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Pessimistic Themes in Kanye West’s Necrophobic Aesthetic: Moving beyond Subjects of Perfection to Understand the New Slave as a Paradigm of Anti-Black Violence

The release of Kanye West’s Yeezus was indelibly marked by the provocation of his hit song entitled “New Slaves,” which introduced a pessimistic terminology to capture the paradoxical condition whereby Black freedom from enslavement only resulted in the capturing of Black people psychically in the neo-liberal entanglements of poverty, servitude, and corporatism. His analysis, not unlike currently en vogue theories of Afro-pessimism or Critical Race Theory’s (racial) realist lens, maintains that despite all the rhetoric and symbols of progress to the contrary, Black people are simply not free in America. West’s performance of “New Slaves” on Saturday Night Live was only amplified by the “Not For Sale” insignia projected behind him.1 West’s “Not For Sale” insignia was a symbol of independence, as well as a public declaration of his anti-corporatism. It signaled West’s resistance against commodification, and announced his confrontational posture toward the rap industry; a posture that ignited the Hip-Hop community and academia alike over this artistic radicalism. However, such a provocation, despite its rhetorical flare and allure, was immediately cast as disingenuous and inauthentic. Kanye West is a Black man torn: at moments by his brilliance and at times by his banality. The lack of attention to his discography in Hip-Hop studies and his performances in philosophical aesthetics is not because his work is not worthwhile; to the contrary, West’s analyses of anti-Black death, corporatism, and neo-liberal aspiration are enough to warrant more than one serious study of his art. The refusal to study West is not at all due to his lack of correctness about the world around him. In reality, West is not studied because his body, his Black male body, lacks the symbolic currency to motivate reverence for his thinking. Regardless of his popularity, West’s ideas,