These interviews were mocked and derided by some and parsed for scriptural meaning by others , the way everything Kanye does and says is alternately mocked and bronzed. He said some nonsensical things and kept comparing himself to Walt Disney despite showing little to no Nazi sympathy and/or adeptness at humanizing rodents. Fans largely lost their patience with his fixation on fashion. But all that apparent mania was at least one very cogent point. His famous, snapped “How, Sway?!” was in response to the notion, posited for the dozenth time by the dozenth interviewer, that if Kanye couldn’t get the institutional and infrastructural support he craved––to make affordable shoes, to design hotels––that he should simply “do it himself.” How? Kanye went into debt to make shoes, clothes, Late Registration. The idea that, if he’s punked by Nike, he should go to Nebraska or Malaysia and build his own factory (with his hands, Sway?) was and is absurd.

All of this, like all of everything, is about Kanye West. Music aside, the current phase of Kanye West’s public life began with a press tour in the fall of 2013, which was meant to coincide with his Yeezus tour, which was delightfully overwrought and featured a fake mountain and a vibrating stage and was extremely good . That press tour was the one where he would sit down with radio hosts, often looking glassy-eyed, and rail against the fashion industry that wouldn’t accept him. You know how, in every magazine profile, Obama was described as speaking in paragraphs? (Remember when he called Kanye a “jackass”? ) Kanye in 2013 was speaking in long, jagged, difficult-to-follow jerks. It wasn’t stream-of-consciousness, because few if any people have inner monologues that sound like that. It was more like predictive text if your iPhone had spent years discussing prohibitively expensive clothing labels and, like, Semi-Pro.

That America has so readily bought into the myth of Silicon Valley as this weird Robin Hood/Walt Disney hybrid is an indictment of a lot of things, chief among them the way our politics have spawned an increasingly toothless public sector, which is in turn used to justify apps and laws and worldviews that consider unions to be archaic and cab drivers to be rubes. We live in a period where there’s so much information available to us that we can become paralyzed by it. The most admirable and industrious among us have responded by organizing on local levels and fighting for measurable change. Most of us, though, have adapted by tuning all the way out or all the way in–—in microcosm, by becoming either exhaustingly cynical or painfully earnest on Twitter, which at the time of this writing is trading at USD $28.01.

Ever since Jesse Eisenberg put on Adidas slides and pretended to invent Facebook, tech entrepreneurs have liked to imagine themselves as renegade outsiders fighting against orthodoxies that are stiff and stale, designed to stifle innovation and turn us into drones (but not in the fun, monetizable way). I don’t think they’re lying; I think that the young, affected men who capture the hearts and minds of the old, affected men at VC firms genuinely believe their pet projects are going to vault humanity forward into a brave, new world, even if they’re oblivious to centuries of labor law or just keep reinventing the city bus again and again. They feign a global vision, but really live inside a closed loop, self-justifying, and self-perpetuating.

It’s not 2013 anymore. Kanye isn’t talking about making Yeezys affordable; he’s talking about flying cars. He’s buddying up to the guys who founded Twitter and posting screenshots of smiley face-punctuated iMessage conversations with the guy who invented Snapchat about how likes and follower counts are “vanity metrics.” Every conversation is about “positivity.” He’s still posting links to articles about prison slavery, but they’re scattered in between adoring messages about Candace Owens and Elon Musk. He’s turned toothless and pollyannaish when everyone else is gripping their armrests in fear; the information that paralyzes us flows off his back into some infinity pool in Hidden Hills.

In that conversation with Sway, before the bitter “How?!”, Kanye made the case that his reinvention of the world could only take place in a rapidly shrinking window. He understood––and this is actually some of the most lucid critique you can make about corporate power––that all these multibillion-dollar companies had to do to get rid of him was to wait him out. “I’m telling you,” he said to Sway, “I am Warhol. I am the number-one most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare, in the flesh!” Sway nods deferentially. “Now who’s gonna be the Medici family and stand up and let me create more? Or do you wanna marginalize me ‘til I’m out of my moment?”

In 2013 Kanye knew that, for the sort of cartoonishly lofty ideas he had about redesigning the world, he needed to harness the literal, physical power of brands and multinational institutions that already existed and, at least on a tonal level, were largely skeptical of him. In interviews, he explained that the only way he could get into rooms with the people who controlled shoe factories or construction conglomerates was to be a gleaming, unimpeachably massive figure in music. If nothing else, the albums were means to a larger end, the fulcrum on which all of this turned.

This version of Kanye West was, at least in tone, disruptive. The degree to which infiltrating Adidas or New York Fashion Week (or Paris Fashion Week, or London Fashion Week) is subversive or serves a meaningful end can be debated, but Kanye’s very presence (and often his sensibilities) seemed to rattle the cages of institutional power. That’s what Yeezus was about , when it wasn’t a midlife crisis fever dream. He was rapping, coarsely, about fucking white wives and about the private prison industry. The style of the music mirrored the arguments it was making. As he said in an interview, about putting the comparatively sunny “Bound 2” at the album’s end: “It lets you know that it’s all good. But it isn’t all good!”

The power he seems to be interested in is not power he can leverage to build factories in Nebraska or Malaysia. It’s the sort of abstract, “pre-revenue” Monopoly money that you and I can never see or touch but that the adults in the room insist is there. There are no more Yeezus_es, no more outbursts at telethons. He is, undoubtedly, out of his moment. Kanye’s remained central to pop culture simply because we all seem to agree he’s central to pop culture––not because he’s making anything vital or particularly interesting, but because he’s created a self-sustaining loop of meet-and-greets and power lunches. It’s like _Waiting for Godot but he’s just waiting for Jack Dorsey to finish his squash game. He can show up to TMZ whenever he wants and hope against hope that he’ll still command a half-hour of our time. But the real leverage is gone, and it doesn’t seem to be coming back.

II. This Was Really Well-Written But The Review Seems To Lose Focus On The Content Of The Album And Instead Hones In On Kanye’s Persona And Behavior, And How It Has Affected Your Ability To Review The Album Objectively

A few months ago, a newspaper editor I follow on Twitter posted that the middling reactions to the most recent albums from Taylor Swift and Kanye West had to be colored largely by our collective souring on the artists’ public personas, since––the editor argued––prior albums had been guilty of similar aesthetic sins. Of course, he’s generally right that popular criticism has drifted too far into a kind of speculative, moralist autobiography. But in the case of Taylor Swift specifically, I found him to be wrong––the stylistic clarity that once made her music undeniable had been muddied by hackneyed genre mashups into a type of shitty, overcalculated machine pop that felt deeply cynical and deeply anonymous.

For ye, though, the question gets a bit thornier. First of all, the editor I follow is wrong: The Life of Pablo was sloppy and slapped together, and its reputation is certainly bolstered by a small handful of very good songs. But before this June, Kanye had never put out something half as bad as ye. It is confusingly, frustratingly awful, and not in the half-engaging way trainwreck albums by massive rap stars sometimes are (see: Encore). It’s seven songs long but feels interminable; it opens with a droning, repetitive monologue before breaking into a take on clipped, Soundcloud-native flows that’s so sedated as to feel like parody. It mentions bipolarity but has nothing remotely interesting to say about it; it frames public backlash to his shrugging at slavery as a financial problem; it hears him clumsy on the microphone, and not in that endearing, ca. College Dropout way. Every emotion but smugness feels pantomimed. This isn’t me trying to parse the moral worth (or whatever) of ye––it’s hollow as performance. It’s hard to imagine even one of these seven songs making the cut for Pablo, which, again, is a muddled album far below the standards of even its most rushed and impulsive predecessors.

The longer I sat with the album––this is weeks, months after it had disappeared from the radio or from passing car speakers; Kanye’s inertia is not what it once was––the more I came to think ye actually benefited from the uproar that preceded it. Every time someone pitched me on a reexamination of the album, or defended it, or even floated the idea that it wasn’t quite as bad as we all initially thought, they talked about it as a document of an artist in turmoil, or a celebrity meltdown happening in real time, or a troubled, wearied man searching for answers.

The problem is that those are all projections from observers. The music on ye, for the most part, does not reflect that. There are warm, room-filling Charlie Wilson hooks and there’s finally another true Kid Cudi showcase on a Kanye album, but the headliner is usually caught flat-footed. Closer “Violent Crimes,” for example, drew ire in June for having regressive ideas about gender, but the creative problem is that Kanye’s verse is staid, plodding. On “No Mistakes”—the one with the great Charlie Wilson hook—Kanye goes for a big, exultant celebration, but comes in two notches too low. Like the verse after the beat change on “I Thought About Killing You,” it sounds as if it’s a reference vocal that will later be replaced by a vocal take with real emotion. These are just gestures. Most frustratingly, while the album stakes itself on being raw and confessional, there’s maddeningly little in the way of Kanye grappling with, or even cataloging his demons. As a chronological section on his Wikipedia page, this era––the hat, the bonfire in Jackson Hole, the sad mania of it all––is an important breaking point for Kanye. The music itself is a footnote.

Of course, this idea––that the backlash to Kanye’s loud, low-information Trump support helped more than hurt––flies in the face of everything argued by the people who are most forgiving of (or excited about) said Trump support. There are legions of Kanye and/or Trump fans online and in the real world who bemoan the supposed “biases” of any critic or listener who likes the album less than they do. These appeals to an imagined objectivity, where “objectivity” really means “more reflective of my worldview,” have existed as long as criticism has existed. To be clear, a number of ye reviews grappled with Kanye’s public performance more than they did with the music itself. This is reflective of some trends in modern criticism, sure, but it’s also the most (and maybe only) interesting angle––the music, again, pales in contrast to everything that came before it.

For all their shrill complaints about lukewarm ye reviews, I did not read or hear a single argument from one of these objectivity fetishists about the music itself. Their defense was itself a political stance: who are you to dock Kanye points for [supporting the President/criticizing Obama/etc.]? Why can’t you be a free thinker, too?

III. Smack DVD

In May of 2005, while the third season of Chappelle’s Show was already deep into production, Dave Chappelle walked away. He left $50 million on the table and torched a friendship with his longtime collaborator. In interviews later, he would explain that he started to get the sense that some viewers were laughing at, rather than with the sketches on his show, which often took provocative stances on race. The catalyst was a white crew member guffawing at a piece where a pixie figure pushes to reinforce anti-black stereotypes; the joke, as Dave had written it, was supposed to be on the stereotypes, but the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, and he felt that there was nothing he could do to stop this weird Faustian machine that had made him wildly rich but allowed white guys holding boom mics or whatever to laugh the way their grandfathers might have laughed at minstrel shows. Dave had had enough. So he went to Africa.

When he came back to North America at the end of the year, he probably had to get to work repairing some personal relationships that had ruptured, and had to worry about salvaging what had only a few months earlier seemed like an unstoppable career trajectory. But on top of all that, he was confronted by rumors: that he was smoking crack, that he was crazy. So he did would anyone would do and went on Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton.

The whole episode is enrapturing. Dave’s funny and staggeringly smart; he covers plenty of ground, but the most compelling stuff has to do with the blunt weight of Hollywood and how it slowly, painstakingly crushes those inside it. Dave talks about the famous black comedians who snapped, cracked, or had strokes under absurd pressure who were called “crazy” by the same tabloids that drove them over the edge; he tells the story of his 24th birthday, when he found out his dad had suffered a stroke, but left his bedside to fly from Ohio to Los Angeles just so he could take a meeting with network executives who had insisted on seeing him in person just so they could insist he recast a role in his pilot with a white woman in place of a black one. At one point, he lights a cigarette and says to James Lipton: “You can’t get unfamous. You can get infamous. But you can’t get unfamous.”