#282. "Jesus Walks" by Kanye West
Today, while mowing the lawn in the billion degree Atlanta heat, I heard Kanye West’s song, “Jesus Walks” on my iPod. A lot of people have emailed me about that song lately.
I like Kanye West. I think he’s a talented lyricist and he kind of reminds me of Q-tip when he was with the group, “A Tribe Called Quest.” I think he’s intelligent and has impacted the entire genre of rap in the way that all great rappers do. I think his song “Jesus Walks” raises some interesting questions. For instance, why is it OK to rap about guns and girls but not Jesus when it comes to radio play? And what happens when you want to talk with God but it’s been a long time and you’ve really messed your life up?
The only problem is that whenever I hear Kanye, one thing goes through my head, one thing that I have written about before:
Kanye West has a sexual addiction.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! I don’t even know him. How can I say that? I didn’t. Kanye did. Here’s something he was quoted as saying in The Sun, a British newspaper:
“I think I have a sexual problem, a sexual addiction. My only drug is porn. I have porn with me all the time. Whenever I go to the porn store, I call it the crack house.”
The guy has a porn problem. Good for him for recognizing that it’s not a hobby, or “just something guys do.” He’s incredibly self aware and even has a song called addiction.
But then, a few weeks before his last album was released, this is how Rolling Stone magazine opened their article on West:
“It’s the wee hours of a Monday night in London, and inside Stringfellows strip club, about a dozen scantily clad women form a rough semicircle around Kanye West and his small entourage.”
For someone that confesses sex issues, that’s a pretty dangerous sentence, but it’s just a description of what was going. It’s factual. Then however, Rolling Stone offers one of the saddest and best put assessments of addiction I have ever read:
“Over the next few hours, he hardly moves an inch. The strip-club environment seems to have tranquilized him. For someone who travels through life at hyperspeed and talks a mile a minute, West is unusually still and silent.”
“Tranquilized” is such a powerful way to describe the trance addicts enter when they’re exposed to their drug of choice. And that the author of the article has the insight to notice that when faced with porn, Kanye becomes someone else, silent and still, is pretty damning.
As I said, I like Kanye West. I’m sure his new album was good, but I promise that it’s not as good as it could have been. Addiction doesn’t work that way. It’s never a muse for anything but destruction. It never opens up new creative paths, it only crumbles them. It attacks the good in your life. Addiction longs to wreck what you are best at. That’s just how it is.
I think Kanye is smart, but he got caught up in the idea that when you get successful, you have to express that success through flesh. You have to surround yourself with strippers and centerfolds. First of all, that’s a lie. Second of all, it’s really cliche. Solomon was rocking that way long before Kanye and look how it turned out for him. (By the way, this is not just an African American or rap thing. Ask everyone from the rock band Nickelback to Lance Armstrong what happens when you mix wild ladies and success.)
I’ve done what Kanye has done. I’ve lived up to about half of my potential. I’ve been “Jon Lite” and it sucks. You’re a shell. You’re thin and flat. A two dimensional version of who you could really be.
Is Kanye amazing right now? Yes.
Does he do really well? Yes.
Would he be unstoppable if he got his porn issue under control?
I can only imagine.
