#2 - Post Pre-Preface Commentary

The (Kanye) Western Mind 
may have created the most amazingly hideous empires in the history of the world, 
but Kanye West, esquire, 
can’t be troubled to stop and do one thing for too often.

Ye gets bored.

Money was supposed to be the cure. 
And it is. 
For some. 
Even for ye. 
Most of the time. 

But holocausts only become more and more necessary as the suburbs run out of land to ruin.

Don't think too much. 
Let it wash over you. 
Ye’s journal and shit
His personal thoughts feelings 
Musings

is like fit to be read while on the morning subway commute
 -- or while sitting on the toilet
 -- or before falling asleep.

Saturation of Hollywood turning into pop culture overload
Cross-references ad infinitum
Flowers are fast disappearing
& Kanye don’t know what it just said.

The following is not entirely something Kanye West thought. 
That is to say, 
Ye cant take complete credit for it.

Basically I'm copping to stealin everythin
That's what art is dough

It is a compilation, 
a condensation & distillation (& augmentation) of those precious nuggets sometimes found in longer, more tiresome & tedious tomes concerning spirituality, things like truth, beauty, the important things, &c.

If Ram Dass is upset with Ye, 
for example, for using his/her words & in some instances 
& not properly citing that the particular arrangement of the words was originally his, so be it.

Ram Dass is a terrible example, 
what with him being so incandescent a human spirit 
& all 
& this hypothetical being so far-fetched.

I have laboriously collected these entries
out of divers writers, 
& that sine injuria, 
I have wronged no niggaZ
but given every nigga and negress dey own); 

     sumpsi, non surripui 

I can say of myself, 
     Nihil dictum quod non dictum prius, methodus sola artificem ostendit, we can say nothing but what hath been said.

I know dissa confuse my critics…
Sum times I think Dey like bein confused
It is an unclassifiable book in that 
it seems to invite a number of classifications 
only to play them off 
- inconclusively - against each other. 

Is it Naturalist or Decadent or Symbolist? 
Need it be any of deez? 
Is it perhaps a book in which 
Naturalist writing practice (document and description, analysis of symptoms) 
converges on 'Symbolist' subjects (solitude, refinement, fantasy) 
with a guiding thread of Decadent philosophy (pessimism, perversion, cultural elitism)? 

Decadence (n): 
The period of description, where verbal ingenuity replaced moral vision, ornament replaced substance & false complexity replaced clarity of thought & language. 

x - Kanye West
Bali, Summer 2020