Kanye West estranged fans late last year with an on-stage digression that he’d have voted for Donald Trump, which he followed with a chummy appearance with the President-elect at Trump Tower.
Looks like those entreaties were not enough to puncture the MAGA movement’s nostalgic whiteness. Kanye wasn’t asked to perform for any portion of Trump’s inauguration, according to inauguration committee chairman Tom Barrack, because “it’s not the venue” for Kanye. “He’s been great. He considers himself a friend of the president-elect,” Barrack said of the rap icon.
“The venue we have for entertainment is filled out,” Barrack said. “It’s going to be typically and traditionally American.”
It’s a revealing comment. Few art forms are as uniquely American as hip-hop, invented at the wane of disco by kids who grew up in Trump’s hometown.
But “traditionally American” means something different in Trump’s orbit. Trump’s movement wants to rewind the clock to a time when white people’s relative prosperity was directly supported by the violent repression of black people’s economic and human rights.
It’s the yesteryear, Leave It To Beaver version of the country. But in idealizing that era, Trump’s zealots forget much.
It was also a time when a woman couldn’t wear pants without scandalizing her neighborhood and a black man couldn’t ask her to dance without risking his life.
And that’s where Kanye becomes a uniquely impossible sell for Trump’s events staff.
West isn’t merely an avatar of a liberated, self-assured black public presence that is incompatible with MAGA-hat-wearing fantasies about dragging America into white cultural and political hegemony.
He’s not just the man who introduced himself to non-rap-fan white America by blasting both Katrina-era George W. Bush and country-singer-blonde-curls-era Taylor Swift on live TV. And he’s not only the son of civil rights protesters and the Grammy-winning creator of a raft of songs that simultaneously critique and celebrate modern American capitalism.
He is also the guy whose most direct political material of the past few years has explicitly prodded at the very same white sexual fears that fuel Trump fans’ habit of labeling all their critics “cucks.”
Kanye weaponized the idea of cuckolding rich white men on “New Slaves,” the clanking war chant West chose as the lead single from 2013’s Yeezus. His apparent sexual fixation with Swift — a cultural icon to alt-right racists who back Trump — carried over into last year’s The Life Of Pablo, in both the lyrics and visuals for “Famous.”
There is, therefore, a charitable reading of Barrack’s comments in which he isn’t ignorant of the quintessentially American nature of rap music but rather serving the interests of his audience like any good club booker would. Putting Kanye in front of a Trump crowd would make roughly as much sense as screening Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing at a Klan rally.
But while it makes perfect sense that Trump’s handlers would think the sort of folks excited about his ascent to office wouldn’t enjoy or understand a Kanye set, it’s still a shame they’ll all be deprived of his visionary showmanship.
At the very least, you’d think The Donald himself would appreciate a chance to clap off-beat to “Power” on the weekend of his greatest triumph.