#31

#31. Kanye West - Black Skinhead (#20, 2013)

4th of 2013

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This is another one of those songs where I find myself undecided on whether or not it could be considered a pop hit. It's hard to say how much of it comes down to Kanye West's unusual release strategies in the 2010s and how much it was just not something everyone was ready for. You would think that after releasing the most acclaimed album of your career and getting a worthwhile victory lap alongside JAY-Z via "Watch The Throne", you'd be set for the next album so long as it's not awful. In truth, "Yeezus" managed to be everything at once. Famously when Pitchfork did their 2013 Readers Poll, the album was simultaneously voted the best album of the year, most underrated album of the year, and most overrated album of the year. I think there's something in that, but it might also just be a very good example of the online Goomba fallacy. Some people love it, others hate it, and when you're not exactly setting yourself up for massive success in the moment, that's probably the dividing line that stops you from dominating the charts.

Thus, "Black Skinhead" was not really a major hit song in 2013. It couldn't crack the top 50 in Australia or the US, while it largely skirted in and around the top 40 in the UK for a couple of months. That felt a little strange to me only because it meant the song had to be acknowledged on the charts, and BBC Radio 1 had to play it during its chart broadcast. It felt more than a little out of place, mostly because every other country couldn't afford it the same space. Then again, Kanye West often performed surprisingly well on the UK charts. Right from the start, it's the only country where "Through The Wire" reached the top 10. It must be something he leans into, because one of his most famous songs is "American Boy", and there's always that BRIT Awards performance I keep bringing up.

That being said, Kanye's reception in the UK is one I always think about. There's a think piece on Vice by Grace Medford that I've had saved to favourites since 2015. I keep it there as a reminder. It's calling back to 2015 when Kanye was announced as a headliner for Glastonbury that year. You can probably predict how people felt about that. Or maybe you can't, because some people took it the extra step and tried to get a petition going to remove him from the line up. The petition that suggested he be replaced by a rock band like Oasis got over 130,000 signatures, though it doesn't really elaborate on what the issue is with Kanye, as if it's something that should be self-evident to all music fans. The article explores all the common criticism of Kanye like his bad temper, ego, disrespect to other artists, and reliance on others to help make his music, and then compares him to Liam Gallagher for which these all apply. Then she stops beating around the bush and makes it clear that this is systemic racism. The idea that certain attributes are acceptable for one person and not the other, complete with testimonials that further strengthen the idea that there's an othering fear of a figure like Kanye West. It just feels like it's something that's been a hot button issue in the UK for a long time. There's a quote from Morrissey from 1986 that's been doing the rounds recently where he disavows reggae, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, calls them 'vile in the extreme'. In case you want to give him any benefit of the doubt, that's after saying that he detests 'modern black music', lest you be mistaken into thinking his bad opinions have only been recent. More recently, tweets containing the n-word reached an all-time high after the UEFA Euro 2020 final, when England lost 3-2 to Italy on penalties after Rashford, Saka & Sancho all missed their shots.

Firstly, I should acknowledge that all of this Kanye West stuff happened in 2015, before he ever donned a MAGA hat, and before he started praising the name of Hitler. I will readily concede that there are very valid reasons to call him to question at this point in time, regardless of what state of 'Okay, he's fine now' he might be in. I don't think you're allowed to retroactively claim a victory in this case, because it certainly wasn't the ammunition being used against him in 2015 (I am aware of the irony as I write about a song called "Black Skinhead", and also sometimes called "BLKKK SKKKN HEAD"). It's much like Lizzo, where all the people who hated her for frivolous reasons suddenly got a valid one.

This kind of racial inequity really radicalised me in my 20s. I was probably part of the problem myself without realising it, but afterwards I just started seeing patterns emerge. Instances of online music rating where artists of all races could be celebrated, but where it was accepted that white artists just had more widespread appeal and would always come out on top. Someone who doesn't like Carly Rae Jepsen might just give her a 4/10 and move on, but the person who doesn't like Beyoncé is locked and loaded with that 0/10. Coupled with all the more serious issues going on in the world, and it just felt like it was something that we all should have been doing better with. I found myself torn between the urgent need to label people as racists or just the more mediated approach of questioning the value of those kinds of collations if they produce the predictably problematic result every time.

Now, there's something to be said about mellowing out with age that I'm beginning to appreciate. It's not that I don't still feel very strongly about these kinds of issues, but it's that rush to over-dramatize everything that I've learnt to rein in. When you're young, you're hot-headed, and feel like everything can be solved by just calling it out, getting the internet win by having the most righteous take, and think that either everyone will concede to you, or that you can rest easy knowing you have the moral high ground and can re-deploy it at any given chance. When you're older, you just realise that it doesn't really do anything and all you're doing is being incredibly annoying. When I see younger people than me still doing things like this, I try to just think 'bless their heart'. It's not that I've become complacent to the idea that things can ever get better, but I recognise that there are better ways to communicate an idea and win someone over, rather than just tell them they're a racist or an idiot who needs to sort themselves out. You're just going to make them go against you and anything you stand for.

That's all to say that I don't really think not liking Kanye West or his music makes someone racist. It would be incredibly oblivious of me to pretend that he hasn't thrived on a brand of actively abrasive and confronting music for a long time. It's something he's been doing for a long time, and it's also why so many people love his music. In the same way people might like an artist like Olivia Dean for her 'back to basics' brand of pop music, there's another subsection of fans who want something much more evocative in response to that. There's absolutely room for both extremes, and the sooner we recognise this and stop trying to claim moral superiority one way or another for it (well, again, maybe for Kanye West in the present day this is valid), we'll all be better off for it.

To go back to my original quandary about whether or not "Black Skinhead" really works as a pop hit, I'd have probably been inclined to say no. It has some points in its favour, where this Hottest 100 ranking is one of Kanye's highest ever, denoting some level of wide appeal, I just couldn't really imagine it slotting alongside what else was going on in the charts at the time. This is somewhat ironic because the song has producer credits from Daft Punk, who very much were in the charts at the time.

Anyway, a funny thing happened 5 years later that changed my mind. 5 Seconds of Summer released the song "Youngblood" and it became the biggest hit of their career. In Australia, it was the biggest hit that year. Maybe this sounds like a stretch, but I've always felt like that song was at least partially indebted to "Black Skinhead". The song's big moment comes in the chorus when Ashton's drums come crashing in and make the song really start to pop out. Combined with the guitars that come through, you get a very similar rhythm that makes me feel at the very least, the two songs have distinguishing aspects that draw on the same appeal. Now, these are clearly very different artists in different genres, but I have heard recordings from 5 Seconds of Summer that lean into a harder rock sound (the bass & drums often get watered down on the recordings), so I'm sure there's a viable middle point between the two. Those drums are absolutely the best part of "Black Skinhead", though I should also give credit to Kanye's unintelligible yelps that come along with it. It's something primal that I can't help but respond to. Enough to ignore the fact that Kanye forgot who was actually fighting in the Battle of Thermopylae in the movie "300".