👑 Watch the Throne 🎤: A Freudian Interpretation

A look into the mania of Kanye West through his most critically underexamined project

Despite being an almost slavishly adoring Kanye fan for much of my life, I never liked Watch the Throne all that much when it came out, or even for many years later. Niggas in Paris, No Church in the Wild — obviously great songs, but the album never felt like it added up to anything as a whole. Sandwiched in Kanye’s discography between the high-concept avant-garde experimentalism of My Beautiful Dark Fantasy & Yeezus, Watch the Throne feels like a decline into straightforward pop. The synthwork feels slightly too of its year, and tracks like That’s My Bitch & Who Gon Stop Me border on ill-advised EDM crossover. The second track, Lift Off, is a particularly heinous mess of discordant pop production and meaningless lyrical pulp — hitting you with its tuneless chorus right at the front of the album, I personally can’t consider it anything but the most unwelcome track on any of Kanye’s projects. But most importantly, the high-stakes psychological drama present throughout all of Kanye’s “middle period” seems to have been paused for a brief sojourn into superficial glamour. Kanye and Jay Z are sitting on the throne, they’re “very happy to be here”, your job is to watch them having fun, and that’s pretty much what’s going on here. 

It didn’t occur to me that there might be more than just that until I read The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom. Bloom’s thesis as a Freudian critic (one which I find admittedly slightly repugnant in other contexts, but this is a topic for another instance), is that the primary subject matter in a work of art, no matter how dressed up in agony over the human condition or whatever universalist concern it may appear to hold, is ultimately the creator’s concern that he is artistically inferior to his primary source of inspiration. The exceptions are those few towering masters in a given genre who define the form for all their successors to come — Shakespeare does not have to address a prior poet, he alone is allowed to consider the full abstract human. But once Shakespeare has written his works, any subsequent English language theatre must ultimately be about the playwright’s tragic inability to match up to Shakespeare. Likewise, all epic poetry after Homer is about the poet’s inability to become Homer, and so on. This is a Freudian thesis in the sense that the precursor poet can be made equivalent to the notion of the symbolic Father. 

It probably comes as no surprise for those who know me that I was tempted to apply this theory to Kanye West. In particular, the song Big Brother, the final track from Graduation and an ode to Jay-Z’s role in Kanye’s career, is a clear example of anxiety-of-influence in hip hop. I was trying to figure out which of Bloom’s six “revisionary ratios” (coping mechanisms to deny the younger poet’s inferiority) is present in this song — I believe it’s “kenosis”, a move through which the younger poet appears to humble himself before his elder, but in a paradoxical manner which subtly deflates the elder’s influence. 

Big Brother is underdiscussed as a song in general and as a pivotal point in Kanye’s arc — it’s the final song on the “college” trilogy of his first three albums and as such represents a transition to his psychologically delicate middle period. The subject matter is profoundly bold and unusual for hip hop — it was and still is unheard of for a rapper to be so confessional about his emotional connection with another man. “If you admire somebody you should go ahead and tell them, people never get the flowers while they can still smell them”, Kanye explains. Arguably, Kanye’s “college” period could be characterized by its excessive humility in his self-narrativization relative to the norms of hip hop, and as such this track in which he prostrates himself toward Jay-Z represents a fitting pinnacle. But we also can catch a glimpse of the more “psycho” Kanye, buried up until this point in his career, given that several aspects of the story Kanye is telling seem to border on crazy-girlfriend behavior (despite the deflecting calmness in his delivery) such as feeling jealousy upon learning that he and Jay-Z both recorded songs with Coldplay’s Chris Martin. 

Kanye makes contradictory statements about Jay-Z on this song. Halfway through the third verse, he says “We know New Jack City, got to keep my brother, but to be number one I’ma beat my brother” — eerily, the character Kanye is referencing from New Jack City ends up murdering his brother in the film’s climax. But seemingly by the end of the song, Kanye changes his mind, declaring this impossible, “An idol in my eyes, god of the game, […], never be the same, never be another, number one, young Hov, also my big brother”, he gushes.

Soon after completing the collegiate trilogy, Kanye announced he would no longer be making rap music but “pop art”, and made his first attempt at working outside of the confines of hip hop with the sung vocals on 808s and Heartbreaks. A sensible way of dodging anxiety-of-influence — Kanye has left the ballpark of rags-to-riches slice-of-life localist storytelling raps that Jay-Z dominates, and decides he is now competing on a different (higher-stakes) plane. Four years later, he would then again decide to rap alongside Jay-Z on Watch the Throne, as supposed equals, comrades, and peers, although we will examine the album’s lyrics closely to see if this accurately reflects the men’s internal feelings around their relationship.

There’s one line on Watch the Throne which really feels like a clue, albeit an obstructed one, telling us we are on the right track to interpret this album in light of the theory of the poetic Father. It’s on Who Gon Stop Me, when Jay-Z says “Pablo Picassos, Rothkos, Rilkes, graduated to the MoMA”. This is a strange line, because Rilke is not a modernist painter who would be appropriate to mention in this context, but rather a German romantic poet. It’s tempting to imagine that Jay-Z just got confused as he was name-dropping for an intellectual posture and made a slightly embarrassing mistake, but two lines later he says “y’all can play me for a motherfucking fool if you want to, street smart and I’m book smart” — as if to dismiss the interpretation that the sudden literary introjection was accidental. As for why he would mention Rilke? Given the context, it’s logical to imagine that the reference is to Rilke’s perhaps best known work, Letters to a Young Poet, in which Rilke gives advice to a student in his art form. Here, Jay-Z draws an analogy to the poetic relationship to Kanye and himself, acknowledging his role as mentor.

If the reader has any doubt around the validity of applying Freud-derived theory to Kanye’s psychodrama, the unreleased track Mama’s Boyfriend from the My Beautiful Dark Fantasy sessions should dispel it. A more directly and explicitly Oedipal rap song has likely never been made — “I’m my mama’s boyfriend, I’m her little husband”, Kanye raps. 

It’s widely interpreted by critics and commentators that the shift from Kanye’s early “college” period of earnestness and middle-class relatability to the “psycho” period of narcissism, nymphomania, and rage, seems to have been precipitated by his grief over the death of his mother Donda West. Notably, however, neither this central emotional conflict, nor Donda herself, are ever addressed throughout these works - Kanye’s loss is un-expressed as a double absence. On 808s and Heartbreaks, the themes of devastation are transmuted into a romantic context. On My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, not only is Mama’s Boyfriend cut despite its poignancy, but more subtle changes reveal Kanye’s intent to leave his mother’s name unsaid — “mama say mama say mama-kusa” on Lost in the World was originally “mama say mama say, mama Donda’s son” on the demo version, but this was changed in the final cut. 

Instead, we find his mother’s loss primarily expressed through a motif of hypersexuality and unstable attachment — 808s & Heartbreaks, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Yeezus, pumped out one after another in Kanye’s most productive period, seem to represent a manic tear through a series of dramatic toxic relationships, until finally ending at a trembling resolution on the final track of Yeezus, Bound 2, in which he narratively settles on his intent to marry Kim Kardashian. Following this conclusion, Kanye took his longest-ever break from releasing new music until presenting the world with the isolated release Only One, a tender sentimental ballad sung from the perspective of Donda watching down from heaven, proud of her son’s accomplishments. It would appear that Kanye did not find it fitting to address the death of his mother directly until coming to some sort of sense of inner conclusion on the matter, after a lengthy process, once which seems to have required finding another equally important female figure in his life to love him in her stead.

What I was surprised to realize is that Watch the Throne seems to be equally important in this series as the three solo albums I’ve named. I will go on to make some very speculative, perhaps untenable interpretations here, but one thing is for sure - there is definitely a narrative in the tracklist of Watch the Throne, one which I have never really heard commented on, and it involves marriage. On the opening track, No Church in the Wild, an ode to excess and lawlessness, we hear “love is cursed by monogamy”, but the sentiment regarding this changes gradually across the album, until by track 10, Murder to Excellence, Kanye is telling a girl “Sunday morning, praise the Lord, you’re the girl that Jesus has been saving me for”, followed by a paean to domestic life in the next track, Made in America, and then the straightforwardly-titled Why I Love You for the album’s closer. 

It seems as if, just as in the more experimental albums of Kanye’s middle period, Watch the Throne represents a journey within Kanye as he prepares himself to commit to a single woman to replace his departed mother. The question is, why go through this process alongside the presence of his “big brother” Jay-Z, and how does this relate to the album’s stated thesis of requesting the listener to watch the throne? 

One thing should be clear — the poetic metaphor at the center of the album is startlingly incoherent — two men cannot spatially occupy a single Throne, at least not without repeatedly having to tell each other no-homo. As we saw, on Big Brother, Kanye had no illusions around the fact that there could only be one “god of the game”, and if he were to seize that position, it would require usurping Jay-Z. 

Big Brother also points to another collaboration between the two artists which seems to have been an emotionally challenging moment for Kanye: “On that Diamonds remix I swore I spazzed, but my big brother came through and kicked my ass”. “Kicked my ass” is an understatement - Jay-Z’s verse on the song is not only often touted as the best verse of his illustrious decades-long career, but is also one on which Jay-Z adopts a kingly, patriarchal posture with maximum confidence, primarily oriented towards artists under his umbrella. “[Memphis] Bleek could be one hit away his whole career, as long as I’m alive he’s a millionaire, and even if I die he’s in my will somewhere, so he can just kick back and chill somewhere, he don’t even have to write rhymes, a dynasty like my money lasts three lifetimes”. With this lyric, Jay-Z asserts that the artistic ability of someone in Kanye’s position is largely a footnote against his personal proximity to and ability to stay in the good graces of Jay-Z. One can only imagine how much of a blow hearing this must have been to Kanye’s notoriously precarious creative ego. 

This is a defeat that Kanye was inevitably driven to avenge. The dynamic between the two rappers on the Diamonds of Sierra Leone remix points to a larger complexity - though the overt message in the song is one of alliance under the Roc-a-Fella label, Jay-Z’s lyrics have the implicit effect of asserting his superiority over Kanye, and seem to have been interpreted by Kanye as wounding. In general, one of hip hop’s appeals is its frequent dynamic of rivalry-in-camaraderie, given that rap crews typically adopt a united posture against the world, yet compete against each other artistically in sportsmanlike fashion in order to ensure a maximum level of performance. However, when you have two notoriously hyper-ambitious egomaniacs like Kanye and Jay-Z, it seems only inevitable that the frame of friendly rivalry would begin to slip, as evidenced by the dramatic lengthy falling-out the two would have some time after Watch the Throne’s release. 

In most pop genres, the central framing device is often a desire to draw closer to the Other — “I want you, I love you, I need you, I want to hold your hand” — and the listener is free to imagine if “you” refers to a friend, a lover, the listener, parental imago, God, etc. Hip hop reverses this, and the Other becomes a target of antipathy and distance — “I have more money than you, I could send someone to have you killed, you aren’t remotely on my level”, etc. (This, of course, does not imply a sadomasochistic relation in the listener, who instead inserts himself in the position of the rapper and vicariously feels the exaggerated bravado of the rapper directed against his own personal rivals.) In simpler language: rap lyrics are typically written as assaults on a vague conceptual stand-in for all the artist’s masculine opponents. Given that, for Kanye at least, his primary rival is in the room with him as he is recording this, we can present a psychoanalytical frame which suggests that when the two artists here enter this frame of standard hip hop antipathy, their primary target (regardless of whether this is consciously known to them) is in fact the other rapper on the album, and the relation present on Watch the Throne is not ultimately one of friendship.

Finally, we have enough pieces laid out to present the thesis of this essay: Watch the Throne is not a detour away from Kanye’s high-concept psychodrama for lighter radio-friendly fare, but a crucial piece of his Oedipal journey. In order to reach his goal of coitus with the symbolic mother (Kim Kardashian), he must first murder the symbolic & poetic father (Jay-Z). 

(And by my understanding, Kanye was successful here — it seems the critical consensus is that Kanye managed to outrap Jay-Z track by track.) 

With this theory in mind, let’s begin to break the album down a song at a time. 

HAM 

Given that this was released as the promotional single for the album, and that it seems to lyrically have the effect of telling the audience what they can expect from the music (“I’m about to go HAM, hard as a motherfucker, let these niggas know who I am”), I’m choosing to interpret it as a sort of bombastic prelude to the drama and placing it up front. 

Kanye opens the record with the eerily sadistic battle cry “It was all good just a week ago, niggas feel theyselves, then that Watch the Throne drop, niggas kill theyselves. What niggas gon do, Hov?” In the frame where Kanye’s generic rivals (“niggas”) can be superimposed onto the figure of Jay-Z, whom Watch the Throne is an opportunity to artistically conquer, these lyrics become torturous and menacing. 

The most interesting line on the song, however, is “Like Eli, I did it”, a line which will surely go over 99% of listeners’ heads and seems solely planted for the benefit of subterranean memelords and internet dwellers. The reference is to “The Greatest Rap Battle Ever”, a semi-viral youtube video displaying a contest between two high schoolers, Envy and Eli. Eli appears to have some form of visible neurodivergence, perhaps autism-related, and loses the rap battle according to the panel of judges in the video, but he has been redeemed by the wide consensus of internet viewers, who declare he was unfairly robbed. Envy is more convincing at adopting the swaggering stance of a rapper on the stage, and is more technically impressive in his delivery, but Eli delivers his freestyle with a raw, albeit awkward, unhinged passion and earnestness which makes him the far more memorable of the pair. The parallel between the high scholars and the dynamic on Watch the Throne seems clear, and also feels loaded with a certain emotional significance, given that Kanye has always been in a difficult position as a neurodivergent person lacking the typical posture of a rapper, often feeling like he has not been given his proper respects and accolades.

Kanye also says “A nigga still young, wanna have no kids, but I’ve been practicing with some actresses as bad as shit, had a few white girls, asses flat as shit, but the head’s so good, damn a nigga glad he hit”. Here he reveals that he is unwilling to commit to a woman. He has been sleeping around with white girls (such as Kim), but they appear to be not on his mind as marriage material, given that they lack the proper child-bearing frames and are thus useful to him for temporary non-procreative sexual gratification. Kanye’s feelings on white women would later change.  

Jay-Z opens his own verse with “Fuck y’all mad at me for? Y’all don’t know what I’ve been through”, followed by a series of disses against rappers who lack the struggle of his gritty impoverished upbringing, which would include Kanye. “Bow down brother, pay homage, don’t spill hate all on my garments”, he continues, and it’s interesting here that Jay-Z is beckoning his “brother” to bow down.

Also, the potential commentary on the phrase “hard as a motherfucker” we might make here seems too obvious to demand explication.

No Church in the Wild

This is the most specifically philosophical song on the album, or of either rapper’s career for that matter, as Frank Ocean’s chorus (“Human beings in a mob, what’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a god? What’s a god to a nonbeliever, who don’t believe in anything?”) illustrates the Lacanian principle that any orderly civilizational hierarchy dominated by a father figure is ultimately constructed by an unprincipled nihilistic master-signifier taking excessive delight for its own sake. Jay-Z references Plato’s famous Eurypthro dilemma (“Is pious pious because God loves pious? Socrates asked Zeus, whose bias do y’all seek?”) in order to reiterate the question of whether God’s desires are bound by law, or by a desire which desires for itself. 

Jay-Z, who has associated himself with God the Father throughout his career via his nickname Jay-Hova, puts Kanye in the role of the Son: “Jesus was a carpenter, Yeezy laid beats”. But lest we are to apply Christian theology to suggest that this, despite its paternalism, places Kanye in an equally or perhaps more prominent role to Jay-Z, Jay-Z quickly snags the third member of the Trinity for himself as well: “Hova flow the Holy Ghost, get the hell up out your seats”. When it’s Kanye’s turn to rap, he rejects Jay-Z’s construction of the Trinity for his own invented theology: “You will not control the threesome, just roll the weed up until I get me some. We formed a new religion, no sins as long as there’s permission.” As mentioned earlier, Kanye’s moral imperative on this song ends up being to assert the legitimacy of promiscuity: “Love is cursed by monogamy, that’s something that the pastor don’t preach.” 

Lift Off

This song in my opinion is lyrically entirely devoid of substance, and thus irrelevant to the narrative here. It’s also not very good musically despite its high-profile appearance from Beyoncé — I will later give my opinion as to why a detail-obsessed auteur like Kanye made such a glaring misstep, but we will have to come back to this. 

Niggas in Paris 

The question of monogamy is further addressed in Kanye’s verse. “‘She said ‘Ye can we get married at the mall?” I said ‘Look you need to crawl before you ball’. Come and meet me in the bathroom stall, and show me why you deserve to have it all.” Kanye has moved beyond his antinomian stance in No Church in the Wild and is now floating the notion of marriage, but only in order to tease and tantalize a woman who he ultimately has no long-term interest in. Later in the verse, he floats the notion again, but this time only in the context of a sort of intermediate situation where he doesn’t have to settle entirely on a single woman: “Prince William ain’t do it right if you ask me, cause if I was him I would have married Kate and Ashley”. And finally on the outro, Jay-Z boasts “I got that hot bitch in my home”, followed by Kanye’s immediate response of “You know how many hot bitches I own?”, contrasting the situation between the two men and implying that Kanye’s is one of greater value.

The more interesting component, however, ties back to the title of the song, and the question of what “Paris” could symbolically represent. As previously mentioned, after Kanye’s collegiate trilogy, he moved away from the field of hip hop into the larger coliseum of “pop art”, and began to visibly obsess over European high culture, baroque aesthetics and haute couture, eventually declaring himself a modern artist of relevance on the level of Picasso. “You are now watching the throne, don’t let me into my zone, don’t let me into my zone, don’t let me into my zone”, Kanye repeats, and again, we are choosing to interpret “you” here as referring to Jay-Z. Jay-Z might be the king of rap as such, excelling at narrative storytelling regarding the black American experience, but if Kanye can enter the broader conceptual territory he feels destined for and control it, there can be no dispute as to who is ultimately superior. Around this time, Jay-Z was also entertaining an interest in high art, but as a collector and patron, lacking Kanye’s fanatical world-historical ambitions. Both niggas might be physically in Paris together, but Kanye is the only one who truly belongs in the Louvre - and they both know it. 

Famously, the duo would perform this song twelve times in a row back-to-back in one of their concerts in Paris, an avant-garde maneuver which could have only come from Kanye. This method of exhaustion strikes us as sadistic - forcing Jay-Z to repeat over and over the moment in which Kanye has realized he’s undeniably toppled his kingship - “I’m definitely in my zone”, he finally concludes as the track fades out. Three songs in and the father is already slain. Kanye is on the throne, and the rest of the album is in fact an extended denouement.

Otis 

There isn’t much psychodrama on this song, and the music video in which the rappers are cavorting around gleefully as the best of friends seems reasonably close to accurately reflecting the energy on the track. This is achieved, seemingly, through the specter of fatherhood and marriage literally being placed in the background (though this backgrounded element is conceptually in the forefront), in the form of Otis Redding (an archetypal “dad artist” for African-Americans of the rappers’ generation), begging us “Squeeze her, don’t tease her, never leave her” over and over. 

Gotta Have It

Also a fairly uneventful song, but with a few moments of interest. “Money matrimony, they tryna break the marriage up”, Kanye says, in a sort of recognition that the business “marriage” between him and Jay-Z must end before the concept of matrimony can truly enter the picture. Jay-Z opens his verse with “What’s up, what’s up, what’s up motherfucker, where my money at? You gon make me come down to your house where your mommy at, mummy wrap the kids, have them crying for their mommy back. Dummy that your daddy is, tell him I just want my racks,” seemingly intuiting that the financial issue is a disguise for anxiety around possession of the mother — in Kanye’s confused mind that is. 

The song ends with Kanye declaring “I remain Chi-Town” and Jay-Z responding “Brooklyn til I die”, suggesting that an unsteady peace can be achieved between the rappers through each remaining in his own territory. 

The concept of the song is ambiguous: “I got what you need”, the sample repeats, but who has, and who needs what? 

New Day

The subject of fatherhood is now finally explicit in this song - with the symbolic father slain, the sun now rises upon previously occluded possibilities. Kanye muses on what direction he will choose to mold his eventual son in. “I might even make him Republican, so everybody know he love white people”, Kanye imagines, rearticulating the previously commented-on notion of Kanye’s territory existing beyond black culture (and of course also concretely foreshadowing his own eventual political turn). “I’ll never let him leave his college girlfriend, and get caught up with the groupies in the whirlwinds”, Kanye says, acknowledging that promiscuity has been a mistake for him. He continues to elaborate on a series of his regrets in life, promising that he will raise his son to avoid them.

“Sorry junior, I already ruined ya,” Jay-Z announces as he opens his verse. Given that at this point, Kanye’s preoccupation seems to be the prospect of literal marriage and paternity, whereas Jay-Z’s is to distance himself from the highly psychologically driven Kanye, I suggest we interpret Jay-Z’s “son” in this verse to be his poetic son Kanye, and his apology to be in reference to Kanye’s verse on the track. “Sins of a father make your life ten times harder”, Jay-Z bemoans, acknowledging a guilt for his role in driving Kanye to make destructive decisions. “My dad left me and I promised to never repeat him”, he ends his verse, but then an echoing audio effect is placed on “never repeat him”, implying that Jay-Z does intend to abandon his role in the relationship. 

That’s My Bitch

Now that Kanye has intended to father a child, he seems actively in search of a partner to claim. “Pop champagne, I’ll give you a sip, shorty right there? Yeah, that’s my bitch,” he snarls, suggesting a scene in which he is rapidly selecting women while out on the night, still in an unstable sort of attachment cycle yet firmly with commitment on the mind. “Twisted love story, true romance, Mary Magdalene from a pole dance, I’m a freak huh? Rockstar life, the second girl with us, that’s our wife,” he muses — he’s at least getting closer. 

Jay-Z’s verse, however, is the more interesting and important one here. He, also, seems to be narrativizing a process of selection in which he has arrived at his wife, though unlike Kanye’s this one is already complete. “If Picasso was alive, he would have made her, that’s right, nigga, Mona Lisa can’t fade her. I mean, Marilyn Monroe, she’s quite nice, but why are all the pretty icons always all white?” he questions, indicating his preference for women of color, while also deflating Kanye’s focus upon European art. “Put some colored girls in the MoMA, half these broads ain’t got nothing on Willona. Don’t make me bring Thelma in it, bring Halle, bring Penélope and Salma in it, back to my Beyoncés”, he continues, free-associating on a list of beautiful women of color before finally fixating on the love of his life. 

He concludes his verse with: “You belong with niggas who used to be known for dope dealing, you too dope for any of those civilians. Now shoo, children, stop looking at her tits. Get your own dog, you heard? Yeah, that’s my bitch”. Jay-Z says. He declares that his wife is inaccessible to those (such as Kanye) without his criminal pedigree, and moreover they are not even fit to gaze upon her. Though Kanye is in search of a wife, Jay-Z boasts that Beyoncé equivalents are in a realm inaccessible to him. 

Welcome to the Jungle

This is an incongruous standout on the album, primarily via being a Jay-Z solo track with Kanye almost totally absent, but also by departing from the motifs of opulence and grandeur for a deep dive into the traumatic, with Jay-Z nakedly expressing a wealth of incredibly dark sentiments: “Paralyzed by the pain, I can barely move”, “Sometimes I look to the sky and ask why I was born”, “Every day is hard, every night is worse, that’s why I pray so hard”, “I’m a tortured soul, I live in disguise”. 

This sets up a sort of reunion with the father — with Jay-Z having acknowledged his guilt in bringing about Kanye’s emotional torments, and Kanye out on the prowl looking for love, Jay-Z can now confess his own agonies, and healing can perhaps begin. In the following tracks on the album, Jay-Z will no longer taunt Kanye for having not experienced the inner-city struggles he went through as he has been doing - rather the two rappers will explore the themes of African-American trauma in dialogue together from an empathetic perspective. 

Who Gon Stop Me 

On the opening of the hook, Kanye laments “This is something like the Holocaust, millions of our people lost”, a general reference to slavery and African-American generational trauma which would be completely out of place on this song and the overall album if if weren’t for Jay-Z’s confessions on the track prior. Jay-Z’s contributions to the hook: “Black cards, black cars, black on black, black broads, whole lotta money in a black bag, black strap, you know what that’s for”, seems to mostly serve to emphasize the importance of blackness to Jay-Z’s personal narrative. 

Not much going on on the verses (aside from the already-discussed Rilke reference), let’s move to the next track. 

Murder to Excellence 

Here we have the album’s climax: a reunion with the father, conquest of the newly displaced mother, and a mood of triumph and celebration. In the first half of the song (“Murder”), Kanye and Jay-Z bemoan the prevalence of black-on-black murder, drawing an analogy to the antipathy which has characterized their poetic relationship. “Strays from the same shade, nigga, we on the same team”, Jay-Z reminds Kanye, and again with “If you put crabs in a barrel to ensure your survival, you gon end up pulling down niggas that look just like you. What up, blood? What up, cuz? It’s all black, I love us.” 

Clearing the tension out of the way, the duo move onto the second half of the song, “a celebration of black excellence, opulence, decadence”. You can almost hear the chiming of the wedding bells and see the bouquet thrown into the air here — Kanye declares “Sunday morning, praise the Lord, you’re the girl that Jesus had been saving me for,” and “I’ll be a real man, take care of your son, every problem you had before this day is now done”. Happiness at last?

Made in America

Matrimony having taken place, both rappers reflect on subsequent tranquil scenes of domesticity. Frank Ocean’s hook grounds this accomplishment and the idea of a stable family home infused with a sense of spirituality in African-American history: “Sweet king Martin, sweet queen Coretta, sweet brother Malcolm, sweet queen Betty, sweet Mother Mary, sweet father Joseph, sweet Jesus, we made it in America.” Jay-Z grounds this sweetness even more concretely in his lineage and upbringing: “I pledge allegiance to my grandma for that banana pudding, our piece of Americana”, he wistfully tells us in the beginning of his verse. 

Why I Love You

All is set for a happy conclusion. In fact, the tone of the music, the title of the song, the lyrics of the hook, all seem to be in place for such a thing. However, as if a last minute shift in the whims of the rappers has taken place, it is not so. Kanye is barely present on the track other than in slight interjections — the stage has been taken over by Jay-Z, repeatedly laying bare his various sentiments of betrayedness along the lines of “Showed love to you niggas, you ripped out my heart and you stepped on it”, “Wasn’t I a good king? Maybe too much of a good thing?”, “I tried to teach niggas how to be kings, and all they ever wanted to be was soldiers”, “Picture, if you will, that the throne's burning, Rome's burning, and I'm sitting in the corner all alone, burning. Why does it always end up like this?”, etc.

Similarly to Murder to Excellence, this song has a dual structure, only in this one it begins with an incongruously happy-sounding pop melody set alongside lyrical themes of paranoia, which eventually fades away to be replaced with a dramatic drumless stringed outro against these same themes, more pressingly expressed in a state of high stress. The drama only builds in its stakes before the music suddenly cuts out, leaving the album to end at a state of maximum tension, with the lyrics “These niggas got a shot, they’ll shoot. Please, Lord, forgive them, because these niggas know not what they do” lending the album its final chilling statement.

This unstable conclusion would prove prophetic, given that Kanye would eventually develop some sort of intense paranoia around Jay-Z, accusing him on stage in a stadium in 2016 of commanding shooters with weapons set upon his head. Two days later, Kanye would be hospitalized in a psychiatric facility. 

What went so wrong? Why did the attempted reunion with the father turn out to be impossible?

This is a theory that will reflect unflatteringly on the rappers under discussion, so please keep in mind that I do not know these men, and any attempt at psychoanalysis can just as easily turn out to be a fantasy of the analyst’s own projection. But my lit-crit theory angle here is that reconciliation is impossible due to the artists’ dual narcissisms regarding the objects of their sexual desires. It is not possible for each to mutually possess a mother stand-in in their separate reflective psychological complexes, because neither rapper, in their attitudes of sexual bravado and territorial competition against other men, can be satisfied with possessing a woman, they must possess the woman.

In one of his songs, Jay-Z boasts “Got the hottest chick in the game wearing my chain”, and this is true -  Beyoncé is not only quite arguably the most beautiful woman in the “game” of black American music, but also the most commercially and critically successful, the wealthiest. Widely referred to as a queen, there is no real competition between her and anyone else in her field - the relative status of the various men in hip-hop is enormously debatable compared to this point. This throne does not need to be watched. It’s obvious that Kanye admires Beyoncé just as much as anyone else, given his infamous VMAs outburst which almost ended his career. Given that Kanye cannot enter coitus with the mother before slaying the father, and Jay-Z’s claim to dominance is in part predicated on his possession of the most exalted woman, this effectively dooms Kanye to promiscuity and hypersexuality, leaving him to wander in the wilderness (“Sorry junior, I already ruined ya”). 

In the end, Kanye managed to perhaps do one better by marrying America’s undisputed number one sex symbol, the most influential woman in media and culture, albeit without a certain pedigree of sophistication which Beyoncé has earned through her music. Similarly to his artistic shift from “rap” to “pop art”, Kanye is able to match Jay-Z’s claim of having the hottest chick in the game by shifting his focus to a larger, broader “game” of mass culture in general.

Based on his lyrics on Watch the Throne, this does not seem like a maneuver Jay-Z is prepared to accept. From the point upon which Kanye narratively sets himself towards finding a wife, Jay-Z begins emphasizing the importance of blackness, black women, and a black family. His declaration towards a peaceful alliance with Kanye on Murder to Excellence is predicated on their mutual blackness, and not their artistry or mutual humanity. It appears as if Jay-Z is able to salvage a position of dominance against Kanye by denying the sanctity of his love, its interracial component diminishing it before the tapestry of sacred black American connectedness which Jay-Z outlines in his lyrics. Allegedly, according to celebrity gossip, there was interpersonal tension between Kim and Beyoncé first before the two rappers fell out, so this lends credence to the theory that it was an element of psychosexual jealousy around the feminine which made their unity unstable in the end. 

Finally, we are equipped to address Lift Off. We have a reason now why Kanye might have put a garish song dominated almost entirely by Beyoncé’s vocals right at the front of the album. Artistically, she is present on the album as something unwanted, a bad vibe, and this is sandwiched right between the two tracks where Kanye is initially denying the value of marriage and touting his own sexual freedom. The song’s awkwardness is entirely intended as an embarrassment for Jay-Z! Would Kanye really be this psycho? He has treated his collaborators in psychologically strange ways before, such as promising Drake the Lift Yourself beat before stealing it away for a juvenile prank in order to taunt him, or telling everyone who worked on Jesus is King that they were not allowed to have premarital sex while working on the album. It’s a bold and perhaps disturbing hypothesis, but it makes some degree of sense. 

Is this conclusion too bleak, too racially provocative, is this unfair to the artists, is this going too far? Have we made a misstep here? Ultimately, it is just one narrative I have developed, which should probably not be taken too seriously. In any case, I hope this exercise has at least opened up new avenues to fully appreciate a work of art I feel as if I was unable to enjoy deeply for far too long. 

If we are on the right track at all here, it will be interesting and a little scary to see where Kanye’s trajectory takes him in the near future. His divorce with Kim was finalized just this last week as I am writing this, shortly after the confusing, seemingly-aborted preview of Donda 2, the second scattered project vaguely based around the memory of his dead mother despite not doing much to mention her directly or reflect upon her existence. Kanye has also been expressing intense sexual jealousy in the public sphere, threatening to assault Pete Davidson, the new object of Kim’s affections. Unfortunately, if we take up the thesis that being able to settle down with Kim was the product of an intricate and dynamic psychological struggle, it seems as if Kanye’s recent instability is likely to get worse before it gets better. Perhaps the pain will be channeled into art, or perhaps Kanye will be pushed to the brink and do something dangerous and unwise. We can only hope and pray that one day Kanye will be able to find the fountain of psychological comfort and inner resolution he seems to have been seeking in vain his whole career and undoubtedly has gone through enough trials to deserve.