When Hurricane Katrina happened, Mr. West was a new artist and his “College Dropout” was an album that helped give millennials a clear sense of identity. He wrote about being insecure, about not being comfortable managing his new money and visibility. That honesty was refreshing. His self-reflection and self-diagnosis felt familiar to a generation that drafted dozens of confessionals a day on social media.

Kids who were in high school and younger when Mr. West made his debut connected with him more than they did with M.C.s like Jay-Z or even Tupac Shakur or Biggie Smalls, who deserve respect but belonged to another era. 50 Cent seemed a Neanderthal compared with the nerdy, backpack-wearing Mr. West.

Mr. West rose as the economy collapsed, and his open insecurity spoke to a generation whose struggle was the housing market collapse, not a crack epidemic. He is the son of a single mother, a professor who raised him abroad for a semester or two in China. His story was more like President Obama’s than 50 Cent’s.

This new generation didn’t necessarily believe in crowns, but Mr. West was their guy, and almost immediately after being chosen, he began to collapse from the pressure.

We’ve seen Mr. West melt down before. His 2013 radio interview with the journalist Sway was as unhinged as Mr. Trump’s recent call-in to “Fox & Friends.” Mr. Trump and Mr. West both seemed to want the same thing in those tirades — to be recognized as gods. Mr. Trump roared into the phone about the Breitbart calculator he uses to argue voter fraud cost him the popular vote. The rapper screamed at Sway, who seemed unwilling to concede that Mr. West is the greatest artist of his generation. Or maybe Mr. West was arguing he was the greatest artist of any generation. It’s hard to remember. We got a harmless new pop culture refrain from the interview — “How, Sway?” — and mostly moved on.

But unlike Mr. Trump’s call, Mr. West’s interview with Sway was videotaped. We were witnessing something more than his outsize ego doing battle with his mammoth insecurity. His refusal to make eye contact with Sway was particularly off-putting. He spent the hour talking to the heavens — not to the interviewer, not even to the audience. Absent was the wink and nod embedded in Muhammad Ali’s news conference performances, where he talked about himself in the third person and invented the kind of braggadocio that would become hip-hop’s bedrock. Watching Mr. West during that interview, some of us began to worry about his mental health.