Kanye West did just enough 2C-B

For him, at least

In 1956 Kenneth Boulding wrote a book titled The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. The cover is either blue or red, and there’s a black Matisse cut-out looking shape in the center. The idea driving all of its escapades into life and society is that on an abstract level, there is a single object, an “image”, that determines the behavior of any complex system (in particular human beings).

To explain better, you have some ideas about who you are, what you believe in, the choices you should make; you have other ideas, more concrete ones, about where you are, the objects around you, the time of day it is; you have expectations about the consequences of your actions, as well as expectations about the actions of others. Together they form the image of the universe by which you make decisions—you know if you take a certain series of turns you’ll arrive home, you’re allowed to do this but not that, et cetera.

Encompassing all of these beliefs, your Kenneth Boulding image takes in information—sights, sounds, smells—and produces output. Some information causes you to act a certain way. You walk outside with a friend, it’s cold, and you tell them so. Other information, really the vast majority of information, passes through your image without creating any effect. You see a car on the street for the thousandth time, it means nothing to you, you don’t think or act any certain way because of it. Particularly important information will not just pass through your image, but change it as well: when you hear a story that changes your opinion of someone, you’re updating your image to include that new data point.

While it is very abstract, the main value of thinking about behavior this way is that it’s generalizable. You and I can have different brains, but if we react the same way to a given piece of stimulus, we share part of the same image. Organizations and societies don’t have brains—but their component members are like sensory organs taking in information and causing them to act, so they do have images.

A profound idea Boulding had is that we, as humans, by and large share a common image. Across cultures, we react the same way to many stimuli—we understand “what it means” to feel hungry or to see another person smile at us. Within a culture, we share even more of the same image. We implicitly know this and use it all the time—we can hold conversations with people we’ve never met before because we know, at least generally, how they’ll respond to different questions or comments. Boulding writes this:

“It is literally because we are of one ‘blood’, that is, genetic constitution, that we are able to communicate with each other. We cannot talk to the ants or bees; we cannot hold conversations with them, though in a very real sense they communicate to us.”

My main thesis here is that Kanye is like the ants and bees: regardless of how normal or abnormal his image was two decades ago, it’s now very different from ours. He communicates with us, but there’s a disconnect between what is meant and what is understood. This is why he’s become so bewildering, and why his new directions in life seem detached from “who he really is”. Is there any benefit to understanding those new directions, maybe not, but after reading this you’ll hopefully want to laugh at him less.

Early last week, Joe Rogan had Ye on his podcast to talk about his presidential campaign and criticisms of the music industry, among other things. One of the official Youtube clips is titled Kanye Gives Thoughtful Answer to Questions Over Foreign Policy, Military Action, the current top comment of which is this:

The “thoughtful answer” part of the video title basically refers to the same thing as the comment, which is that at the clip’s beginning, 2 hours and 45 minutes into the interview, Kanye shuts down: he gets asked a question about being commander-in-chief and is stone-faced for almost 30 seconds, staring at the desk. The silence is immediately uncomfortable, and Joe Rogan elaborates about the threat of China and Russia to fill the void. “What if China takes over Taiwan? What if they invade Taiwan?” In an odd, disaffective way, Kanye starts off with “Yes, I would”—then stares at the desk more. His eventual answer is basically reasonable and what you would expect from his campaign platform, but it’s broken by pauses that are long and very still (another comment on the video: “I feel like when Kanye pauses, he pauses my screen Aswell.”). The climax is when during a particularly long freeze—Joe Rogan looking at him alertly—he closes his eyes, waits a moment, then comes up telling Joe that he just said a prayer.

“What motivated you to say a prayer right there? The seriousness, the significance of this subject?” Joe asks.

“Yeah, absolutely—we can’t, jump from jokes about this to joking about peoples’ lives. We have to—completely be still in this moment… this is a whole different, you know, setting, or mood, than what this whole interview has been about.”

I think the value of this exchange is seeing Kanye at his least functioning point, at the apogee of his orbit. He comes off as honest and actually humble, but pausing for more than two seconds in a taped interview makes it seem like you’re really plumbing your brain’s depths—if you take longer than four seconds, you’re probably lying. We know these things whether we’ve been interviewed before or not, we know without being told that the expectation is to answer the interviewer’s questions as fluently as possible and move on, we’re even willing to give a lackluster answer in order to avoid scrutiny. Kanye has lost that instinct—in his image, the very normal stimulus of not knowing what to say causes an entirely different response than it would in yours or mine.

It’s reasonable to be a little skeptical at this point. All it takes to have a different image is to act up a few times, let a few pauses go on too long or make a few cryptic tweets? But I think the key difference is that when Kanye acts up, he’s not trying to—he’s not deliberately going against his internal grain. He realizes what he’s saying is unusual, he even acknowledges it when he’s especially far gone (“I know this is going to get into a riff, where people are like, ‘OK, Ye, we’re losing what you’re saying…’”), but at the same time he can’t help sharing the ideas he’s excited about. Compare that to the stereotype of a spoiled, Gwenyth Paltrow-esque celebrity making controversial comments because it gives them a little kick, because they like to see the plebeians scratch their heads.

While he’s much more fluid and conversational before the commander-in-chief question, the rest of the interview does make it obvious how different Kanye’s internal scorn function is, the part of his image that’s supposed to stop those exciting ideas. Part of being a patriotic citizen is being a realist, not asking stupid questions, not pursuing naive, no-good, wackadoodle trains of thought. When Joe Rogan asks how he organizes his daily schedule, Kanye answers:

“I, uh, drive my children to school—drive my kids to school. And—I stay at school, with them all day, and, you know, I’m in the kitchen, like, working with… the top chefs, on the planet, to create these healthy menus, and I’m working with the farmers…”

What the fuck? Where did these top chefs and farmers come from, and why is Kanye so invested in their meals that he spends his entire day with them? Earlier in the interview he has a Will.i.am moment and blurts out “I’m building a monas—I’m building a, a monastery that will then be the future of monasteries, it’s like, full sustainable energy…” Our image, the standard image, no longer has an input that makes us think about school lunches or monasteries. Either it tried to retrain itself—when we used to get input that made us think about school lunches and monasteries, it crushed those thoughts—or it was never fertile enough to think about them in the first place, i.e. no input ever could have lead to that output. I think probably it’s the first; when we bring up something that isn’t “cool”, that doesn’t exude professionalism, worldliness, sophistication, a calm demeanor and common sense, it gets discouraged in various ways and eventually doesn’t crop up again. We gain a sense of pessimism (we live in a society et cetera) that makes us lose interest when a conversation gets too “silly”—which in turn enforces that pessimism on others.

While Kanye can be extremely critical at times, especially against the music industry, I think he is fundamentally optimistic. He isn’t embarrassed to treat pictures like this as high design:

But 24 years ago Kanye West was no one, just a 19-year old from Chicago making beats and not thinking about whether Play or Grow should be closer to the grapes. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been successful—no one would have wanted to collaborate with him. Now, he’s doing and saying things that no one else with his fame is doing or saying, regardless of whether those things are good or bad. What led from then to now?

My theory is two parts: first, Kanye’s image was never the same as ours. He never had the same conception of music as the people around him, so never released the same albums they were releasing. Lines like “in a French-ass restaurant / hurry up with my damn croissants” are unmistakably Kanye. They are not imitations. He was able to continually succeed in his career because his view of the levers of fame was at it its core different—he saw different arrows of cause and effect, given a certain action he predicted different results. Those arrows and predictions weren’t even necessarily more accurate than those of his peers, but they led him to act in a very singular way.

Why wasn’t Ye designing monasteries fifteen years ago, then? Kenneth Boulding had a good answer to that: two people with identical images won’t have identical actions when they’re in different parts of the field. Fifteen years ago Kanye was trying to wear fly clothes, sell a lot of albums and make it on the cover of Time magazine. In 2020, he has worn all the fly clothes and sold all of the albums he could have ever dreamed of. He has the knowledge and team to crank out as many high-production tracks as he wants. He has explored old-school soulful rap and sparse electronic rap and heavy-hitting collab rap, he has made the holy-grail collector’s sneakers, he has done the music videos and tours. His wife is one of the most recognizable people on Earth, and it’s already been 5 years since he got the Time cover. These things have changed Kanye’s image, but they’ve also changed where he physically is. The past is its own form of stimulus—Kanye could put on the same sweater he wore on the original “Real Friends” art, pose in front of the same keyboard, and still have no desire to make another Old Kanye album.

The second part of my theory is pure speculation, but there are hints of it in plenty of other places online. I propose that sometime around 2016, Kanye did enough 2C-B to significantly alter his brain—maybe not exactly 2C-B, or just 2C-B, but in essence I think there was some combination of drugs and other factors that created a permanent change in his mental weather. November of 2016 was when he was admitted to a psych ward after experiencing a breakdown on tour. Prior to the breakdown he had been giving rants on stage, many of which travelled around social media and were mocked wherever they ended up. Afterwards, he was formally diagnosed with bipolar disorder, although since then he’s questioned if that's the right diagnosis.

As far as evidence goes, there’s obviously the “Tweakin tweakin off that 2C-B” and “I done died and lived again on DMT” lines from Yikes, but there was also a significant shift in Kanye’s overall demeanor. Watching old interviews, Kanye was essentially normal around 2014. He was religious, but in a way amenable to cultural elites—his religion was never more important than his career. He had intense moments, but at the “apogee of his orbit” he only came across as immature or egotistical. He didn’t freeze up or stumble over his words; talking to people didn’t seem more difficult for him than it does for the average shy person. He clearly had the social skills necessary to go from being a young artist to collaborating with the best people in his field.

Compare that to an interview from 2016—ironically, released a day before his breakdown—where Kanye is much closer to the Joe Rogan version of himself (link). His facade has broken down, he pauses frequently, he seems much more emotionally invested than in previous interviews. It’s completely unscientific to judge his mental state off of how he acted in a single, formal encounter on a single day, but it just feels like some switch has been flipped. Before, Kanye told you in a linear way what his vision of an ethical and artist-led fashion industry looked like. Post-2016, and to this day, he might still be talking about the fashion industry—but you get the impression his ideas are four-dimensional concepts that he has to reduce down for you, that he struggles with putting into words.

That’s not to say that Kanye has gotten in touch with any divine wisdom, or figured out any particular secrets, or having objectively better ideas; it’s just that what’s going on in his head is even more singular than it was before. His image used to be unique—inputs led to different outputs than in your average person—but his range of possible outputs, at least on a day-to-day basis, was basically the same. Now, his range of outputs is partially the same, partially ranging into places not many people go. The first is like a telephone switchboard where someone’s mixed up the cables. The second is like a telephone switchboard where someone’s about to mix up the cables, then discovers there’s a second switchboard under the desk—the calls that used to go to Kansas are suddenly going to Uganda, the energies that used to go to rap are now going to holiness instead.

This is all very loose, and Kenneth Boulding’s idea of an image might be too abstract to apply to such a concrete scenario. But in so much coverage of Kanye’s exploits, in so many conversations about whatever sentiment his latest tweet was, there seems to be gross misunderstanding. People still treat Kanye as that conceited Gwenyth Paltrow archetype who chooses to be obnoxious, who chooses to be controversial at the expense of our sanity. I don’t pretend Kanye isn’t spoiled or doesn’t have an enormously high opinion of himself, but I also believe he that has always been truthful—that he is still motivated by honest emotion, by goodwill towards men, by the same creative forces that made Blood on the Leaves, Through the Wire, Stronger, Hey Mama, Runaway, the sickest tracks he has ever released. When he tweets “We will cure hunger”, I don’t think he’s trying to proselytize; I think he believes in the significance of those words on a deep level.

There is a brief part of Boulding’s book where he talks about craziness, how the basic definition of insanity is having an image that’s unusual compared to the predominant image in a society, but I probably don’t need to add anything else to that. I do want to add that being an individual, having abilities and thoughts that no one else has, doesn’t free someone from being responsible for their actions, and there are probably no shortage of ways Kanye could be a better father, husband, artist and influencer. He of course shouldn’t be immune to criticism because he’s unique.

But we could all stand to improve, and having compassion for our fellow man—maybe making a better effort at appreciating and understanding, especially after all the 2C-B—would be a decent place to start. A few minutes into his podcast, Joe Rogan asks Kanye whether or not he’s different from the average person.

“Yeah,” Kanye starts, “I think I’m different, from…”, then reconsiders. “I mean we’re all different, so I’m definitely different from everybody—we’re all different from each other.” But there is a sly grin on his face, a hint of the indomitable spirit, as he finishes the thought that originally came to mind. “I mean I do, bump into people that seem to be like—the same character… It’s like people play the same roles, it’s like, man, I just met you before! You’re just like the head of this company over here…”