In America, the popular arts reign supreme. It is an unfortunate truth, and I say this speaking as a literary snob, that you can take all the novels, poems, symphonies, and operas ever written by Americans and burn them in a trash can fire under the Manhattan Bridge without any great diminishment in the global storehouse of the fine arts. The American genius has always resided more in the hybrid arts, like popular songs and cartoons, than it did in forms that it borrowed from Europe. America is jazz, the blues, Tin Pan Alley, and rock ’n’ roll, musical theater, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis. It’s Tupac and Biggie. You take Samuel Beckett, and I’ll take Bugs Bunny.
The one and only time I ever met Kanye West was in a modest recording studio in Jersey City. Kanye was a young producer working on tracks for what would become Jay-Z’s 2001 album The Blueprint. I was writing an article about Def Jam Records, Jay-Z’s label, and making the rounds of local kids who sat in their rooms in the Bronx or Long Island and produced major-label-level beats. Kanye was neither especially communicative nor did he come off as particularly arrogant or deranged. I remember that he was older than some of the other beat-makers I knew; was from Chicago; and wore a backpack. Other than that, he seemed laser-focused on the work he was doing for the man who at that time was the biggest rap star in the game.
When Kanye’s first album, The College Dropout, dropped five years later, in 2004, I recognized the off-kilter beats and the tasteful soul samples, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that he could rap—since most good producers lack the upfront ego and/or the linguistic giftedness to accompany their own tracks. Saying that Kanye was a B-level rapper with a winning sense of humor was therefore a compliment.
With the release of his third album, aptly titled Graduation, I saw that Kanye had matured into the type of artist who could write and produce popular anthems that channeled deep emotions in a self-aware way. Graduation was Kanye’s Revolver or Rubber Soul. It expanded the boundaries of his art by bringing a kind of elevated aesthetic consciousness to a form that was generally still seen as disposable.It also showed that he could rap. That Kanye’s self-awareness and attention to form would lead him into designing sneakers and clothes made sense, especially in an emergent celebrity branding landscape where large corporations encouraged artists to communicate directly with their audience through social media. In 2011, I followed West and Jay-Z around the country, trying to wrap my mind around the new mass aesthetic that he was creating.
What was not apparent circa 2010 was that we were standing on the edge of an American pop art apocalypse. The same technologies that helped elevate West as the in-house artist-aesthete of a new corporate branding machine would crush the 20th-century movie studios, publishing houses, and record labels that once nurtured artists like West until they became stars. They would also help drive him mad.
Since then, the dizzying decline of the American popular arts has become impossible to miss. America’s most vital film director under the age of 80, Quentin Tarantino, has moved to Israel. Television has become an art form for people with semiotics degrees from Brown. Since 2010 or so, there have been no more rock stars. Blues and jazz have been dead for nearly half a century. Innovative rappers exist, but only in local microcultures like Memphis or Baton Rouge. The machinery that once brought their music to tens or hundreds of millions of listeners is gone.
There is no 21st-century Chuck Jones or Quincy Jones. There isn’t even a 21st-century Spike Jonze. What kind of a culture is that?
It is within that blasted cultural landscape that Kanye West, who threw away his elite-certified standing as a pop genius along with a billion-dollar fashion empire to pursue the chemtrails of his manic-depressive brain, now lays claim to the title of Best American Artist.
Despite being a diseased egomaniac and a dreadful influence on his millions of social media followers, he remains every bit as talented as he proclaimed himself to be from his emergence appearance as a brash newcomer two decades ago, at exactly the moment when the rap genre appeared to be running out of steam. Ye’s creativity sparked a revival of the music that continues to this day. His latest album, Bully, is a masterpiece, lyrically and production-wise—certainly the best album he’s released in a decade. However much it pains people to hear it, and pains me to write it, given his unquenchable ambition to decorate every white T-shirt he can find with swastikas, Kanye West remains America’s reigning popular artist—which means he’s America’s reigning artist period—with his derangement and his hatreds being an inescapable part of the package. West’s lunacy doesn’t detract from this claim; it certifies it.
There is a reason that most good American stories end in madness and/or death. You’ll rarely go wrong by betting on the snap of the bough maybe half or two-thirds through the story, once everyone has already bought in to whatever dream of riches or invincibility got them onboard the bus to what turns out to be nowhere, or often somewhere worse. First there’s the crack, like a rifle shot, followed by the echo, which is both shocking and final, which allows the reader to relax into the warm feeling of inevitability that comes from knowing that it’s already too late to stop what is coming. The hoped-for future filled with glittering mountains of gold is revealed to be a crazy hallucination built on lies. Who is at fault? You are, of course. Then comes reckoning with the consequences of having planted corn rather than hay or gone long rather than short on the market or whatever other version of Original Sin appeals most.
What makes a piece of art American is not just the crash of disillusionment that follows upon promises of utopia. It’s the acknowledgement that the wild exhilaration of the ride was bound up with and indeed ultimately motivated by a particularly American form of madness, born of the realization that nature exists entirely apart from us and doesn’t much care about the stories we tell ourselves to explain what we are doing and why we are here.
The crash is the underlying mechanism in all of Robert Stone’s novels, as well as those of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather and William Gaddis, the films of Francis Ford Coppola and John Ford, and virtually any other truly American artist you can name. That’s why the title character in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man begins by speaking to us from a room filled with lightbulbs. But the man who discovered this mechanism—who laid out how it worked, in a way that a large number of subsequent American artists would feel compelled to follow—was Herman Melville, the author of at once the most singular and most generative American novel, Moby-Dick.
Before the publication of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville was a respectable midcareer author of sea-adventure stories like “Redburn” and “White-Jacket” whose mature work had failed to match the initial success of his two early, ostensibly autobiographical novels, Typee and Omoo. What made Typee and Omoo hits, in addition to their presentation by publishers as autobiography, was their colorful and energetic inversion of Romantic tropes. By depicting the “unspoiled nature” beloved by European philosophers as a dangerous place, Melville both copied and parodied recognizable elements from 19th-century America’s most popular adventure story, the English novelist Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Where Crusoe builds his hut and becomes a model of self-sufficiency, Melville’s sailor protagonists are chased by cannibals who try to eat them.
Yet continuing to rewrite Robinson Crusoe, which Melville did thematically in Typee and Omoo, and then quite literally in his third novel, Mardi, could take Melville only so far. As his career as an adventure writer stalled, Melville even tried his hand at a brooding land-based romance titled Pierre, which contained several chapters of incisive satire of the bohemian population of late 1840s lower Manhattan. “Pierre” was also a failure.
So where did the stunning, midcareer genius of Moby-Dick come from? The answer rests in Melville’s new approach to the narration of his book. Where the author’s prior narrators were generally identical with his protagonists, in Melville chose instead to speak through a secondary character, who may or may not be named Ishmael, who tells the story of life on the Pequod, and of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the Great White Whale. By establishing distance between the narrator and his story, Melville gave the story independent life: He also made visible a philosophical and emotional conundrum that had defined and bedeviled the American sense of self since the days of the Puritans.
Moby-Dick became the one truly indispensable American novel by carving a path through the psychic wilderness that the Puritans made, in response to their disappointment of not redeeming the world—which was to take their outward search for meaning in nature and internalize it. In doing so, they established the architecture of the American self, which is shared more-or-less equally by all Americans, regardless of national origin or skin tone.
The founding myths of the Puritans powerfully shaped the DNA of the culture that in turn shaped us, and there is frankly nothing that any of us can do about it. It bears repeating here that the Puritans who came to America were not the same people who later overthrew the English crown under the direction of Oliver Cromwell. Rather, they were an even more radical variant of those people, who left England for Holland, and then left Holland for North America, at the risk of their lives, leaving behind everything that they knew and held dear. Meaning that they were weirdos.
The Puritan mission to the physical wilderness of North America had little to do with the territorial ambitions of the English crown, or with the hope of profit in the slave trade or the burgeoning global marketplace, or with the spiritual salvation of whatever “native peoples” they happened to find there. The Puritans had a much more grandiose goal in mind, which was an encounter with raw nature through which they would reform Old Europe, and thereby all of mankind. Specifically, they aimed to establish a “city on a hill,” whose shining example would convince the Protestant and Catholic armies who were then fighting what became known as the Hundred Years’ War—a conflict that killed more people per capita in large areas of the continent than World War I and World War II combined—to lay down their arms and embrace the Example of Christ.
You can take a guess about how that battle with nature turned out. After the Hundred Years’ War ended without anyone in Europe paying any particular attention to the struggles of a small band of Puritans in the New England wilderness, the attention of the settlers turned inward, as they sought to locate the source of the sin that had resulted in the failure of their mission. The Salem witch trials followed. Then came King Philip’s War, in which the New England native tribes repaid the Christian kindness of the settlers by massacring them in hideous ways, with the hope of driving them all into the sea. The natives failed, but then, so had the Puritans, whose delusional effort at achieving world peace had ended instead in a tide of blood.
It was in Moby-Dick that Melville established the dynamic of this soon-to-be quintessential American battle between man (represented by Captain Ahab) and the nature he seeks to control (the whale). To them, he added a third character: Ishmael, the narrator watching it all from a distance.
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter from Jack Dorsey, most likely to preserve the value of his companies, whose stock market capitalization is derived in some large-enough part from their function as memes, which in turn is largely supported by social media. When Twitter banned former President Donald Trump from its platform in 2021, Musk had good reason to suspect that he might be next, and that the effect on his business might be catastrophic—an intuition that led him to offer to buy the company at a multiple of what anyone else was willing to pay for it. In doing so, Musk became a hero to those who rightfully opposed mounting government control over what information and opinions we are allowed to take in under the guise of “combating disinformation.”
As it turned out, though, Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which he renamed X, led to a new kind of evil, which was the monetization of stupidity, ignorance, and hatred on a global scale. Whether he meant to or not, Musk took a signaling mechanism that had been used to enforce messaging discipline within the Democratic Party’s larger permission structure machine—encompassing social and mainstream media, as well as virtually the entire social-institutional structures of the country, including large corporations and professional associations—and turned it into an ATM through which state-backed propagandists and freelance conspiracy theorists could monetize their attacks on the mental balance of the entire U.S. population. Which is why we are all crazy now.
The moment Ye started spewing antisemitic gibberish is the exact minute that smart people should have become aware that a reality far greater and more menacing than the quirks of one artist’s peculiar brain chemistry was on the immediate horizon. This is because Ye is the kind of artist who absorbs and transmits the reality around him. He’s an open channel, picking up signals from the emotional universe around himself, in order to find material for his art. He is a repository for human desire, and aspiration, and lunacy. He is the measure of our own disease. He is, or was, Melville’s whale—a representation of the nature that mortals (at least of the American variety) feel compelled to control, the physical manifestation of our ambition, against all constraints and often against reason.
Indeed, after describing the endless creases and notches carved in Moby Dick’s giant head, Melville makes a point of telling readers that the meaning of Moby Dick is entirely beyond him: “If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.”
Whatever Moby Dick represents, however, Ahab’s pursuit of the whale is pure madness—an opinion voiced by the Pequod’s first mate, Starbuck. Yet Starbuck’s objections are hardly shared by the rest of the crew. A Quaker from Nantucket, Starbuck incarnates the logic of the market, according to which Ahab’s obsession with the Great White Whale is madness. The point of a whaling voyage, like the point of selling designer sneakers and sweatshirts, or Starbucks coffee—which did not become America’s most popular beverage by accident, either—being profit. “I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance,” Starbuck replies, to Ahab’s great aria against the whale, delivered on the deck of the Pequod. “How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
Ahab scoffs at Starbuck’s invocation of the damage his obsession might do to his balance sheet. “If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch, then, let me tell thee,” he exclaims, striking his chest, “that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!”
Starbuck is not impressed. “Vengeance on a dumb brute!” he replies, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
In response, Ahab delivers an elevated pastiche of Emerson and German romanticism delivered in pseudo-Shakespearean cadence and backed by the unbounded self-assertion that would be equally at home in the mouth of any good rapper:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks,” Ahab declares, after Emerson. But Melville’s dark, twisted version of transcendentalism departs from Emerson’s sunny philosophy almost immediately. “But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask,” he continues, departing the world of appearances for the land of crazy. “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”
What makes Ahab’s speech so indelibly American is his call to action laced with the foreknowledge that nature’s game is fixed. Still, as an American, he will act anyway. If the world is but a set of masks that we impose on some larger spirit that defies our earthly grasp, Ahab’s response is to allow his subjectivity free range, and in doing so, wreak havoc, like the second generation of Puritans did, and as Americans have done ever since. “To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough,” Ahab broods, before settling back on the figure of the whale. “He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
I’d strike the sun if it insulted me! Ye could hardly put it better. (That’s why Melville is now and for all time the greatest of American writers.) “Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” his captain exults. Melville ends the scene thus: “The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered.” So much for the marketplace.
Starbuck retires below decks, avoiding Ahab for nearly the entire rest of the journey, emerging only to deliver his definitive verdict on the tale: “Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” Or as Ishmael puts it, “All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick,” Ishmael concludes. Or as he also puts it more simply, “all mortal greatness is but disease.”
And so, Ye became Ahab. Unable to let go of the idea that the whale has robbed him of something personal, he wishes to overcome and thereby supplant the whale. Like Ahab, he is driven mad by not knowing where he stands in relation to nature, a fact that Melville underlines through the fact of the captain’s missing leg, which the whale took from him.
Ye, as an American Black man, understands his missing leg as the legacy of slavery, which led to the exaggerated pursuit of prestige and material goods combined with cartoonish displays of masculinity—aspects of rap culture that West has sharply criticized and at the same time proudly exemplified since The College Dropout dropped 20 years ago. As he put it then, before he learned more subtle arts of sublimation:
What made it Kanye, though, was the follow-up couplets:
It was Kanye’s self-aware duality, his ability to turn on a dime while matching lyrics to beats, that set him apart from hugely talented rappers like Nas, Biggie, Tupac, Jay-Z, Pusha T, and maybe a dozen others, none of whom truly begin to approach West as an artist, in part because West was the only one who could write both the music and the lyrics for his Hood-inflected arias of the American Self.
And yet, like Ahab, he can’t lose the peg leg. It’s there in the distinctive off-kilter cadence of his beats, which has followed him through a half-dozen different versions of Ye. He can’t stop being mad and picking fights. He’s no Starbuck, bound to the logic of the marketplace. He is the disabled captain, heaping curses on the whale.
Being Ahab is crazy. Being jealous of a whale, which in Kanye’s personal mythology has become “the Jews,” is crazy. Starbuck promises a life of empty materialism ending in the finality of death. For Kanye, or anyone else looking to this allegory for modeling of their own American story, is there any other option?
Of course there is.
“Call me Ishmael,” the book begins. Did you? Well, then you are Herman Melville’s bitch now. But you’re not actually any closer to knowing the name of the fictional character whose existence and veracity you have been forced to swallow in the space of three words.
The usual assumption among literary scholars is that Ishmael is the bearer of the Puritan biblical name of Hagar’s son, who is exiled to the desert with his mother by Sarah, Abraham’s wife, in favor of her son Issac. In recompense, God promises that he will not deny Ishmael his birthright as a son of Abraham. Rather, he will also make of Ishmael’s descendants a great nation. Where the children of Isaac will be the Chosen People, the recipients of the law, the children of Ishmael will be numerous and mighty, and at war with every other nation. They will be the Almost Chosen People. Which is as good a description of Americans as one might offer, and an admirable piece of prophecy on Melville’s part.
There is another, equally plausible, and less bombastic, source for Melville’s naming of Ishmael, though. To say that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is the source-text for a huge part of American literature is not simply a joke; it is also a truth. And in Melville’s case, it is even more true, given that the author’s first two books, Typee and Omoo, are dark anti-romantic rewritings of Defoe’s novel, and his third book, Mardi, is an even more pointed and literal rewriting of Crusoe.
Ishmael appears as a character at the beginning of Robinson Crusoe, after the title character escapes from Moorish slavery. He is Black, of course—a fact that would seem to make Moby-Dick amenable to today’s woke theorists. Imagine a book narrated by a Black character, about the pursuit of a white whale! After setting sail in a stolen boat, Crusoe’s next move is to throw the Black boy overboard. Too bad that the critics who specialize in elevating such details aren’t generally Melvillians.
Is it fanciful to assume that Melville took Defoe’s castaway and made him his narrator-in-disguise? Perhaps. But Melville left at least one clue—aside from his narrator’s own name—that he did exactly that when he mentions “the Hull Literary & Philosophical Society’s” whale skeleton as part of a “Leviathanic Museum” in the cetology chapters of Moby-Dick. Hull being the port in the novel from which Robinson Crusoe originally sets sail.
“Call me Ishmael” is an invitation that Kanye West should take up, because it solves the problem of whether to become Ahab or the whale while situating him correctly in the lineage of the great American artists who came before him, American culture being distinguished in fact by its irreducible hybridity. Was the brass trumpet invented in Africa? No, it was not. The same goes for Ralph Ellison’s novels. There’s nothing African about them. If you want African writing, go read Wole Soyinka. The form is still entirely European, though.
To deny the existence of a specifically African American culture is not to reduce the importance of Black artists to American culture. It is to say that their influence was a foundational part of the mix. American culture is made by and for Americans, because it reflects a greater reality that we all share in common, and that we apprehend through a set of lenses that were shaped over centuries by the encounter of our ancestors, literal or figurative, with something larger than ourselves.
As an artist, Kanye West is every bit as much the descendent of America’s lunatic settlers and their vaunting ambitions, set against an indifferent nature under the wandering eye of God, as Melville was. Which may finally explain why both artists followed a similar arc, which led them to the Jews. For Melville, it was his turn toward Christianity, or rather to the American idea of the divine, which culminated in the late-in-life journey to Palestine that provided the basis for his verse epic Clarel—a book that is almost entirely unread today, but in which Melville’s American protagonist is a fellow traveler along with the 19th-century Jews who even then were struggling to establish their place against hostile natives and an indifferent world.
Similarly, the struggle inherent in West’s fitful turn toward Christianity, which he appears to sincerely love but is unable to fully embrace, is also reflected in his hatred for the Jews, who in the end represent two irreconcilable sides of his own fantasy of himself. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the past decade of West’s own work, from Donda, to his Sunday Service, to his latest album, in which he remains a man reaching for grace, while being unable to distinguish what is inside himself from the indifferent chaos of nature. As a result, he is condemned to the life of mad Ahab, chasing the whale.
My advice to him is simple: Be Y-Ishmael instead.
