The curse of Kanye West There’s no separating the artist from his illness

Where does the part of you that is “you” subsist? Your personality, your character, your soul if you want to call it that. Most of us would probably say intuitively that it’s somewhere in the brain. If we were feeling science-y, we might say something about the prefrontal cortex — a region of the brain believed to have responsibility for executive functions like planning, behavioural regulation and decision making. Take away this lump of grey matter, and you take away the person too.

That’s the understanding of the mind that Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) referred to in his (latest) apology for what he described as “a four-month-long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behaviour that destroyed my life”. (The apology was issued in the form of a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal.) During this period, Ye identified himself wholly and horrifyingly with antisemitism. He posted images of the swastika on social media; he even bought an advertisement during the Super Bowl directing people to a website that sold swastika T-shirts. He released a song called “Heil Hitler” which sampled a speech by the Führer.

But Ye’s history of antisemitism, and other chaotic and disturbing behaviour, goes back much longer than those four months, and so do his efforts to explain it. In 2016, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he now believes his issues started long before that, as he wrote in the apology statement: “Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage — the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.”

The reaction to this was not uniformly welcoming. Some observers have suggested that Ye’s apology is simply an effort to launder his reputation ahead of his upcoming album releases, and regain some of the commercial opportunities he lost during his years of promulgating hate against Jews. Others have said, reasonably enough, that the damage Ye has done is too extreme for forgiveness to be an option. If you’re disinclined to be understanding, Ye pinning his actions on an injury looks a bit like an attempt to evade responsibility.

Nonetheless, what he’s saying has medical warrant. One study found that, in the year after suffering a traumatic brain injury (TBI), 31% of patients developed a psychiatric disorder, and 22% developed a psychiatric disorder they had never experienced before. Neuropathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu told Vanity Fair: “There is no doubt in my mind that the TBI he suffered was a significant and substantial contributory factor to his progressive behavioural and cognitive impairment regarding his impulsivity and lack of restraint on the public domain.” He urged compassion for those with TBI: “They need our empathy and sympathy and not our judgement and dismissal.”

Standing behind all this is the figure of a man who had the misfortune to become the classic case study of brain injury and personality transformation: Phineas Gage, the American foreman who survived having his head impaled by a metal pole, but was left with scars far beyond the physical.

That Gage lived at all is miraculous. In 1848, while he was working on the railway in Vermont, an explosion forced a tamping iron through Gage’s left cheek and out of the top of his skull, destroying a portion of his brain. The doctor who treated him, John M. Harlow, reported being able to pass “the index finger of the right hand into the opening its entire length”. Harlow kept the risk of infection at bay and, remarkably, Gage recovered his physical health, though he lost the sight in his left eye.

His personality, however, did not come through the experience intact, and this became the most significant part of Gage’s story. “Previous to his injury,” wrote Harlow, “though untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart business man, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage’.”

This “new” Gage was “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man.”

This may sound familiar to followers of Ye’s career. Since his arrival as an artist in the early 2000s, Ye’s astonishing, generation-defining musical talent has been repeatedly waylaid by bizarre acts of self-destruction, which have become increasingly dark, cruel and inexplicable  over time. It was surprising (but politically semi-coherent) when he went off-script during a telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to declare: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” It was outrageous but funny when he crashed Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to say: “I’mma let you finish… but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” This was wild behaviour, but wild within the remits of celebrity misbehaviour, and it was fun to watch.

But it felt ugly when he escalated the Swift feud in 2016 with the song “Famous”, in which he rapped “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex./ Why? I made that bitch famous.” Adding to the humiliation, the video features a naked body double of Swift. It was, effectively, revenge porn too. There was something vicious, too, about the way he made himself a svengali to his reality star wife Kim Kardashian, posing her in ever fewer clothes. “He’s pimping her,” said a friend of mine at the time. He would do the same thing later, and more disturbingly, to his second wife, Bianca Censori.

When he endorsed Donald Trump in 2018, it was disorienting: how do you go from attacking George Bush Jr over racism, to endorsing the white supremacists’ top pick for president? At Paris fashion week in 2022, he wore a “white lives matter” shirt, alongside his friend (and fellow black Right-winger) Candace Owens. All that, maybe, could be wrestled into a narrative of Ye rejecting identity politics and embracing a role as a provocateur — both things that are not completely outlandish within hip-hop. But when he tweeted in 2022 that he was “going death con 3” on Jewish people, that line of understanding expired.

Something in Ye had fractured, a fracture of personality complete enough that he felt compelled to change his name in 2018. I have spoken to associates of his who feel that the downward spiral began when Ye married Kim Kardashian in 2014 and was absorbed into the circus of her family, exposing him to a kind of celebrity power-gaming that he could neither control nor understand: he was made into a character in someone else’s reality show rather than the protagonist of his own life. I’ve always suspected that the death of his mother in 2007 was his greatest catastrophe. Donda West had been an absolute believer in her son’s greatness: she worked for him, and she protected him from some of the more predatory aspects of fame. When she died aged 58 as a result of complications from plastic surgery, he lost the one person who was able to tell him “no”.

Both those versions of the Ye story protect a “real” Kanye West who existed and made music for a time before a “bad” version of him took over. The new narrative of the traumatic brain injury takes that away: before the crash, there was no Kanye West in the public eye. He was still toiling away for his breakthrough, believing utterly in his own abilities, but unable to get record labels to see him as more than a producer. His debut solo single — the 2004 song that made him a star — was “Through the Wire”, which tells the story of his injury and recovery.

The wire in the title is the one that held his jaw together. He made the song so close to the accident, he’s literally rapping through the wire on the recording, causing him to lisp in an odd, vulnerable way that represented something characteristic about Ye’s art: a shocking capacity for sincerity, a vulnerability within the braggadocio that made him unique. When South Park mocked him in 2009 with the “Gay Fish” song, it nailed that part of his personality completely: the gag in the song is that Ye takes a stupid joke about “fish sticks” so seriously, he reshapes his whole personality around it.

So there is no separating the artist from the illness with Ye. If you love him as a fan, then the only way you’ve ever known him is in his damaged form. Maybe we even owe the art to the damage. Looking at Ye’s career, you could even make the argument that his pathologies made him. Without his impulsiveness, his stubbornness, his imperviousness to “normal” behaviour, would it have been possible to achieve all that he achieved? Then again, if he wasn’t an acknowledged genius, would any of these traits have been indulged up to the point of Nazism?

The story of Gage ends badly. In multiple popular accounts, he’s described as growing ever more dissipated, even wicked. Biographies claim he was unable to hold down a job, and was reduced to the undignified life of the freak-show exhibit, always accompanied by the pole that maimed him. But that isn’t quite the picture the archive paints. Much is post-hoc elaboration. Yes, in the immediate aftermath of the accident, Gage is documented as showing many of the behaviours we would now label as “disinhibition”. But it’s also known that in later life, he worked for several years as a stagecoach driver — demanding work that could hardly be done by the wild semi-human he’s often described as. Gage’s accident changed him, obviously, but it did not place him forever beyond the realm of morality. He did, apparently, get better, in mind as well as body.

I cannot argue that Ye deserves forgiveness: that is for the individuals he has injured to decide, from his own family to the global Jewish community. I am not even sure that forgiveness is something he needs from a strictly commercial perspective: the music is so good, Ye has always been effectively cancel-proof. I’m interested less in what the world owes to Ye than in what is possible for him now. If Ye really is a modern-day Phineas Gage, there is hope. The historical record suggests that recovery is possible, with the right support. It may never be complete, but it is real.

The larger question is whether it can be available to someone like Ye. There’s a cruel irony that the biggest block between Ye and stability might be the thing that, for many, disqualifies him from sympathy: his privilege. With so much money, and so many people happy to become enablers in order to bask in his celebrity, there is very little to restrain him. No Donda to tell him when he’s gone too far. No limit to what he can spend in the service of his own ruin. (How many bipolar sufferers must, on learning about the Super Bowl ad, thanked their stars that their manic episodes had never coincided with being a millionaire?) His brain may have been damaged, but nothing can demolish a person like wealth and fame.

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