October 27, 2020 - 3:00pm
How has the Joe Rogan Experience gone from being an amateurishly produced watering hole for foul-mouthed LA comedians, sponsored by a masturbation aid, to being among the most influential media platforms in America? Democrat and Republican politicians have been beating a path to the comedian and commentator’s door. Donald Trump challenged Joe Biden to a debate on the podcast. Now, Kanye West has insisted on talking to Mr Rogan about his quixotic presidential ambitions.
“I believe that my calling is to be the leader of the free world,” says West. It is easy to make fun of the man’s self-importance. Very easy. Still, it does not come from a place of simple narcissism. It is clear that the rapper has a deep core of spiritual conviction. His belief in God might be a somewhat shapeless belief in a grander, more loving force than man, but it is real. He expresses powerful truths, movingly, such as in his comments on the ludicrous contortions men squeeze themselves into in order to excuse their porn habits, or the culture of death surrounding abortion, and his horror that he might have sacrificed the family he loves due to being “busy” with more trivial things.
But then he is off again, into another riff. He likes the Star Wars prequels. He is outraged about the contracts musicians are bound to. At one point, he appears to forget what he is doing there and starts asking himself whether he wants to be in “content” or “tech”. “Kanye!” you want to say, “You want to be the president of the US! Remember?” “It’s almost like Kanye [is] five people talking about different things,” one commenter jokes, “And each person gets a turn every twenty seconds.”
Such haphazardness is to some extent inherent to the platform. Without scripts or preparation, one’s thoughts flit about much as they do when one is talking to friends in real life. Still, the sheer extent of West’s conversational randomness is symptomatic not just of his own colourful personality, but the extent to which, in an internet age, we consume more information than we can ever process.
Of course, it is good to consume a lot of information. No one wants to be blinkered. But the flip-side of our freedom from the narrow epistemic confines of the mainstream media is the difficulty of discerning what is worthy and unworthy of our focus. What is true and what is not? What should be prioritised? Hell, what we thinking about in the first place?
West’s moments of striking poignancy faded into a blizzard of frenzied rambling, which made for one hell of a podcast, but could be a problem for someone who wants to change the world.
Ben Sixsmith is an English writer living in Poland. He has written for Quillette, Areo, The Catholic Herald, The American Conservative and Arc Digital on a variety of topics including literature and politics.
bdsixsmith
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeHaven’t bothered with the video, but was struck by ‘Of course, it is good to consume a lot of information. No one wants to be blinkered’. A false antithesis. Or, as T S Eliot put it better:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
I agree 100%.
This has led to a generation that is almost incapable of making decisions at all let alone the notion of rational decisions.
I came up before Cell phones and PC existed. When I had a decision to make or needed information on how to do something outside of my skill set, my resources for information were compared to today’s, very limited. I could find an experienced person for advice, ask the shop owner selling the gear, look it up at the Library, ask my pals, and that was about it. At that point I had to make my decisions and carry on.
The Millennial generation know nothing of this. They are and always have been plugged into their cell phones and seemingly are unable to decide where to dine without first consulting Google.
When they need information, they type in a keyword and are blasted with thousands if not millions of choices from where to receive information. The problem is that they themselves play little part in prioritizing this info and have lost the ability (or never developed it) to discriminate between useful info and that info which aims to manipulate them.
I am an engineer and watch the Millennial technicians and engineers struggle with this daily. They will never just take my word for something based on the fact that I’ve studied the task and have successfully completed it 1000 times before. They always have to have internet proof. The problem with that is that when they Google a query they get tons of links and they, not knowing anything more than they did before they sent that query, have no way to judge what they get back. In the end they are more unsure, more nervous, and less confident and trusting.
They are frozen with indecision because they never feel as if the have adequately researched the thing at hand, but then they cannot possibly read all of the 250,000 results that Google forwarded.
I love the internet and have been online since before the WWW was a thing. Never has it been easier to research and communicate. BUT…I come to it with skills previously acquired. The ability to discriminate data, extrapolate motives, and above all the ability to know how much and what info I need to make the decision.
I have watched tech make quivering neurotics out of a whole generation of people who appear to be simply paralyzed by information overload..
Yes, I have dipped into it over the last week or so. The guy is clearly all over the place and one wonders how he managed to become so successful. (I am more or less unfamiliar with his music).
In contrast Ice Cube, who is working with the Turmp team on Project Platinum, seems to be very wise. Watch his interview with that creep Cuomo on CNN where Cuomo calls him ‘brother’.
And 50 Cent, who is openly supporting Trump, obviously has his head screwed on. Again, watch the Chelsea Handler interview in which she says, in the most racist manner imaginable, that as a black man he cannot vote for Trump.
Cuomo called Ice Cube ‘brother’? That’s barely better than calling him homie. I can’t remember the context but Joe Biden said something similarly toe-curling not so long ago in some excruciating attempt to be matey. He’d have been slaughtered by the likes of CNN had he been on the other side of the political fence.
Yes, he did. You should check it out. Really, I know nothing about Ice Cube or his work, but he seems to be evolving into quite a significant elder statesman figure. His contempt for Cuomo is palpable, and it is a contempt that we all share.
Wow, I need to check this out. Ice Cube working with Trump!!! I take it he won’t be going back to Compton any time soon….
Kanye West suffers badly from a Bi-polar dysfunction. His wife has gone public asking everyone to please take this into account.
I am neither particularly a fan nor follower of his, nor an authority on his life by any means, but he, from what I can judge from this and his other public displays, is a man who has a solid heart and who is in good faith, doing his best to make positive changes in the world in spite of, or maybe sometimes, because of his affliction.