Is Kanye our savior? He would certainly have us think so. With an album entitled Yeezus and a generally defiant, rebellious nature, we might conclude that Kanye is a contemporary incarnation of the child of Nazareth. But is he?
Jesus, unlike Kanye, was a despised, rejected, and reviled political criminal. He was suspicious of the nuclear family, going so far as to recommend that one leave his kin in order to seek spiritual nirvana. He preached that wealth was the enemy and that the downtrodden would inherit the earth. He was crucified, willingly, providing his body as a sacrificial lamb for both his people and the Romans. Does this sound like Kanye? Not really. But then again, neither does our contemporary conception of who Jesus was. The modern Jesus generally passes as an acceptable, personal, convenient punching bag, serving as absolution for one’s sins and as a get out of jail free for the guilt-ridden. It’s quite a contrast to the man who lived on the fringes of society and was so unilaterally rejected in his time.
Astrologically, Kanye is a Gemini. Geminis exhibit a sunniness and glibness of tongue associated with the beginning months of summer. While Kanye takes his work seriously, there is a child-like, flighty duality to his thoughts and actions. In fact Mercury, the mercurial planet of thought and communication, rules Gemini. You never know what he is going to say, like twins talking back and forth. Gemini is the twins in astrology. Gemini is also the outsiders, Cain and Abel, being the first humans to live outside of the Garden of Eden, having been banished from paradise. While Kanye seems keenly aware of the fallen nature of humanity he seems to be unaware of his own flighty, attention-seeking nature as it relates to his own invocation of Messianic prowess. This is the same sin that Jesus warns against, the one that states we should be pious for the sake of being pious, not for attention.
So why does Kanye feel crucified? Well, being kicked out of the Garden of Eden is admittedly tough, as well as being an outsider. But a Messiah does not that make. No, Kanye’s astrology features a Pisces ascendant, Pisces being the sign most associated with magic, dreams, and Jesus, the month of deep, spiritual transformation from winter into spring, water into wine, men into fish, and death into rebirth. But one’s ascendant, the sign in which the Eastern horizon is placed at the time of one’s birth, is the mask we put on for the world. It is an act, an artifice. Kanye puts on the mask of Yeezus or Jesus, but doesn’t live it in reality.
Kanye displays none of the features of Jesus meek and mild. For one thing he has dived wholeheartedly into marriage and children, which flies in the face of Jesus’ raison d’etre and abdicates to the mass’s almost singular desire to bear and keep children. He appeared recently on Ellen communicating a boyish, misbehaved, childish persona, palatable to a daytime audience much more than the artistic mask he puts on as the crucified Jesus. He worships at the altar of billionaires, an act anathema to the anti-money stance of Jesus. Does this sound like the markings of a rejected man?
But Kanye may yet be our savior, as Jesus in antiquity has nothing to do with the Jesus of today. Jesus had no social media, no Ellen, and rejected the biological trappings of nature, namely procreation and arguably the kind of ambition someone like Kanye espouses. Kanye and Kim Kardashian getting married is amongst the most overexposed, animalistic acts we’ve witnessed in recent media history. A doubling down on the traditional man/woman procreative binary, Kim Kardashian with her fertile, bulging hips just ripe for child rearing, and Kanye being the irreverent husband that can be tamed by her and her coven even when he misbehaves. The much more Christ-like and transformative act for Kanye would be to come out in some fashion because allegedly he is gay.
So we crucify Kanye with every click, every tap, every retweet, every petty judgment, convenient like our garden-variety conception of the modern Jesus. In this sense, he is justified in calling himself a Messiah. But, a Messiah can only be crucified if he saves us and is truly the one who transforms us. And Kanye is nothing of the sort. He saves himself in his own Gemini game, understanding the significance of the air he flies in but nary a thought spared for the gravity of his influence, ignoring the potential for deep cultural transformation as a humble, Christ-like figure. But as it stands, we don’t have much of an appetite for transformation. We merely want to see reflected back to us a hyperbolic, technologically expedient version of who we are and who we think we should be. Kanye is all too happy to deliver, dragging the carcass of Jesus through the mud, faking a crucifixion, laughing all the way to the Gemini bank.
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