Kanye, Leos, And A New Pop Cultural Situationism (?), Part 2, by Adam Lehrer
Adam Lehrer critiques Kanye West's DONDA and Leos Carax's Annette, and wonders aloud if they are embodying of a new Situationism.
The critique and discourse around DONDA has already become exceptionally annoying, polarized, and even politicized in the manner that almost everything is now. On one hand, you have a mainstream music press blood lusting for Kanye’s head and all too enthusiastic about taking the artist down a peg after the MAGA hat and his various ideological “transgressions” over the last few years. Tirhaka Love, an insipid moron with a likely fake name who “writes” for The Daily Beast, made the oh-so-undeniably “insightful” criticism that for an album dedicated to the memory of his mother, it seems to be filled to the gills with “men who hate women,” and has little women collaborators (in today’s media of course, the idea that a work of art could be misogynistic AND good is anathema, poor Henry Miller would have never hacked it today). Dylan Green, slightly less histrionic in his review for Pitchfork, writes: “The music of Kanye—who once said 400 years of slavery was a choice, who once tweeted that Bill Cosby was innocent, who revolutionized rap and has not made a truly great album in five years—sounds like an afterthought.”
But the reactive defenses of DONDA proliferating on Twitter accounts largely from the other side of the culture wars appear to be equally incoherent, if less obnoxious. Many of the album’s proponents have landed on some idea about how those who dismiss DONDA are just afraid of beauty, spirituality, and redemption, or something, and one could easily conclude that critique around the record has been entirely reduced to whether or not you hate or love Kanye’s public evolution over the last decade (on that front, I agree with the pro-DONDA people more than its professional critic and libtard detractors).
The reality of the record is much easier to detect when letting that noise fade into the background: DONDA is a mildly sloppy, overproduced, and mediocre late-career record by an artist who was for a longtime the most exciting in all of popular music. It is, without question, WAY too long, and there is simply no reason that an artist who once edited 90 tracks to the 38 minutes of the rawest industrial-inflected/pop/rap that the world has ever heard (Yeezus) would release something so needlessly dragged out. The choice to repeat three of the album’s earlier tracks at the end perplexes more than it provokes thought. And though there are moments of beauty here (“Jesus Lord” with its soaring melancholic gospel is moving, and “Hurricane” extracts incredible hooks from The Weeknd), the album is burdened by tedium. One could argue that all Kanye’s post-Yeezy records have been even uneven and lacking of the maniacal focus that defined his masterful trilogy of 808z and Heartbreaks, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus. That’s not to say it’s all been bad — I’d wager that his collaboration album with Kid Cudi, for instance, ranks amongst the most creative and exciting music of his career — but the albums often feel more like mixtapes than they do full-length records. DONDA, the longest of all the records he’s released since 2016, is to Kanye what Never Let me Down was to Bowie: a signal to the world that infallible musical genius is actually all too fallible. When you come to public prominence baring your soul, it’s not unlikely that you might exhaust your spiritual aura all together.
Yet, despite my dismissal of the actual record, I can’t bring myself to write off DONDA as a meaningless cultural event. I think it’s clear that Kanye has mostly been bored of making music for a very long time now — he basically said as much in his 2013 interview with the famous poptimistic music dork Zane Lowe, while waxing lyrical on several other fascinating pseudo-philosophical insights— and has felt trapped by his cultural role. His real aspirations are communicated in his declared heroes: Walt Disney, Howard Hughes, Ralph Lauren and of course Donald Trump among them. He covets the kind of pure disruption that necessitates a platform and caché bigger than that which is typically allotted to even the most iconic of musicians. To a large degree, he’s achieved beyond his wildest dreams even in that regard in the creation of the now billion dollar enterprise that is the Yeezy footwear and sportswear line. You can naysay his fashion designs all you want, but Kanye said from the beginning that his desire was to create a product line that wields a high fashion influence to more utilitarian ends. And he did it. The man’s ability to make his dreams come true is fucking amazing.
Nevertheless, Kanye’s cultural presence is still that of the genius, difficult, impenetrable, and awe-inspiring artist. He occupies a role held before by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, David Bowie, and others: that of an aristocratic-leaning, fiercely self-committed creative force whose every act is seemingly laced with nothing short of pure will-to-power. He’s an artist, he’s a musician, he’s a designer, but he’s also somehow more than all of that. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that Kanye’s recent recorded output has felt uneven. Yeezus’ packaging, a clear jewel box with no album art, signaled the death of the album itself (it is, perhaps, the last “album”). Kanye told us then that his interest in “the album” as a product had waned, and thus his subsequent recorded output has been absent his rigorous perfectionism in favor of a looser and at times haphazard feeling to various ends. Music now is just one aspect of Kanye’s much larger vision; he’s less a music maker than he is an aesthetic universe builder, like a great fashion designer.
And given his leanings towards fashion, it’s not altogether surprising that “the show” has become the primary vehicle of Kanye’s expression. Consider the greatest fashion designers of the last 30 years: Alexander McQueen, Rick Owens, Rei Kawakubo, Martin Margiela, Raf Simons and others made “the fashion show” central to their role as creators. The product, even when beautifully made and stunning to look at, is made to finance the broader spectacle of the runway show (Rick Owens, one of the most radical of the designers mentioned, still makes most of his money in the slinging of hoodies, leather jackets, and sneakers that have barely changed in the many seasons since he first introduced them into his product line). It is the show that is the totality of the designer’s vision: shape, form, movement, color, and (of course) sound.
The DONDA release parties then, like those designers’ runway shows, should be understood as Kanye’s chosen expressive vehicle at this juncture in his career. The music on DONDA could be just as important OR secondary to the overall spectacle as are the various garments worn by models in a fashion show (icing on the cake, etc etc). This could explain the surreal experience I had first listening to DONDA independent of the shows around it and coming to find numerous flaws in the music that I hadn’t noticed when watching Kanye’s release parties for the album, floored. Kanye, using all the language and signifiers of “the spectacle” or contemporary pop culture in a digital era, pulls off the stunning feat of delivering nothing short of bizarre conceptual and gestural art statements made to an audience of millions.
I watched the last two of the DONDA listening parties and found beauty, madness, and the sheer audacity of artistic megalomania in both of them (I missed the first). The first, in Atlanta, saw Kanye surrounded by thousands of dancers as he skulked, posed, and lifted weights on a sparse stage that consisted merely of a mattress and light fixtures. Fashion, as always with Kanye, was a focal point – Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga’s creative director and founder/former designer of Vetements, served as creative director for all the listening events. In that second show, Kanye wore a militaristic, cyber-punk ensemble that included black combat boots, cargo pants, a bullet proof vest emblazoned with DONDA, and a bizarre bomber jacket covered in spikes constructed of some high-tech fabric. The performance was abstract and ambiguous, and beautiful and moving. At the next show, the more grandiose of the two, Kanye recreated his childhood home in South Chicago on stage and brought out controversial guests DaBaby and Marilyn Manson, supposedly commenting on the transcendence of forgiveness and redemption against a vindictive and remorselessly puerile cultural paradigm. In Kanye’s worldview, the noble sinner is he who drives the culture forward and emerges as the messianic figure. It is a position to be coveted and celebrated, not scorned and dismissed. In both events, DONDA sounds more sublime that it often does on the record alone, likely because it is but one aspect of a much more totalizing vision.
Kanye has long transcended his position of “rapper” or “producer” or even “musician”. The DONDA listening parties make plain that Kanye is much closer to his noted favorite artist Matthew Barney than he is his industry mentor Jay-Z (who, for the record, I loathe). Like Barney, he is a conceptual artist working at a massive scale, injecting abstract ideas into the most visible and mainstream cultural spaces (spending insane amounts of money while doing so). Kanye, to one degree or another, has emerged as our most prominent and enduring Situationist-adjacent pop culture figure. Everything he does; the hype machine, the shows, the albums, the clothes, the controversies; collapses the spectacle, tears a fabric in it and shows us a piece of sublime beauty lurking beneath it, and demands the attention of millions if not billions of people. It was on Yeezus that Kanye declared: “I am a god.” I remember clearly the religious scolds and otherwise taking him to task for that statement, but his commentary can now be read as utterly insightful if not prophetic. In liquid modernity, the only religion left is the Internet and the entertainment industrial complex around it. And Kanye, as a man capable of commanding the algorithm to a preternatural extent, is one of its most powerful, all-knowing gods.
Leos Carax has been one of my favorite film artists for a long time. I forget how exactly I discovered him as a youngster, but I believe I first read about his 1999 transgressive cinematic adaptation of Melville, Pola X, when it was briefly associated with the subversive film movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, then defined by critic James Quandt as the “New French Extremity”. Leos, nevertheless, has little in common with most of the filmmakers best associated with that line of critique. His movies are, predominantly, romance films. Even Pola X, with all its incest and unsimulated sex, has the barebones structure of a romantic tragedy. And just like romance is embedded into Pola X, Leos’ subversive streak proliferates throughout all of his films, even the ones imbued with a more pronounced French quality of charm and awe. The Lovers on the Bridge follows two mad young lovers (played by Juliette Binoche and Leos regular Denis Lavant) who can’t live without one another. They are also, however, homeless and drug addicted; and in the contrast between the love and the degradation, Leos evokes beautiful contradictions. In Bad Love, a cunning intelligence operative played by Lavant is tasked with locating a serum that treats an STD that can only be contracted by those who have sex out of curiosity rather than loving commitment. Leos is both a stone French romantic and a gleefully antagonistic enfant terrible. Sometimes I see him as the connecting tissue between the film philosophies of Jean-Luc Godard and Harmony Korine. While the former is a French modernist intellectual and the latter a postmodern American sleaze merchant, both filmmakers appropriate genre tropes to deconstruct and disrupt bourgeois conceptions of narrative linearity and filmic technique. Leos has commonalities with all these aforementioned traits.
Leos produces an exceptionally small amount of work, but something in his art shifted with the release of Holy Motors in 2012. The film, starring Lavant once more as some kind of an agent (or something) who throughout the film performs the roles of an assortment of different individuals (a trollish and almost inhuman looking man who kidnaps a beautiful woman, a Chinese gangster on assignment to perform an assassination, a dying man saying good-bye to a beloved family member) but to what ends we never understand. He’s not being filmed, and no one in particular seems to be watching (except us, of course, HAH!). The film is an exquisite love letter to the particularities of cinema as a mode of artistic expression. A deconstruction of the elements that breathe film to life: light, color, movement, performance, costume, sound, and more. Despite its surrealist impenetrability, however, it was the biggest production of Leos’ career. In retrospect, Holy Motors feels less like a work of cinema that it does an act of the creation of a situation, in which the artist snuck a work of conceptual art into the schedule of Cannes-backed prestige international movie making. The film was widely adored and ended up on countless “Best Films of 2010s” lists. The commercial and critical success of the movie heightened it as an artistic concept. It’s art as a pop cultural coup.
The response to Leos’ new film, the musical Annette, has been less enthusiastic. Despite its frenetic creative vision, moments of soaring highs, terrific musical numbers, inflections of symbolism, and a career best performance by Adam Driver, it does seem to have some indefinable quality missing that prevents it from attaining inarguable greatness. Incoherent, tedious, and lacking point/substance are amongst its most common criticisms. None of these criticisms are necessarily wrong, it’s just that what Annette represents as a creative gesture is something that film critics don’t have the faculties to appreciate. They fail, you see, to look past Annette’s flaws as a work of cinema and into its achievements as a situation. An event — chaotic, seismically ambitious, and undeniably strange — that for a brief moment forces the masses to pause, consider their own pop culture, and reflect on the meaning of all this content.
It’s not that Annette is the first musical to have aspirations to more adult-oriented, ambitious art — surely it would be absurd to say such a thing given the entire career of Bob Fosse — it’s that it’s a musical film that attempts to go beyond the constraints of both the musical and the film. Its narrative is sparse: a self-immolating comedian (like Lenny Bruce or Sam Kinnison or Andy Kaufman), played by Driver, falls in love with an opera singer (played by Marion Cotillard) and they have a baby, the comedian gets canceled and slowly starts to seemingly merge psychologically with the misbehaved character he portrays in his act. The baby is born, but the now emotionally suffocated comedian “accidentally” kills his wife in a boating accident, but commits himself to being a father. That commitment fails to overshadow his ambition and raging narcissism, however, and he quickly finds a way to use his daughter’s supernatural talent to sing and levitate (the daughter Annette is portrayed almost entirely by a puppet, and yes we see her both levitate and sing) as a means of getting rich and famous once his career has flamed out. He recruits his wife’s opera conductor to write the music, but later murders him too when he learns that Annette might be his new friend’s biological daughter. The plot is wobbly, disorienting, and it fails at conveying a singular subtext. It’s about love, ambition, pain, boredom, freedom, art, performance, and shock. Or maybe none of these things. Maybe something more.
It’s a rock opera that is not formally dissimilar from more mainstream fare such as The Who’s Tommy or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but only uses that familiar form to shatter form altogether. Annette, keeping in tune with the provocateur streak that Leos has always kept close to his heart, can best be understood as a unique example of what I’ve taken to calling a work of cryptographic transgressive art, or crypto-transgression. Using the language of mass media, or what Debord calls “the spectacle” — the musical genre, the big budget prestige movie backing, Amazon Prime, an actor perhaps best known for Star Wars — Leos creates a work of art that confounds, obscures, asks and never answers, thrills (if you let it), and most importantly demands the attention of an audience that no longer has any attention to give. Leos encrypts truly radical sensibilities within the mass market language of the musical with all its recognizable genre tropes. It is the event around the artwork — in all its perplexing splendor — that will be the enduring creative gesture. Annette forced me to ask: “How did something like this even get made?” The film’s structural flaws became meaningless against the miraculous nature of its existence. Its very existence is thrilling for it expresses a repressed hope that subversive art may still have a future. Leos has said publicly that he believes cinema is a state of mind that can exist outside of the movies. Annette, with the strange event that surrounds it and its unlikely existence, is perhaps his attempt to create a movie that can function outside of the confines of the images on screen. “There shouldn’t be questions and answers, but questions and more questions and doubts,” says Carax.
"We've always been into ecstatic kinetic motion, senselessly throwing ourselves around our instruments, turning people in the audience into instruments, playing people, playing the kinetics of crowd motion,” said Charles Gocher, drummer of one of my favorite bands Sun City Girls, in a 1989 interview with Forced Exposure. “We've gone out of our way to watch the crowd flow and draw them into what we're doing.”
I’ve always believed that art needs an audience to even function as an artwork. Sure, I can admire the millions of people out there making art in private, indulging their perversions and psychological weirdness. But an art doesn’t become art until it has an audience that it can engage and maintain tension against. Perhaps this is why, absent a truly engaged audience, art feels so lifeless and dead. As a collective audience, we are over-stimulated with content while spiritually malnourished for art. There’s so much of everything that it all is reduced to nothing. We are all participating in this spectacle but demonstrate little participation in actual culture. In this culture, the finding of an engaged audience is itself a creative gesture. But a Situationist culture, as Debord tells us in the Situationist Manifesto, encourages “total participation.” It makes sense then that the cultural works that have had the most lasting resonance with me these last few months were Kanye’s DONDA release parties and Leos’ Annette. While both flawed as singular creative products, both artists managed to disrupt the spectacle and demand the attention of masses of people. And with our attention earned, they inject abstract, puzzling, glorious, and beautiful ideas into our cerebral cortexes and collective unconsciousness. They are broadening the pop culture paradigm with concepts and forms that are utterly radical, given the obscene amount of bullshit shat into existence on a daily basis. And while I may be stretching the definition of Situationist art to suit my own narrative purposes (sorry people, I’m a theory fictionalist and an artist, not a fucking social scientist), I find myself celebrating DONDA and Annette as works of Situationism in a culture that desperately needs them. The flaws of the artworks, whatever they may be, fade into the background in the face of that monumental achievement.
Hail Kanye! Hail Leos! Hail Debord! Death to the present, and pray for a future!
READ PART 1 HERE
Illustrations:
1. Kanye listening event in Chicago
2. Kanye listening event in Atlanta
3. Bowie in the 1980s
4. Kanye and Trump
5. Alexander McQueen SS 2001
6. DONDA listening event in Chicago
7. Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle
8. Leos Carax’s Pola X
9. Leos Carax’s Holy Motors
10. Leos Carax’s Annette
11. Annette
12. Pink Floyd’s The Wall