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Kanye knows that rap careers are short. Old rappers are not going on tour, unlike old rockers. He's looking for some sort of second act: pundit, politician, etc. Being unnecessarily controversial even if it costs him money is part of that.
That is absurd. He was making more money than he ever had before, in the months preceding his cancelation he made up the majority of online sales on Adidas' website. The world was his oyster, he had reached the greatest financial success of his life, surpassed all his peers, and the value of his company was still sky rocketing.
Tour? You do realize that he was now a billionaire designer, yes? Who cares about going on tour? Kanye had one of the most devoted fan bases, and he can and did go on tour, but he now a fashion brand, who happened to rap as a side job. Rhianna, another artist turned billionaire fashion label, hasn't performed in 10 years. It doesn't matter. They don't have to do that kind of stuff any more.
Then he lost billions of dollars in a single week, and if you think that it was part of some 3D chess move and not just bad impulse control then I don't know what to tell you.
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Snoop Dogg (51 years old), Eminem (50 years old), Big Daddy Kane (54 years old), Ice-T* (64 years old), Rakim (54 years old), Krs-One (57 years old), Chuck D (62 years old) and Slick Rick (58 years old) are all touring in 2023.
*As a member of Body Count.
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How much of that is the relative newness of rap, though? Along with the preponderance of solo acts meaning that death/disability to a name means that it can't be Ship of Theseus'd like a lot of bands are at this point.
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He had a second act: fashion. That he fought really, really hard for. He then immolated it and most of his non-rap business links not due to some career plan, but because he's a mentally ill narcissist.
I actually think he's not narcissistic at all, but is surrounded by narcissistic people and he doesn't know how to cope. Like all good creatives and artists, he's doing his best to represent the world as he sees it because he wants to help people but he does it in a way that steps on toes, and he thinks it's ok to step on toes because he thinks he's revealing things that will help people because it's helped him in the past. But he, like many of us at themotte, finds that exposing his reality gets him in hot water, but he's past the point of caring about not stepping on toes of people he sees as the elite, when he thinks it can help empower people who really deserve to be helped.
More plainly: Kanye sees Jews as oppressing poor people in America. He wants to help poor people in America, so he attacks Jews. He's not crazy, he just has a different perspective than everyone else who thinks "I can't attack jews because [fill in the blank.]" He thinks "I need to attack jews because they have the power, they are literally the ones who can keep me from being a billionaire (see what happened) and I'd rather attack people with power than poor hillbillies who wear White Lives Matter t-shirts" (hence his wearing a white lives matter t-shirt and attacking Jews.)
I'm not defending his actions or beliefs but it drives me crazy to see everyone misunderstanding him and thinking he's mentally ill when he's so clearly just working from a different perspective than the vast majority of people, in my opinion.
My opinion on Kanye being a narcissist long predates anything about Jews. Trust me, there's about a decade and a half of weirdo things he's done.
We could put that aside and still have reams of evidence.
People think he's mentally ill because he's literally a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder who's talked about going off his meds, and then does things -like torch a lifetime's work in a totally unproductive way- that make it appear as if he's manic.
No one doubts that he has a different perspective. The issue is how many different ones he has depends on how stable he is on that day.
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