Accountability in Music • Page 1014

that’s fine dude! be a bully, stoop down as low as you can. bing bong!

 

blah blah it's not Nazi propaganda, it's mental illness, blah blah
Mental illness doesn't make people Nazis. I'll gladly jump on the anti-Nazi pigpile.

 

mental illness doesn't make people nazis, I know because my depression and anxiety don't make me a nazi.

 

Yeah this is the same type of justification as Michael Jackson having a troubled childhood.

 

I swear to god the lack of understanding of the difference between justification and acknowledgement is an epidemic

 

Imagine dying on the don’t bully nazis hill

 

Not accountability, but I found out this week that the guy that made the most cursed tweet of all time also produced that Kanye Netflix doc.

 

I'm mentally ill. I have clinical depression and anxiety. I'm also not a fucking Nazi. Fuck you.

 

yeah my post was sarcastic. there are many mental illnesses that disturb your identity and can make your beliefs and personality and behavior shift much more drastically than depression and anxiety tend to. i'm not saying anyone is bullying Kanye that's not my post or my point but I think people underestimate the effects that more severe illnesses can have.

 

It seems to me the conversation that started yesterday is getting less and less nuanced with time and that's not benefitting anybody, so maybe best to move on? I shouldn't have even brought it up tbh. Just wanted to defend my man Randy!

 

this thread is a nuance suck tbh. the exchanges between you and wharf were great until people started (willfully?) misreading what wharf was saying as an excuse for ye being a nazi

 

clearly, but unclear as to why

 

I am not trying to continue this conversation more than it has but to just to illustrate my point as I've so far purposely avoided analogies: you would not tell an addict that their stealing is inexcusable because your depression and anxiety doesn't make you steal. I have personally been involved in the home care of someone who would scream that they wished I was dead and use their excrement as a weapon when they were improperly medicated, and the idea of telling them once medicated that there is no excuse for that is completely out of my realm of understanding. Even the US criminal justice system acknowledges that there are circumstances where people are unable to meaningfully grasp the difference between right and wrong.

I don't know if any of this applies to Kanye, but no one does. We do know he suffers from severe mental illnesses and have reason to believe they are not properly treated. I don't think any of this is an argument to behave any differently towards him as a fan, I'm not saying it's ableist to not want to listen to the Hitler song, but the hostility to any implication that mental health could play any part in his descent into wherever he is now is misguided, imo.

 

oh btw, gabor maté – the author of myth of normal – the book i recommended yesterday about trauma, escaped nazi germany after his grandparents were killed in auschwitz and his mom sent him away. pretty devastating story at the beginning about what happens when he and his mom are reunited.

 

Hearing what is behind the perspective is helpful. I think on forums, we often read what is on screen and see a conversation but what’s happening is more like several individual conversations mostly occurring and informed by what is not on the screen. Sometimes if the context I’m using for my own conversation is different than the context you’re using for yours, we disagree but if we synced to the same context we’d agree, etc.

 

Truly cannot imagine a less controversial take than "Kanye is severely mentally ill and unmedicated, which likely explains some of his behavior but certainly does not excuse transforming into a full-on facist"

 

I cannot believe there have been like three pages about Kanye? In 2025? It’s been nearly a decade of this shit. I was one of the kids who downloaded College Dropout in 2004 and had their lives changed but that dude has been gone.

While it’s sad that he seemingly only has the worst kind of people around him, maybe that’s because he’s also the worst kind of people?

His misogyny, antisemitism, internalized racism, on and on, are not excusable, or even that useful to discuss. (She says while commenting on it.)

But this year has felt like a bit of a turning point, in that mainstream music publications are not covering all of his antics anymore. And I hope that continues. I didn’t know anything about a Hitler song until coming here.

 

Respectfully, that’s why we’re talking about him

 

I know that. But at a certain point what else is there left to say?

 

Being desensitized to his bullshit does not make what he says and does moot. His actions are still damaging to people, so I don’t feel that his behavior should, simply, fall out of conversation.

 

I’m know that ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. My point is that he’s seemingly doing this stuff for attention and it looks like he’s getting more and more desperate for it.

I belong to more than one demographic that he has said disgusting things about. (His misogynoir has always been in his work to some degree, but he really kicked it into overdrive when he decided to talk shit about Harriet Tubman for some reason.)

Personally, I can’t intellectualize his shit anymore. He just sucks. Expressing hurt or disappointment is one thing. But I don’t see the value in going in circles about what the causes are other than his own hatred.

(The reemergence of the argument around his mental health is what spurred me to even comment. But I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all.)

 

to me kanye is a dude who made incredible art once upon a time and is now the guy on the street corner just yelling random bizarre nonsense at anyone who will listen but he does it online to his giant platform. ascribing agency or malice to what is clearly someone spiraling out feels like giving power to the wrong place. and yes, the same thing that predisposes one to making incredible art can also predispose one to ending up publicly psychotic which imo is very clearly what’s happening

 

I really don't think conflating genius with insanity is the move here and I also don't think we're the ones giving power here considering the size of his platform

 

Even if that’s what it is, he 100% believes what he is saying and means it. There is malice.

 

We really don’t need to explain away his descent into nazism. Of all the embarrassing things this site can do…