One reason that some readers may not understand why Kanye West ought to be the next president of the United States is that they haven’t listened to his music, and so do not understand the political, social and historical significance of his lyrics. Therefore, we’re going to interpret everyone of his lyrics. This first installation focuses on the first two tracks on West’s first album, The College Dropout.

Before we jump into the lyrics, some historical context.

Between 1910 and 1970 eight Million Americans emigrated from the mostly rural South to the mostly urbanized “North” — especially New York and Chicago. These migrants were the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the humans whose unpaid and unacknowledged labor built America’s wealth.

After emancipation there was a period of great hope. They called it reconstruction. Freed slaves and their children started cooperative businesses, schools, held political offices, and began to enjoy the freedom and democracy and equality that America promised all.

Then came the counterrevolution. Aided by cowardly white “moderates” in the North, white southerners took back control. They instituted segregation. They prevented anyone deemed “black” from holding office or voting. They organized into terrorists groups and inflicted great violence on so many black bodies. They attacked the cooperative businesses. They instituted a system of permanent economic subordination called “sharecropping.”

This was why the migrants headed north.

There were more opportunities in the North: fewer pogroms, better pay, more people, better nightlife. But there was still racism. The migrants got the worst jobs, the worst pay, and the worst security.

And there was segregation, still: housing segregation, most importantly. In Chicago, where we will start our story, the White Elite forced the Black Emigrants into a thirty block strip of land on the South and Near West Side of the Story: the black belt.

After the Second World War the Ruling Parties of the United States launched a large scale social experiment and spent massive amounts of money building highways and housing developments outside of the cities and gave cheap financing to formerly working class humans to move out into these “suburbs.”

Jewish, Irish, Italian, Czech, German, Scottish Americans left the city and moved into the suburbs and became something called “White.”

The migrants from the south and their descendants did not get to move to the suburbs and enjoy the New American dream. They were stuck inside the urban core. Stuck inside of decaying buildings and cheaply build “public housing” in neighborhoods with less and less resources each year.

There were limited options for survival in these neighborhood. One option is to seek out the low-paying, unrewarding, grinding jobs offered by the system. One option was to study hard, and escape via higher education. Call this the “Uplift” strategy.

Kanye West’s first album, The College Dropout, starts off with a short monolog by a man who we will call as The Teacher.

Kanye, can I talk to you for a minute?

Me and the other faculty members

Was wonderin’ could you do a little some, somethin’ beautiful

Somethin’ that the kids is gonna love when they hear it That is gonna make them start jumpin’ up and down

And sharin’ candy and stuff

Think you could probably do somethin’

For the kids for graduation to sing?

The name of this monolog is Introduction. The next song is called We Don’t Care. It starts with some relaxed fun party music, music that sounds like a summer party, then Kanye agrees to sing a song for the kids. He says:

Oh yeah, I got the perfect song for the kids to sing

And then the voice rises into song.

And all my people that’s…

Drug dealin’ just to get by

Stack ya’ money ’til it get sky high

There is another option for survival: this option is to sell substances that the American state deemed to be “illegal.” So the first message that Kanye West conveys, as Kanye West is: people who are drug dealing in order to survive, continue to drug deal. Kanye West’s lyric career therefore begins with an invitation to civic disobedience. Given the racist and totalitarian origins of the so-called “drug war” the invitation seems appropriate: why not encourage drug dealers to prosper? Prospering includes not only building wealth but avoiding violence. Why not encourage wealth and peace?

We wasn’t s’posed to make it past 25

Joke’s on you, we still alive

Throw your hands up in the sky and say:

“We don’t care what people say”

Who is this “we?” Why wasn’t this “we” supposed to make it to the age of twenty five?

If this is your first time hearin’ this

You are about to experience somethin’ so cold, man

We never had nothin’ handed, took nothin’ for granted

Took nothin’ from no man, man, I’m my own man

But as a shorty I looked up to the dopeman

Only adult man I knew that wasn’t broke, man

(1) West sets expectations high. This experience you are about to have will be so different than the experiences you have had before that you will feel cold. It will be like falling in love or meeting a new friend for the first time.

(2) West explains his class background: he took no hand outs, but had to constantly budget and be financially aware because of the limited opportunities available. As a youth he admired drug dealers, because they are the only people he knew who weren’t “financially destroyed”

Flickin’ Starter coats, man

Clothes indicate social status, and the drug dealers had the best clothes, therefore the highest social status.

Man, you don’t know, man

We don’t care what people say

This is for my niggas outside all winter

Cause this summer they ain’t finna say: “next summer I’m finna”

Sittin’ in the hood like community colleges

This dope money here is Lil’ Trey’s scholarship

Cause ain’t no tuition for having no ambition

And ain’t no loans for sittin’ your ass at home

So we forced to sell crack, rap, and get a job

You gotta do somethin’ man, your ass is grown

This verse analyzes the economic structure of the oppressed neighborhoods in the United States, with a particular focus on the way that social advancement and risky/scorned behavior (drug dealing) are connected to one another: the dope money is the scholarship for Lil’Trey. The options for a maturing man in this environment: do nothing, or take on multiple jobs at once “Crack, rap, and get a job”

The second verse is for my dogs workin’ 9 to 5 that still hustle

This verse concerns the experience of working in wage labor and in the black markets at the same time. It happens because the wages offered by capital are too low to satisfy any needs beyond basic survival.

Cause a nigga can’t shine off $6.55 And everybody sellin’ makeup, Jacob’s And bootlegged tapes just to get they cake up We put shit on layaway, then come back We claim other people kids on our income tax We take that money, cop work, then push packs to get paid

Humans gain the necessary resources to have a cultural life by taking on small sales jobs of both “legal” (makeup) goods and a “illegal” goods (bootlegged tapes, “drugs”) They purchase goods on payment plans and come back to the store to continue to pay for the goods the good. They claim nondependent as dependents to get more resources from the state. They take the money they get from these sources, bundle them into a single good purchase, and then, like entrepreneurs do, resell them in smaller portions — essentially forming firms that connect producers to consumers on a long supply line.

And we don’t care what people say

Momma say she wanna move South

Scratchin’ lottery tickets, eyes on a new house

The system offers remote chance to achieve opportunity outside of this ecoystem: “the lottery.” The system uses the monies poor people spend on this distant chance to “fund” the schools.

‘Round the same time, Doe ran up in dude house

Couldn’t get a job, so since he couldn’t get work

He figured he’d take work

The drug game bulimic, it’s hard to get weight

There aren’t a lot of openings in the drug market, and so there is a constant pressure to reduce the margins of everyone around you. It’s more or less, sort of, a commodity good, so there’s constant competition between firms and attempts of firms to steal each other’s capital. (He couldn’t get work, he’d take work)

A nigga’s money is homo, it’s hard to get straight

But we gon’ keep bakin’ til the day we get cake

And “we don’t care what people say”

The financial situation of the oppressed population is structurally similar to the life of oppressed sexual minorities (consider that this was from 2007, when the possibility of social equality for oppressed social groups in the patriarchal United States was still distant.)

You know the kids gon’ act a fool

When you stop the programs for after-school

And they DCFS, some of ’em dyslexic

Because the system cut all supplemental programs and allowed the education systems to decay, foolish behavior circulates. Some become so socially dysfunctional that they become wards of an uncaring and distant state.

T hey favorite 50-Cent song “12 Questions”

We scream: “rocks, blow, weed, park”, see, now we smart

These group of people follow the messages conveyed to them in music: they orient their activity around the black market.

We ain’t retards, the way teachers thought

Hold up, hold fast, we make more cash

But despite being “informed” that they were stupid and doomed to die, the Drug Dealer makes more cash, does better, continues to improve their situation.

Now tell my momma I belong in that slow class

Sad enough we on welfare

They tryna put me on the school bus with the space for the wheelchair

I’m tryna get the car with the chromie wheels here

They tryna cut our lights out like we don’t live here

Look what was handed us, fathers abandoned us

When we get them hammers, go on, call the ambulance

Sometimes I feel no one in this world understands us

How do you feel about a system that terrorized countless families of an oppressed ethnic group via racist application of police state control over substance use?