"JEEN-YUHS: A KANYE TRILOGY"

Few celebrities are as hard to pin down as Kanye West. The 44-year-old rapper, fashion designer, former presidential candidate and tabloid staple, who legally changed his name to the mononym Ye last year, appears to be mess incarnate, at least by the standards of decorum and self-commoditization we traditionally expect from stars.

There’s the Kanye of “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” and the Kanye of the slavery-was-a-choice embarrassment. There’s high-fashion Kanye and Kardashian Kanye, man-of-the-people Kanye and prophet-of-his-own-greatness Kanye. Just in the past few years, there’s been the Kanye who donated $2 million to the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, as well as the Kanye who declared “love” for President Donald Trump, then disavowed politics shortly thereafter.Online, there’s also been rampant speculation about which of his outrageous statements can be attributed to his eccentricities, and which to his bipolar disorder. West, who’s been open about his diagnosis but bristles when his pronouncements are dismissed as products of his condition, would surely chalk up his contradictions to his free thinking. But many of us just aren’t sure who or what we’re looking at when he makes the headlines these days, or how to talk about it.

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