America Has a Problem

Still Processing

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Arts

4.8 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today: The undoing of Kanye West. “We’re in deeply vile territory, and I can’t make intellectual sense of that,” Wesley Morris says about West, who now goes by Ye. In 2004, when Ye released “College Dropout," he seemed to be challenging Black orthodoxy in ways that felt exciting and risky. But over the years, his expression of “freedom” has felt anything but free. His embrace of anti-Black, antisemitic and white supremacist language “comes at the expense of other people’s safety,” their humanity and their dignity, J Wortham says. Wesley and J discuss what it means to divest from someone whose art, for two decades, had awed, challenged and excited you.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Jay. What's up? I was at a party last month and this song came on
0:06.8	She take my money and you know normally
0:12.5	My first impulse with this song is to just get my eagle on
0:19.2	But I really did not understand how the DJ didn't get the memo
0:23.4	So I just stood there on the dance floor not dancing
0:28.2	What did you want to happen? I?
0:31.8	Just wanted to not have to think about him
0:35.2	Enjoy the night. Yeah, I just wanted to enjoy the night
0:38.0	This was me just like running out of runway to let this person's
0:44.0	Ideology fly if we can even call it an ideology
0:47.7	but
0:48.8	Mostly what I was feeling out there on the dance floor was just
0:53.3	Like another occasion for me to sit in my blackness and figure out what that is all about
1:00.1	It's tough right it's really frustrating and it's difficult to try to
1:06.4	Figure out our relationship to someone we don't even know
1:11.2	Yeah, but it's worked. We've had a relationship too for decades. So thinking about the investing from that is
1:19.1	It's painful. It's not a small thing. No, it's it's huge and it's so huge that I I have to be done
1:28.6	Mm-hmm now
1:30.7	When I say done, I don't mean I'm going to come after people who play the music in my presence
1:38.1	I just think that I Wesley Morris am
1:43.3	done trying to
1:45.3	Make a kind of intellectual sense yeah of the artist formerly known as Kanye West who now goes by yay
	...

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