MUSICAL THRONES
"Shut up! Before you get exiled!" - Kanye West
Once Upon A (Not So Very Long) Time Ago ...
2009
In 2009, not long after the sudden, unexpected death of his mother, Kanye West famously and controversially interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at MTV's Video Music Awards after she'd been presented best video for 'You Belong To Me', a catchy, country-style pop song about unrequited love. His drunken argument to the captive audience was that Beyonce with her own video for 'Single Ladies' had been robbed of the prize by the young country/pop star, Swift. Jaw agape, Beyonce's shocked expression at Kanye's impromptu outburst encapsulated perfectly how much of the American public felt in that moment of pop culture madness.
It was the cultural equivalent of King Kong grabbing Fay Wray and making his way to the top of the Empire State Building, or perhaps even the Joker gatecrashing Bruce Wayne's party in Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight', except spilling Hennessy instead of white wine across the room. And similarly to both those monsters, Kanye came crashing down to earth.
For a man with a God complex, the incident made him look transparently and horribly flawed, most notably within the entertainment industry circles, especially after he'd delivered such a flawless start to his career with both his iconic 'College' trilogy and the groundbreaking '808s and Heartbreak'.
And yet, to paraphrase a line from one of his famous early hits 'Diamonds are Forever':
Even flawed ones.
In a rare instance of his 'reading the room' of public opinion, Kanye fled into the night like a comic book villain, far away from the scene of his 'crime' as both Taylor Swift and Beyonce continued to advance their own stellar trajectories as commercial pop icons. Meanwhile, Kanye retreated into as relative obscurity as a self-professed 'God' possibly can to lick his ego wounds. Living in exile in Rome where both he and Virgil Abloh worked as interns for luxury fashion house Fendi in a bid to advance their tailoring skills and broader knowledge of the fashion business, West was soon plotting his devastating second act renaissance. Abloh would also benefit from his time in Rome, with Kanye, later becoming the creative director of Louis Vuitton in Paris for almost four years before he tragically died in 2021 of a rare form of cancer.
2010
I guess you really did it this time
Left yourself in your warpath
Lost your balance on a tightrope
Lost your mind tryin' to get it back
'Innocent' - Taylor Swift
In October 2010, at the mere age of 20, Taylor Swift released 'Speak Now', her Grammy award winning sophomore project and an album of notable significance in her young career as it was the first to exclude any songwriting collaborations, highlighting her ability as a solo artist to write her own material. The album also marked a deliberate decision by Swift to move away from the country pop genre she had so far been associated with as she staked out a more universal pop sound that could reach to a wider audience. This switching up of music horizons also reflected Swift's increasing fame as a star requiring bigger ideas and styles to match her growth as a commercial artist. As Kelsey Barnes wrote - 'Speak Now' isn’t about her (Swift's) transition from girl to woman, it’s about her transformation from girl to celebrity."
Side note - I remember taking my nine year old daughter to see Taylor Swift perform on her 'Speak Now' tour back in 2011 and being genuinely impressed by her presence as a pop performer, forgetting throughout the concert just how young Swift herself was, such a veteran of the business did she seem. Even back then, there was a sense that here was someone destined for a rare type of fame.
A month after Swift's 'Speak Now' was released, Kanye the 'monster' returned from exile to deliver a near faultless record 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' (Roc-A-Fella), the summit of his creative achievement up to that point and dazzled critics and audiences alike with his new sound which broke through the glass ceiling of the rap and hip hop genre with its maximalist fantasia of musical colours. If 'Power' and 'All Of The Lights' were an obvious 'fuck you' to anyone who doubted him, then 'Runaway' was a private confession made public, admitting his worst and most toxic character traits.
And I always find, yeah, I always find somethin' wrong
You been puttin' up wit' my shit just way too long
I'm so gifted at findin' what I don't like the most
So I think it's time (so I think it's time)
For us to have a toast
And then, as if to recognise he was now America's number one monster (replacing Bin Laden), West even laid down a track on 'MBDTF' called 'Monster' in case anyone was in any remaining doubt about the fact. The bass thudding hit sounded uncannily like an escaped gorilla running rampage through the city just like King Kong, featuring Jay-Z, Rick Ross and notably launching female rapper Nicki Minaj into the stratosphere with her fire breathing verse. The track's theme expounded on the idea of artists bulldozing their way to the top through hard earned, self-made success, exponentially growing bigger with increasing fame while any perilous obstacles (including hubris) threatening to bring them down get flattened and pulverised in their wake.
Looking back, it now seems that in their own unique way, Kanye and Taylor were both making adjustments to their own relationship with their celebrity and it was clearly reflected in both of their 2010 albums.
One thing was for sure though, the monster (Kanye) was clearly going nowhere, having learned to fully weaponise his villain status to his commercial and artistic advantage with the pop princess (Swift) finding her career forever entwined with the wild visionary. She and her fan base would also use this strange rivalry to their advantage, forever pointing the finger at the big bad wolf to highlight the obvious contrast with their heroine.
2011
In 2011, the 'Queen' Beyonce scored her biggest selling album to date with 'Dangerously In Love' while her husband, the New York rapper Jay-Z, released a collaboration album with Kanye West called 'Watch The Throne' (Roc-A-Fella) where both the master (Jay) and the student (Kanye) now found themselves on equal footing although it was clear that West, having the distinct advantage of being both a rapper and a producer overall, had the creative upper hand. Add to this Kanye's unique addiction to controversy which only served to further advance his fame as opposed to Jay-Z who clearly chose to avoid the 'flashing lights', preferring instead to protect his empire like a wily kingpin. That's always been the difference between the two men: Kanye forever unafraid to burn down the building, confident he can rebuild from the ashes while Jay-Z will simply install extra smoke alarms to avoid any fires in the home in the first place. Perhaps it's a reflection of the Brooklyn rapper's own insecurity of returning to the street that he no longer wants any smoke, literally and metaphorically.
If 'Speak Now' and 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' revealed a clear focus from both Kanye and Taylor, Beyonce's 'Dangerously In Love' seemed purposefully designed to cater to a variety of demographics and as a consequence ended up feeling inconsistent and confused in its overall execution, though that certainly wasn't reflected in its huge global sales. Perhaps, as the fulcrum between West and Swift either side of her, it was becoming increasingly clear to many that Beyonce's creative real estate was owning the centre ground commercially which ironically made her less dangerous to both of her rival titans of the music business. At least, that was until 2016 when she released 'Lemonade' exclusively on Tidal, her husband's music streaming platform and demonstrated she could deliver both risk-taking edge with avant-garde ascetics and commercial appeal, a composite of West and Swift. Timing your pivots is an art form in itself in this fickle digital age.
2024, Superbowl, Beauties and the Beast
The Stage Is Set ...
Fifteen years after the notorious MTV moment which shook the entertainment world, all three players of that drama returned to take their seats at the Super Bowl akin to the grand finale of a super hero movie.
Taylor Swift, a mid-30's prom queen, was the centre of attention, having made global headlines dating American football player Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs and dividing America, with the MAGA crowd convinced both Taylor and Travis are celebrity operatives for the Democrat party. Their apple pie optics combined with two of the most iconic industries in America - sport and music -appear to pose an existential threat to many on the right as they know this power couple could potentially persuade a huge percentage of voters to vote against their orange monster/saviour Donald Trump, the surrogate daddy villain to a certain Mr West.
In fact, ever since 2016, the Super Bowl has become more and more of a political football where corporate progressivism, encouraged by the woke left, has competed with political messaging from the Trump-influenced right. Every gesture or entertainment involved with the event has been seen as being part of the current culture war being waged in America. When Kanye sampled Gil Scott Heron's 'Who Will Survive In America?' on 'MBDTF' in 2010 little did we know just how apt that question would later become and that the stage for the volatile social/political zeitgeist would be the grassy 'gridiron' of the Allegiant Stadium, Las Vegas in 2024.
True to villainous form, Kanye arrived at the Las Vegas stadium wearing a black Alexander McQueen mask with a white crucifix attached to it, having released his controversial new album 'Vultures' independent of any record label 24 hours earlier. Not only that but he also dropped an audacious 'no budget' 30 second video phone message ad that looked like a deleted scene from 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' for a $7 million dollar ad spot for his fashion/music company Yeezy.com. Given most of the other adverts for the Super Bowl have budgets of the average Hollywood feature length movie, it proved once again that West has the Warhol-like finger on the culture zeitgeist, taking risks where others wouldn't dare.
Seemingly comfortable being the monster in the Taylor's fairytale romance, echoes of the tension of 2009 permeated the atmosphere of the Allegiant Stadium although in this instance it was less about awards this time, and more about the heart of America. Having abandoned his own 2024 presidential run and announcing his support for Trump in the upcoming election, the political dividing line between West and Swift has seemingly been drawn for the upcoming American election.
Taylor 4 Biden, Kanye 4 Trump.
Less provocatively, though no less talked about was Beyonce, dressed as a country and western cowgirl setting the tone for her soon to be unveiled foray into country music with two new songs 'Texas Hold Em' and '16 Carriages'. What's interesting about this genre switch for the singer, which reverses the more typical accusations of cultural appropriation, is that it has also become unavoidably political with reports of an Oklahoma radio station KYKC refusing to play her records as they deemed them not officially country enough. Of course, this is clearly not true as it the song almost cynically utilises the tropes of country music as the foundation of its structure. But perhaps for a different reason: an African American female encroaching on a white dominated music genre poses a different existential threat to the one of Swift and Felce's romance in the election year. It is also hard not to see Beyonce's calculated move as one designed to impose itself on Swift's original territory, ironic, as it was Taylor's country pop single 'You Belong To Me' that kick started the three way psychodrama between the three stars back in 2009. Even the cover art of 'Texas Hold Em' has a practically naked Beyonce on display, inviting the comparison with Kanye's latest album cover where he, in the words of Professor Skye 'objectifies his wife'. The fact that both Kanye and Beyonce are competing in the Billboard Top 100 with their respective singles make the events of the Superbowl 58 seem ever more deeply knotted. America's politics has become so inseparably enmeshed with its entertainment culture there's really no place left for the innocent consumer to hide.
Professor Skye went on to summarise the symbolism of Taylor, Beyonce and Kanye at the Super Bowl expertly in his recent video review of 'Texas Hold Em song review'.
"Think about all the things that are happening like what is the meaning of celebrity and power structures. How can you be a celebrity - how can you be an artist and not be co-opted by the power structures. Kanye is so insistent on not being co-opted by the power structures that he is intentionally making himself so repellant and repugnant, even to people who like him as an artist. The power structures rejected him and his art was able to exist on its own. We have Taylor Swift being filmed all the time and we're waiting for her album and she's watching a show (with her boyfriend playing on the field) in a stadium she could fill six night in a row. Then we have Kanye trying to get to number one with a song he's barely even produced because he's an independent artist. And then you have Beyonce who's so co-opted through the power structures that she releases her song and announces her song through a Verizon commercial. The relationship between these people and the control systems goes all the way back to (2009) through to 2024 when they're still the centre of culture."
Silence is violence
It appears we're living in an age of fierce identity politics where pop figures can change and persuade the perception of culture and politics no matter how superficially banal and inconsequential that notion may at first seem. The more pertinent question is perhaps how does an artist protect their creative integrity in a political age such as ours? It now seems inevitable that there is no avoiding a discourse on the politics of an artist whether they like it or not. As it happens, Beyonce, Jay-Z and Swift have all openly encouraged their fans to vote for the democrats including performing in campaign concerts and assisting in fundraisers, while Kanye (not encouraging anyone to vote any particular way) has previously expressed his support for Trump which clearly came at a huge cost to him personally and professionally. Jay-Z even referenced his attempt to bring Kanye back toward political 'redemption' on the track 'Jail' on Donda (2021).
Hol' up, Donda, I'm with your baby when I touch back road
Told him, "Stop all of that red cap, we goin' home"
Not me with all of these sins, casting stones
Saturday Night Live, similar to the Super Bowl as another staple and barometer of American culture, suffered an awkward moment back in 2018 when Kanye ad libbed his way through 'Ghost Town', taking a moment to express his upset at the treatment of African Americans (or even people in general) in support of Trump.
In simplistic terms, the American political landscape could be seen comparatively in the pop world as Jay-Z and Beyonce as the Obamas, Taylor Swift as Hilary Clinton and Kanye West as Donald Trump.
Perhaps the political lanes for these artists will be insignificant in the larger assessment of their cultural impact as creative artists. History will record their allegiances but the longevity of their music over time will be their ultimate legacy. Which one will be remembered? Which will be forgotten?
For now though, there's certainly no sign of abeyance for these throne watchers, no raging against the dying of the pop life. All three remain pivotal in the direction of the culture in America, for better or worse. Kanye's dangerous, creative anarchy will forever be in pointed contrast to Swift and Beyonce and if both women remain untouchable in their pop star kingdoms, the wandering spectre of Kanye's monster will forever stalk the landscape to remind them that just as every 'hero needs his' or her 'theme music', every fairytale needs its villain.