What is to be done with Kanye West? It’s hard now, on the release of his new album Bully, even to narrate his life story in the 2020s with all its twists and turns: the naked wife, the “Jewish doctor”, the jihad waged against Pete Davidson, the failed campaign for the presidency. It’s hard to know whether his many outbursts or his many apologies are sincere. The hardest thing, though, is to look away.

“Offensive”, “outrageous”, or, as George W. Bush once said, “disgusting”: none of these words ever really hit the mark. The only one that comes close is “pathetic”, a sense sharpened always by West’s own intense self-seriousness. Here is a man who longed for nothing more than recognition for his “genius”; got it, and much else besides; and proceeded to sabotage himself relentlessly.

Early reviews for Bully have been largely positive, and West has just announced his first UK concerts in a decade. Other musicians have rushed to collaborate with him, and he appears to be undergoing a rehabilitation of sorts within an industry which had previously shunned him.

It’s thus easy to forget that West’s rock bottom came just last year, with the leaked but officially unreleased album Cuck. Amid the uproar over his infamous song “Heil Hitler”, which got him banned from several countries and canceled several sponsorship deals, the human side of the album understandably received less attention. It hardly excuses or trivializes West’s explicit flirtations with Nazism to say that Cuck was the work of a man in turmoil. There is his stark anguish over being separated from his children. There is, as well, the resurfacing of a long-suppressed trauma concerning an incestuous homosexual relationship he had with his cousin — now a convicted murderer — when they were children, and the haunting impact which it might have had on their subsequent trajectories.

Now, for the umpteenth time in his career, West is clawing his way out of self-destruction and into his redemption arc. Since he says he is “done with antisemitism”, “Heil Hitler” has been rechristened “Hallelujah”. The public apology for his antisemitism — inscribed onto a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year — seems more considered than his last one. “When I wake up”, he declared in 2022, “I’m going death con 3 [sic] On JEWISH PEOPLE” (even here, there is something amusing about his overpolite use of “Jewish people” over “Jews”). Some time later, he apologized: “No one should take anger against one or two individuals and transform that into hatred towards millions of people.” It was a cheering sentiment, but one somewhat undermined by the fact that it was apparently provoked by watching Jonah Hill’s performance in 21 Jump Street.

So, opening the Wall Street Journal to Kanye’s apology for remarks and actions which occurred subsequently to his Jonah Hill-induced epiphany, it was only natural to reach for that other famous Bushism, “Fool me once…”. But, reading it, one cannot help but find it moving. That feeling of déjà vu is part of what it means to witness a man struggling with bipolar disorder, which, clearly, as West says in his letter, is what’s been going on all along.

We all are privy to his highs and his lows, to a cycle which he cannot break out of: we already have a vivid sense of what his manic episodes look like. American elites and celebrities like to talk incessantly about mental health, but, as their distancing from West shows — and as last month’s Tourette’s affair at the Baftas demonstrated, too — they are even more prone than the rest of us to recoiling from the ugliness of genuine mental illness when it rears its head.

Bully may well earn West a degree of forgiveness from his peers and from the public. It would not be the first of his rehabilitations, and it may not be the last. But even if he does fool us twice, he would be as much a victim.

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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