ICARUS, YE & DONDA 2
Daddy's not gone. You see the light on. Daddy's at home.
Like Icarus, last night, Ye flew a little too close to the sun.
Even his actual pulsing heartbeat that was being live streamed across the world prior to the Donda 2 listening event resembled the glowing orb as it thudded like a bass drum in our ears.
As a replica of his childhood Chicago home appeared in flames surrounded by water, there is a sense Ye has firmly lodged his own architectural equivalent of the Amityville house, Bates Motel & Du Maurier's Manderley in the cultural firmament.
For Ye, the home has clearly come to symbolise the loss of innocence and overall security for this artist, who appears to no longer be able to return to either his late mother's house or his wife and children's.
I once wrote "Home is where the heart is, but when your heart is broken, where do you make your home?" for a lost soul drifter character from a script I worked on. Somehow, I was reminded of the line last night as I watched Ye walking through the shallow, fire-reflected waters which surrounded the house stalking it like a ghost trapped in a celebrity bardo.
Baby I'm free. Like a homeless person. No matter how much you got, you can't own this person.
Never before has there been a more profound sense of a billionaire vagabond, one, who like Elon Musk, spends every waking hour of his entire life devoted to his industries. Perhaps if Howard Hughes had had an extrovert quirk to his personality and could 'spit bars', he might have conveyed his darkest pathologies to the world like Ye.
But the aviator remained imprisoned inside his room, while Ye remains imprisoned outside of his.
Pay the toll on the broken road.
Some Buddhist practicioners believe that by a certain age in your life you should burn all of your spiritual books, as past a certain point the student should become the teacher meditating on what has already been realised and not seek to further add to the accumulated wisdom.
Watching Ye surrounded by the smoking ruins of his childhood home, there's a feeling he is attempting to burn all his karma to free himself. But tragically, it's inescapable for him as it is for all of us, unless of course, we heed the lessons in those spiritual books before we discard them.
Has he I wonder? I guess we'll find out.
I still get lost sometimes
Memories haunting mind
It was clear early on at the event that Ye was channelling his full Akira mode merging Japanese Manga Noir aesthetics with fragmented digital heartbreak and personal dissolution.
Has there ever been an artist in the history of recorded music that has both juggled a multi-billion dollar empire whilst surgically dissecting his own complicated life so transparently to the entire world?
It was at times as if the stage inside Miami Stadium was his operating table and he, perhaps somewhat masochistically opened up his wounds for the audience to witness. If it all sounds a bit uneasy and gruesome, perhaps it's because it is at times. But isn't that what great art is about? Tapping into the raw humanity of our suffering which is always relative to the individual who experiences it. Rich or poor, black or white, male or female, adult or child.
And what has Ye's entire discography been if not essentially one long musical diary that's charted the 'rake's progress' from young innocent to Frankenstein's monster.
If an ego death occurs for this monumental artist, the question will be what the exact total cost of the collateral damage from his Göttdammerung will be. The ghoulish fascination for many of those watching on is to see if this multi-level genius can survive the war waged against the dichotomy of his own internal Heaven and Hell.
