REVIEW: KANYE WEST, "NIGGA HEIL HITLER"

by Colin Liddell

It's been some time since a song has generated as much controversy as KANYE WEST's latest banned-on-every-platform-but-still-all-over-the-internet release "Nigga Heil Hitler."

Asking Grok for the full lyrics, I was informed 'no dice, because it's a song "that promotes hate speech, antisemitism, and glorifies Nazism, which violates my policies."

And this is from Grok, the brainchild of this guy:

Twitter Heil Hitler

What a time to be alive, as they say!

The music shows Kanye's skill as a hip hop artist. He builds up a brooding downbeat texture with electronic strings over which his high autotuned baritone raps in counterpoint, followed by a chanted chorus that is then reinforced by a lot of scary-looking black men dressed in wolfskins. 

Listening to the lyrics, they don't really seem to be about Naziism, although there is a voice sample of Hitler later. This could be Adolf talking about the price of eggs for all anyone cares. Here, the sample is mainly used texturally in a typical hip-hop sense to maintain musical tension.

But back to the lyrics... I would say that what Ye is really singing about here is how his autism rubs up against the rather hypocritical and hysterical world. 

He complains about how he is banned on Twitter, is not able to see his kids, and is sexually cucked, leading to a growing sense of alienation that pushes him over the edge. 

Going by the video that accompanies the song and is very much part of this cultural artefact, he is tying all this into much bigger themes like the brutalisation of Blacks through historical slavery and oppression, and then amplifying that through the early-20th-century German incarnation of turbo-charged "victimization" represented by Adolf Hitler. This may not all be historically accurate, but since when has that been a stipulation in music or how people feel? 

In this song Hitler is merely code for "pariah" or "outcast."

Even worse, he supports tariffs! 

Another part of the song's chemistry is to draw power from the taboo. This is something hip-hop has always done, most notably with its constant referral to the N-word. What Kanye has discovered is that "HH" is an even bigger N-word than the N-word, especially in modern American society with its clusterfuck of free speech, individualism, and multiculturalism. 

The real issue is the edginess of hip-hop and rap. These have exhausted the shock value of their conventional tropes of crime, racism, sexism, etc., to the point where they have become banal, platitudinous, and even cosy.

What Kanye has done here -- regardless of his own personal motivations (some of which have focused on the Jewish ethnicity of people he believes have wronged him) --  is to unlock a whole new "power level" of the edgy and the taboo, something that will not be lost on a whole generation of up-and-coming artistes in these genres. Good luck with the ADL and SPLC keeping a lid on that one!

All I wonder now is whether we'll see Kanye discovering why JOY DIVISION changed their name to NEW ORDER, what Mick Jones's pre-CLASH band was called, and why KISS chose such an unusual font for the last two letters of their name.

Glorifying Naziism, apparently

Also published at The Revenge of Riff Raff