Don’t blame Kanye for his abject idiocy

Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain.

But songs such as ‘Heil Hitler’ and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me. The man is an abject moron. Some will say, so what? There have been loads of abject morons down the years in pop. Why draw a line in the sand for Kanye West? Good question. And it turns out it’s not his fault. It’s the fault of the simpering white liberal critics who decided, apropos of nothing very much, that this halfwit was a genius. A genius – y’know like Lise Meitner, Goethe or McCartney – for creating songs uplifted by whatever snatches of melody he stole (sorry, sampled) from people who were musically talented, for the cretinous braggadocio and sub-McGonagall verse. Yes, Robert Christgau, Alexis Petridis, I’m talking about you. Why did they take this view? Because he was black and not as obviously talentless as many of his peers ploughing this deathless furrow.

So I have allowed my political disdain for this oaf to percolate into the review, for which I apologise. As for the songs: ‘Father’ has a cute gospel intro and ‘White Lines’ usefully nicks the chorus from the Carpenter’s ‘Close to You’ to make it listenable. CeeLo Green occasionally delivers some chiming vocals and ‘King’ bounds along on a reasonably catchy riff. The rest? The rest is as fraudulent and empty as it ever was.