announcement everyone’s been quick to play the blame game, with many reductively claiming that the Kardashian clan has chewed up another man and spit him out. It’s more than that though: Kanye West is a walking brand, the embodiment of the mad artist, Shakespeare in the flesh as he himself has put it. All of this behaviour was either that he, and his PR team, were shrewd about all the ways to keep him in the news, look how he’s intrinsically linked with Taylor Swift if you need proof of that, or that this man was running himself so ragged that a breakdown was inevitable,
If you need proof of the latter look no further than “I Am a God” on Yeezus. Never has a musician proclaimed himself as such a powerful entity while also making it sound bloody stressful. The fact is, this has been coming for a long time, the pressure of being Kanye West has finally become too much, while all the people around him, the people that make money when he says stupid things, or takes songs off his just released album to tweak them further, couldn’t ignore it any longer. In the noughties the main example of someone being drained physically and mentally by the music industry was Britney, now it’s Kanye.
