the izz-O, V to the izz-A.” By 2013, West was making this kind of claim much more explicitly in a solo song titled “I Am a God.”
In West’s best songs, a thrilling rebellious energy flows from this narcissistic triumphalism, but without a revolutionary systemic critique of inequities to connect that energy to its practical conditions and consequence. So while he often calls out pertinent historical enemies of the black community like Reagan and Bush, he inevitably presents an alternative that merely reverses the supremacist form of their claim to power. This rebellion is a mirror image, rather than the transformative alternative that defines revolution. That distinction can be seen in his attitude toward education, which seems like a reaction to moralistic pedagogy, but one that only posits an opposing supremacism, a superior internal standard of reference that overcomes the inferior standard of the other. He defines the message of his first solo album in terms of the implications of its title, The College Dropout: “All that’s saying is make your own decisions. Don’t let society tell you, ‘This is what you have to do.’”63 West discloses his class privilege with a passing reference to the presumption he would go to university. “People told me to stay in school,” he mentions, meaning college rather than high school. Of course, for many young people in the United States, college is not a duty to be avoided, but an unlikely opportunity that cannot be presumed, whether due to cost or to their social context, in which a degree is not the norm.
But this disclosure of privilege is not to be rebuked of itself, as it can be revelatory. In this case, it seems to condition West’s ability to disregard a common experience of moralistic education that can be called, after Jacques Lacan, “orthopedic,” in the etymological sense of “straightening” children or bringing them into line. In simple terms, the orthopedagogue begins with a predetermined standard and works to make the student conform to that standard, rather than discerning from the student’s interests and affinities a direction for development. Both a critique of orthopedic pedagogy and some of the consequences of West’s privilege are indicated—along with his famously cavalier nonconformity—by comments to a hip-hop journalist, in which West praises a white singer-songwriter known for slick, radio friendly production and mainstream appeal: “I listen to John Mayer, and his song ‘No Such Thing’ is exactly what my [philosophy] is about, but in different words.” Upon closer attention, the observation turns out to be as apt as it is unexpected, and West’s relevance as an artist is connected with the narcissism that makes it possible for him to confess an unfashionable affinity with such idiosyncratically defiant vulnerability.
Mayer’s articulation of West’s philosophy is less revealing as a work, lacking West’s reflexive complexity. But when it is considered in the context of this evidentiary reference, mediatized and repurposed as an articulation of West’s message, Mayer’s pablum becomes, if anything, more directly indicative of the systemic fantasy in which it is implicated. The song cited is on Mayer’s 2001 debut, Room for Squares, a title that performs West’s gesture of unfashionable confession without his audacity or unexpectedness.64 This prepares the listener for the kind of hackneyed anti-intellectualism one might expect from radio pop: “They read all the books but they can’t find the answers,” Mayer tosses off, with all the casual self-assurance of one who has never bothered to read the books, because he feels no pressing need to find the answers. The chorus is a gleeful encomium to Mayer’s own unstudied, preternatural wisdom: “I wanna run through the halls of my high school, I wanna scream at the top of my lungs,” he sings in a falsetto softly mimicking the energy of a scream, “I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world, just a lie you got to rise above.” The reality on offer in his high school is, the song makes clear, the secure but workaday life of a conventional “American dream”—the kind of career, marriage and family life that can seem like paradise to those excluded from it, though it has been limned as a hell of capitulation by artists of every generation.
The metaphysical promise of American consumerism is brought to its romantic apotheosis in Mayer’s encouragement to break on through this staid image of an easy but ultimately unfulfilling living: “They love to tell you, ‘Stay inside the lines,’” he observes in the rising harmonies of the song’s bridge, before dropping back down, to again build with each word of promise, “But something’s better […]”—now rising to a crescendo of falsetto harmony—“[…] on the other side.” This is a sweetened commercial concoction of the rebellious fantasy familiar from decades past, a synthesis of Pat Boone and Jim Morrison. It is a fantasy produced by privilege, in which the only way to lose is not to try, and one has only oneself to blame for not realizing one’s boldest dreams. This fantasy is just as fundamentally predicated on faith in the whole agency of power as any conspiracy theory: A path is planned and available to you, it claims, and if you do as you are told, all your predictable needs will be provided. The society Mayer dreams in falsetto is the family socialism of wealthy white well-intentioned parents, an image of society compatible with Sedgwick’s account of D. A. Miller’s paternalistic welfare state. Such authorities mean well, Mayer’s song implies, but they nevertheless fail to see the grander life each of us can live if we just throw away their velvet chains and embrace the risk of inspiration. The contempt bred by this predetermined path to success is clear in Mayer’s promise that, in order to possess a better life than this, one need only ignore the clueless adults who lack the imagination or courage of youth: “All of our parents, they’re getting older, I wonder if they’ve wished for anything better, while in their memories, tiny tragedies […].” In short, to avoid the petty, tragic lives of one’s sad old parents, Mayer explains, one need only ignore them and follow one’s own self-aggrandizing dreams of glory.
The song ends with Mayer imagining his moment of vindication, after he has proven himself definitively right and demonstrated his innate superiority over all those around him. He plans his triumphant return to the 10-year reunion held in his high school’s cafeteria, to “stand on these tables before you” and gloat about his success, presumably to all those classmates who did not listen to the advice he screamed as he ran past them in the hallways, or who doubted his inevitable apotheosis. Just before this climax comes a brief interlude in which the music slows and Mayer wails, as if to summarize the previous 50 years of white male teenage fantasy in popular song, “I am invincible, I am invincible, I am invincible as long as I am alive.” Not only are we reminded here of the godlike omnipotence that defines phallic value, but also the immortality it implies, the eternalization that defeats history and change, that insists like a track West produced for Jay-Z, “never, never, never, never change, I never change.”65 Mayer and West seem to imagine themselves like Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, a supremely powerful figure somehow hobbled by the machinations of external authorities. Indeed, this is the fantasy necessary to invest in Reagan’s neoliberal promise of unaided success, overcoming the weights and blinders of parents’ rules or government regulations, to rise into the skies and beyond.
But this fantasy of overcoming does not propose an alternative to the powers it disdains, nor does it even reject the form of power imposed by conventional authorities. Instead, it merely posits that those currently supposed to possess authority are imposters, allowing the enunciating subject to take their rightful place of supremacy, claiming authenticity as embodiment of power. It is as though these men have discovered their parents are not the all-powerful beings they seemed to be through a child’s eyes, but instead of challenging the image of potency that shapes their expectations, they disqualify the compromised potency that defines their experience. Instead of questioning their belief in an all-powerful being—as perhaps merely the fantasy of a child still growing into full embodiment and empowerment, aspiring to a simplistic perfection because it is their first imagination of power—they angrily blame their parents for failing to realize omnipotence. By rejecting and negating the defeated wills and “tiny tragedies” of their parents, they seem to imagine they will emerge into possession of the supreme potency they presume. This is only possible on the basis of emulative, aspirational identification with a figure beyond conventional power, as in West’s ironic articulation of his own divinity: “I am a god, even though I’m a man of God, my whole life in the hand of God.” Though it may seem that a god cannot devote himself to God, it is in fact only by emulative
