It’s worth considering that perhaps Kanye, and also Kusama, might somehow be off-limits from criticism because of their well-publicized mental illnesses. It’s certainly been enough to have put an asterisk on nearly every criticism of Kanye’s outbursts. We’ve been made to ask ourselves: Can someone be mentally ill and bigoted at the same time? Can the former influence the latter? Or is the latter a pre-existing condition, that has nothing to do with the former?
Freddie deBoer, a writer who himself has bipolar disorder, has written about this, arguing: “To say that West’s behavior might not be fully under his control is not to say that it’s not within his responsibility.” He goes on to add that we “have to be willing to both find that someone is guilty of bad things while bearing the complications of mental illness in mind.”
It is certainly worth being cautious in our criticism of both artists. But it doesn’t explain why there has been no peer criticism in the industries that both Kanye and Kusama occupy.
The only explanation for this I can think of is money.
In hip-hop, as in art, there seems to be a consensus that certain artists are too big to fail. Each of these artists has a cottage industry built around them; there are thousands of people with a direct financial interest in making sure their artistic figurehead remains commercially attractive for brand investment and merchandising. As the book asserts, Kusama is among the highest-selling living female artists in the world. {read}