Kanye West Wore a Burzum T-Shirt...

...and that really does not matter.

Times are weird. Russia is still attempting to take the Ukraine amidst preparing to rig an election in March. Israel, the United States’ strongest geopolitical ally, is still attempting to snuff out Palestine, whom many Americans stand in resilient support of. Most importantly (if news coverage is any marker of significance,) Kanye West wore a Burzum t-shirt.

I’m not going to presume to have any answers for the former two matters, but I can address the latter with some finality:

1. If you like Kanye West’s music, it likely has nothing to do with who he is as a person (that being “an egotistical asshat”)

2. If you don’t like Kanye West’s music, you likely felt that way before he began spouting off a bunch of racist, fascist, or egoist bullshit.

3. If (1) or (2) don’t apply to you, you either

   1. Don’t care, because this is all quite stupid (bravo, that’s the right answer)

   2. Or your head is soaked in so much commercial propaganda, you’ve sheepishly confused a company’s product with an actual political perspective.

It’s the last point that I’m going to spend the bulk of this article addressing. I’m not going to dive too deeply into the things that West has been saying - you can find that information online ad nauseum. What I will dive into is how and why we culturally attach ideologies to the actions and adornments of celebrity artists, as well as what it means to like an artist’s work without necessarily liking the artist themself.

Let’s Get to It

Us Americans are an ideological bunch, and a loud one at that. Since the early days of advertising and public relations, it has been subtly hammered into the minds of many of us that our outward appearance is just as much a statement of our beliefs as anything we say. One such implementation was Edward Bernays’ “Torches of Freedoms” - or cigarettes, as we know them - of which women could use to assert their freedom as individuals distinct from the male-driven society they lived in. This was after Bernays got the idea from his colleague, the famous psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, that women could use cigarettes as a way of obtaining their own penises. This painfully phallocentric idea is only made more nefarious by the fact that a lot of women actually fell for it, publicly sparking up smokes in political acts performed by Suffragettes of the First Wave of Feminism.

Of course, this campaign was done in bad faith. The goal was not to give women an image of individualism or power. The goal was to sell more cigarettes. The forces acting behind all of this marketing were in no way concerned with women’s freedom. They purely wanted to double the size of their market. If anything, they saw women as ripe for a subjugation of a different variety: slaves to trends through which they could sell more goods. It’s upon this nefarious bedrock that such misguided ideas like “conscious capitalism” and “vote with your dollar” came to be.¹

Convincing a generation of women to smoke was not the only success Bernays had. Among numerous other successes, one particularly relevant campaign was convincing people that the clothes they wore were a statement of their individuality.

Fashion as a Political Statement

Let’s fast-forward a hundred years. Nowadays, boomers think they’re being clever when they wear a t-shirt calling Biden or Trump stupid, and every other metalhead is sporting a t-shirt promoting their favorite band². All of this nonsense is much to the benefit of Gildan. What’s more, Bernays likewise linked fashionability with the styles adorned by movie stars and celebrities in a campaign performed at the behest of clients like Clara Bow (aka “The It Girl”) and Hearst Magazines International, the publisher of the magazine Cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan Magazine has woven itself so deeply into the Zeitgeist that “Cosmo” is a household name. “It Girl” is still used to denote a woman of great influence over fashion.

Excerpt taken from “The Century of the Self”, a documentary by Adam Curtis

It’s for this reason that a celebrity can wear an article of clothing and not only will people give a shit, they’ll fallaciously take the adornment as an actual statement beyond peddling manufactured goods. We are all steeped so heavily in “influencing” (or advertising, in less manipulative language) that we have a hard time decoupling our own ideals with the assumed ideals of a celebrity in inherently meaningless clothes.

Let’s address that last statement some more: is it actually inherently meaningless for West to wear a Burzum shirt? He has been saying a lot of nutty shit lately, such as “I like Hitler”, or “Jesus Christ, Hitler, Ye! Sponsor that!”

That latter statement reveals a lot about West’s intent with all of his antics of late: he’s challenging the advertiser economy. That’s a goal I can somewhat relate to myself, even though I don’t condone his approach. What we have here is someone known for behaving iconoclastically turning up the knob to eleven. Is it resulting in some problematic rhetoric? Undoubtedly. Is it validating actual racists and fascists who generally would not feel propped up in our society? I’m sure it is. Does this have any bearing whatsoever on West’s musical talent, or the impact of his music on his fans? Not even a little bit.

It’s not uncommon to hear the whole “separate the art from the artist” spiel from West’s fanbase. They’ve had to deal with him saying nutty bullshit for a lot longer than his sudden fascination with fascism. Us fans of black metal are quite used to this perspective ourselves, especially thanks to the likes of Varg Vikernes, the mastermind behind Burzum³.

About Varg

Varg is a masterclass in human shittiness. He’s a convicted murderer, an arsonist of historic sites, and a proud Odalist, a culturally conservative form of European nationalism⁴. The latter has become the basis for his espousal of a lot of anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric.

To the original point of using fashion to make statements, wearing a t-shirt for a band of known shittiness like Burzum is not merely a statement of fandom anymore, but an assertion of an anti-establishment mentality. It is here we can see the overlap between all of West’s ranting-and-raving, and his choice to wear a Burzum t-shirt. He is attempting to continue rustling the feathers of the easily-upset. The same can be said of anybody else doing the same. Since the debate around Burzum has become so emotionally charged, one can’t simply take on its image without similarly invoking all the baggage of the political debate that has emerged around it.

To put it simply: the intent of wearing clothes to shock those who assume intent in fashion is not a statement of ideology so much as a metacommentary on assuming ideological intent behind fashion. This is post-modernism once again folding a flimsy idea in on itself. No longer is wearing a Burzum shirt a statement of “I like Burzum”, but instead “I like Burzum - so what?” Such a statement could just as validly come from a political opponent of Varg’s as it could a right-wing nationalist, bringing us back to the point of “inherent meaninglessness” alluded to earlier in this piece.

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So what does the proclamation of politics through fashion have to do with Kanye’s music? The same thing Varg’s shittiness has to do with Burzum’s music: nothing at all. One can validly enjoy Kanye West's extremely significant contributions to the world of hip-hop production while decrying his public persona. One can have intense distaste for Varg, his ideas, and his actions while still finding the album Filosofem to be a case of banger… after banger… after banger. Would I give Burzum my money? Yes, because one fundamental American ideal is that one’s shitty beliefs should not be used to sweepingly preclude them from society⁵. If I give Burzum (and by extension, Varg) money, it’s for the contribution of music that I enjoy, and not for, say, his shitty book.

Now is this to say that an artist’s intent never matters? No. It’s to say that the artist’s intent and the perception of their art by the masses is decoupled just enough to make it possible for it to not matter. Sometimes, an artist’s intent crosses that divide by way of the artist being poignant enough to communicate across the gap. Thankfully for black metal fans, the espousal of problematic ideas through the music is usually lost somewhere between the low fidelity of the sound and general incoherency of the vocal delivery.

Counter movements within metal like RABM (Red Anarchist Black Metal) don’t fail to get meaningful traction because the metal community is naturally right-leaning. They fail because the attempt at creating music that is “ideology-first” is lacking in artistic integrity, putting second the most important part of music: how it sounds. This is why those who defend their continued listening of known NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal) bands tend to rebuttal with “but the riffs though…” As such, if an RABM band wants to make an impact, I encourage them to spend more time writing riffs than trying to preach at us. However, I expect they’ll achieve as much as any NSBM band has achieved in spreading nationalist ideals, which is to say “little, if at all”.

As a fan of a wide variety of black metal, I feel the same way about RABM as Michael from The Good Place (played by Ted Danson) feels about frozen yogurt:

There’s something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little so that you can have more of it.

As for Kanye? Many can tell you that what he brings to the table is creative beat production. Even if his vocal delivery is coherent enough to effectively communicate his egotistical idiocy, it’s still possible for a vehemently secular person as myself to appreciate the creativity of the vocal sampling on Jesus Walks. That’s because lyrics have little to do with musical quality. You can recite absolute nonsense on a track and still have something pleasing to listen to by the end of it. This largely how I would characterize West’s last few albums and how he’s able to retain the following that he does. I would also describe in the same terms the shallow garbage proliferated en masse by the pop industry as a whole.

In Conclusion…

All this is to say that you can like a work without liking the artist behind it. By the same stroke of logic, a film buff can love Rosemary’s Baby (and its measurable impact on feminist cinema) without endorsing the rape⁶ of a preteen. A cartoonist can likewise draw inspiration from the works of Winsor McCay without partaking in institutional racism.

The solution to your experience of a work existing at odds with the intentions of the artist is really quite simple: enjoy what you enjoy, and formulate your own ideas of the experience, even if said ideas fly in the face of what the artist may want. That is your right as an individual with their own distinct perspective. However, to assume that anybody’s ideas are validly represented through what is purchased or adorned is a tacit endorsement of an ill-meaning industry that deliberately proliferated the very idea with the goal of raking in more profits. Let’s stop falling for this rhetoric, shall we?

1. Before you start the tirade that typically follows this criticism, please consider that if these ideas could actually affect change, they would’ve been snuffed out already.

2. I count myself among them. Anyone who knows me personally would easily count metal t-shirts among my regular fashion statements. At this point, one’s fandom is so tightly coupled with modern fashion that it’s become difficult to support bands in any other way. However, as this article is written to demonstrate, I don’t conflate my fashion choices with my political perspectives.

3. I am a fan of Burzum, though I despise Varg as a person. The basis of my fandom is purely auditory. That is to say “I like how it sounds.”

4. You’ll often hear Burzum described as a “Neo-Nazi” band. This is an extremely reductive viewpoint that lumps together similar-yet-distinct groups of shitty people. I encourage avoiding viewpoints of such little nuance, because lumping together complex topics under a simple umbrella is a thing that idiots do. However, I digress, as this topic is an article for a different day.

5. To assume it should is the stuff of banishments, dungeons, and gulags. I do not support the court of public opinion, which is sadly becoming a controversial perspective. I get the feeling of discomfort that adherence to such a principle can bring about, but frankly, adhering to an ideal even when it doesn’t feel convenient is how I would distinguish a principle from a mere belief.

6. Alleged rape, I suppose. Aren’t out-of-court settlements great? For the rich, I mean. Not us.