The lights are off, and outside our apartment there’s nothing to be heard but crickets chirping and the occasional car driving through our small town, New Salem, Massachusetts. Yet inside, in the pitch black, my mom and I jump up and down, blasting Kanye West. My mom points at me and at the top of her lungs sings, “'You gon' touch the sky, baby girl!”
Thanks to my mom, I’ve been an avid listener of Kanye since third grade. No matter how I was feeling, there was a Kanye song to match my emotions. Sad? I listened to “Heard ‘Em Say.” Defeated? “Bring Me Down.” Hopeful? “Street Lights.” Angry? “Power.” I listened to him alone on the bus to school and with my best friends everywhere we went. His music was an integral part of my life for years.
I want to declare without shame that I love Kanye, but I’m not sure if that statement is completely accurate. I will always love his music, not only for its bold, empowering themes but also for all the memories his music gave me.
The first concert I ever went to was on Kanye’s “Yeezus” tour with my best friend and my mom. We seat hopped through the weed-stenched TD Garden until we were a mere few hundred feet away from the stage. We sang to “Bound 2” until we lost our voices, and on the 1 ½-hour car ride home, we listened to “Yeezus” over and over again as we reminisced.
Years later, during my first year at UCLA, I went to a concert on Kanye’s “Saint Pablo” tour with my roommate, hoping the experience would be as magical as the first. But over the months leading up to that night, Kanye had been feuding with a variety of celebrities and continually disrupted his shows with lengthy and controversial rants. I kept asking myself if I could separate his words and actions from his music. On the night of the concert, I left The Forum in Inglewood feeling conflicted.
It’s nearly impossible to go through life without being occasionally disappointed by celebrities whom we normally admire. But can we really separate their words and actions from the parts of them that we love? Should we even try? These are the questions I ask myself when I reflect on how my relationship with Kanye has changed, only to end up at a crossroads of conflicting sentiments. It’s hard to find peace with this constant internal conflict, but as a fan, I find it reassuring to know that this discomfort is a result of normal psychological processes.
To experience the pain of being let down by a celebrity, fans must have first established a connection with that artist. My connection to Kanye began with my mom and was solidified by friends who loved his music, too. When I listen to “Hey Mama,” I feel this ache in my chest because I take his words to heart. Kanye raps, “As we knelt on the kitchen floor/ I said mommy I'ma love you 'til you don't hurt no more/ And when I'm older, you ain't gotta work no more,”
striking a chord with my own desire to repay my mom for all she’s given me and raising me single-handedly. Although Kanye and I have far more differences than we do similarities, I’ve always looked at how his lyrics apply to my own life. He wasn’t just my favorite artist, he was a part of my identity.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way about an artist or celebrity. According to Matthew Lieberman, a professor of social psychology at UCLA, we find our place in our environment and make friends partially through bonding over celebrities.
“For most folks, there's a period of personal development in the teenage years where we are trying to sort of self-define who we are, and part of how we do that is through cultural touchstones and celebrities,” Lieberman said.
He explained that my history with Kanye and associating him with so many positive memories enabled an attachment to him to form.
“It's about attachment – not just attachment to him but what he represents in the context of friends and family,” he said. “That's going to make for a strong pull on you so that it isn't easy to dismiss him or give him up.”
For some, such as Jem Aswad, the senior music editor at Variety, Kanye was easy to give up on. Aswad said his relationship to Kanye was always more professional than personal.
“I can't listen to Kanye anymore. I was burned out on his voice anyway because he's just been annoying me. I even had a little trouble with “Yeezus” because he was getting on my nerves,” Aswad said. “I'm not really a fair example as a fan. ... I resent Kanye because every time he tweets I have to like stop what I'm doing and write a story about it.”
As a young teenager, my attachment to Kanye grew stronger not only because I associated him with friends and family, but also because I was able to constantly watch his interviews online and read his usually entertaining Twitter feed. I felt like I grew to understand him more and more with each tweet, Instagram post or any online post involving Kanye.
This one-sided connection is what Yalda Uhls calls a parasocial relationship. Through social media, there are more ways than ever to establish them, said Uhls, an assistant adjunct developmental psychology professor at UCLA.
“Parasocial interaction has increased because now you can tweet at a celebrity, and they may answer you back. It makes people feel like they have a real relationship, ... like they can see the ‘authentic’ person,” she said.
She said, in the past, celebrities were able to easily hide aspects of themselves and only show a facade that fit the narrative they were trying to sell. Although that may still happen today, social media has occasionally unveiled celebrities and exposed more honest versions of them.
“In many ways, young people feel closer to celebrities than they have,” Uhls said. “There's a theory that parasocial interactions and the sort of relationship that people feel they have with celebrities have grown.”
By no means do I consider myself to be someone who is overly preoccupied with celebrities, yet I cannot deny that it is easy to get sucked into their aesthetics or comical social media pages. Although I feel contentious toward Kanye’s Twitter page at times, I also frequently enjoyed seeing posts like “Super inspired by my visit to Ikea today,” or “Everyone has made mistakes. I just make them in public.” His random feed added another enthralling layer to the man I already felt I owed so much.
As time went on, Kanye started popping up on social media for reasons that weren’t so inspiring. Just last year he posted a series of tweets that ranged from sensationalist, such as “The thought police want to suppress freedom of thought,” to highly controversial, like “There was a time when slavery was the trend and apparently that time is still upon us. But now it's a mentality.” Even though I wanted to assume there was some truth and wisdom behind his words, I still had to confront the possibility that he was not some omniscient being who could do no wrong. I had to face that he is less than what I wanted him to be my whole life.
I had to jump through mental hoops to justify my love for the artist even before the age of social media. The first time was when I was in sixth grade – when he interrupted Taylor Swift’s speech during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. I remember people talking about it in my classroom, describing him as rude; I had never heard someone describe Kanye negatively before then. I was never a fan of Swift, so while it was indeed a rude thing to do, I was able to dismiss it because it seemed irrelevant to me as a sixth grader with no knowledge of gender politics or adult responsibility.
When I was a sophomore in high school he put the Confederate flag on some apparel in his clothing line in an effort to reclaim it. I thought it was an odd, but perhaps noble, effort. When he publicly supported President Donald Trump and wore Make America Great Again hats during my first year at UCLA, I was disappointed since I was raised as a liberal Democrat and I wanted him to be, too. But everyone has a right to their opinion and at least he is exercising his political freedom, right?
His whole career, Kanye has been claiming that he is a god while simultaneously saying that he is just an insecure man who makes mistakes like everyone else. The confidence he brings to his music when he claims he’s superior to all other rappers, and perhaps people, has always inspired me to be better, to try harder – or at the very least, fake it until I feel slightly better about myself. When he sings, “I promise, I’m so self-conscious,” I want to commend him for admitting it. Early on, we learn that nobody is perfect. Yet, when I see Kanye mess up or go against my status quo, I still want to cringe.
Ever since he interrupted Swift, he’s been marked as an aggressive, rambling lunatic. However, that was never what he was to me; seeing him painted in such a negative light for years, and perhaps deservedly so, created a sort of mental discomfort for me. When I spoke with Lieberman, he confirmed my experiences and feelings as a mental process called cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is a kind of psychological ache that occurs when someone holds two contradictory beliefs. In my case, the inconsistent beliefs are that Kanye is good, since he has meant so much to me for the majority of my life, and that sometimes Kanye’s words and actions are often unfavorable, to say the least.
Lieberman said it is common to experience cognitive dissonance resulting from celebrities.
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“Almost no role model really stands up to scrutiny, to be honest,” he said. “The more you see the unvarnished image of any celebrity, the harder it's going to be to keep them on a pedestal.”
Over the years, I never stopped loving Kanye’s music. Yet, somewhere along the line, I stopped watching his interviews and reading his tweets.
It’s not that I wanted to avoid what he had to say, but a part of me didn’t want to risk ruining the image I had built of him years before. I didn’t want to confront the idea that he wasn’t everything I wanted him to be. Without being truly aware of it, I was trying to reduce the cognitive dissonance I felt by separating Kanye West into Kanye the musician and Kanye the controversial figure through a process called compartmentalization.
“It’s developmentally normal to understand and perhaps be disappointed that a person is not just one thing,” Uhls said. “As you got older, you understood there are more sides to them.”
Likewise, Lieberman explained that compartmentalization is useful when you deal with the immediate anguish of an event. As time passes, you can distance yourself from it in a way that allows you to acknowledge it happened without feeling badly about it.
“Suddenly, you look back and say, ‘That was my favorite person when I was a kid, I still love their music, but I don't really care about them so much,’” Lieberman said.
Lieberman recounted his own experience with compartmentalization when he learned of the sexual assault allegations against Louis C.K. He said he felt attached to C.K. because he considered the comedian to be a social psychologist in his own way. Lieberman even used to teach with C.K.’s comedy clips in his social psychology class, so he said he felt frustrated when he realized he would no longer be able to do so. This attachment led to him wanting to separate C.K.’s actions onstage from his actions offstage.
“He made fun of things which caused people to examine certain things in themselves, and that's probably done now,” he said. “He will never have that influence again, and I'm not sure that he should.”
However, we aren’t always given the opportunity to compartmentalize because sometimes celebrities cross a line that we internally drew based on our beliefs. When this happens, we don’t necessarily completely cut them out of our lives, but we slowly become less attached.
Aswad described his experience with R. Kelly, who he used to listen to and has reported on many times. Though he loved the singer’s hits like “I Believe I Can Fly” and “The World’s Greatest,” Aswad said he feels that he can’t listen to the numbers the same way following the accusations against Kelly.
“All these (songs have) really naive, nursery rhyme-ish statements of self-confidence and belief and faith that are still touching,” Aswad said. “It makes me sad that I feel almost morally prevented from listening to those songs anymore.”
I have always immediately downloaded Kanye’s albums as soon as they dropped and obsessively listened to them for months. However, after not checking his social media feed or watching as many interviews, I realize I am no longer actively strengthening the bond I feel with him as a person, instead of solely as a musician.
“If you're no longer adding new stuff relative to other things that fill up your experiences, they can start to move into the past and part of nostalgia,” Lieberman explained. “That means you are less actively attached – you sort of remember and enjoy the fact that you were really attached to something, and you still look at that like an old photograph and say, ‘Wasn't that sweet,’ but it's less of an ongoing thing.”
Despite my contradictory feelings and subconscious efforts to avoid anything bad about Kanye, nothing can invalidate the happy memories I have associated with Kanye’s music.
Kanye played such a significant role throughout my life that no matter what he says or does, I know I will always justify my love for his music, if not for him as a person. Maybe I don’t like Kanye’s politics or outbursts, but I don’t think I will ever dislike his music, which means I’m left with two options: Continue to compartmentalize him into two entities, or appreciate that Kanye, like everyone else, is a dynamic person who is more than a few words and behaviors. At the end of the day, if what he believes in are the very things that make his music what it is, I can accept that, even if I disagree with him.
Maybe we would all be better off if we absolved ourselves of the responsibility of deeming someone as a wholly good or bad person and just accepted that they lie somewhere on the moral spectrum. Learning to take our favorite celebrities off their moral pedestals will help us recognize that they, too, are humans and make mistakes without renouncing how much they mean to us. At the same time, it saves us from the hurt and discomfort we feel when we can't seem to separate the art from the artist, giving us full control on how we choose to celebrate these stars.
In some way, it might be more accurate to say, “I love Kanye’s music,” instead of simply “I love Kanye.” But I know it’s more than just his music. I miss the old Kanye and all that he represents because he gave me so many valuable memories with my mom and friends. I will always cherish the times I danced around the living room while listening to “Touch the Sky” with my mom. One day, I hope to blast the same song while dancing around the living room with my own kid.